Pouncing lions, pronking springboks, poison-arrow lessons: Botswana's safari idyll
In Botswana, they named their currency, pula, after their most precious commodity. Their diamonds? No – it's the rain. The word means 'blessings', too, and perhaps that's hardly surprising given the Kalahari covers 70 per cent of this parched southern African country. The Kalahari, though, is not the endless expanse of sand that might first appear in your mind's eye. And, after this year's especially plentiful rains, the desert is blooming, covered in sweet-smelling flowers and head-high grasses that provide plenty of grazing for wildlife and domestic cattle alike. Pula indeed.
Botswana reserves 40 per cent of its land for its wildlife. And in a country that's the same size as France (with a population of less than 3 million), well, that's a lot of land. The approach here, though, is not the mass safari tourism you'll find in many places elsewhere on this continent. Here it's high value, low impact. The camps are on a small scale; there are few with capacity for 30 guests, most have between eight and 12.
The atmosphere, then, is an intimate one and, once you're in the bush, it really is just you and the animals. You're not going to be in a crowd of 20, 30, or even 40 other vehicles surrounding a cheetah too distracted by clicking cameras to catch her prey. Over the course of a week's drives, I rarely saw another vehicle except in the distance. In Botswana, you could have travelled back in time to an Africa that Karen Blixen [who wrote Out of Africa ] might have recognised from 100 years ago when she had her farm in Kenya – albeit with guns replaced by camera lenses.
The Ker & Downey camps I visited here conjure a certain nostalgia, too. The 'tents' (in practice, huge rooms with an occasional nod in the direction of canvas) offer luxury and comfort: mosquito-netted four posters, Turkish rugs, indoor and outdoor showers, thatched roofs, deep shady verandas. Early morning tea is brought in a pot covered with a cosy. Dining tables are set with napkins in their holders, classic tableware (Blixen brought her Royal Copenhagen porcelain and crystal with her), fine wines and food.
Guests gather around a huge fire, dinners are served at long tables where guests and guides discuss the day's adventures. The camps are generally unfenced, and animals wander through at night, hence you are always accompanied by a guide after dark. None of the animals wears a tracking device so you follow the signs (footprints, droppings) and the formidable knowledge of your guide. You are on their territory.
The atmosphere is intimate. In the bush, it really is just you and the animals.
Maun is not the capital of Botswana (that's Gabarone) but it is the country's safari capital. It has grown exponentially since I was here 20 years ago, but despite having over 80,000 inhabitants, it's still classed as a village – albeit one with an international airport from which tiny light aircraft or helicopters transport travellers to the camps. After 14 hours in the air flying from London, I felt the need to stop off at Grays Eden, a new colonial-style hotel with a beautiful garden that goes down to the river, and a restaurant featuring what you might call 'bush fine dining' (the kudu carpaccio is a speciality).
From Maun, it's 25 minutes in a 12-seater known as a caravan over the vast, empty Botswanan plains to Dinaka Camp's airstrip on the Central Kalahari's northern edge. I was met by General, my guide for the next couple of days, who ran me through the rhythm of the day: 5.30am wake-up call; 6am breakfast and game drive; 11am brunch; 3.30pm high tea and the second drive with sundowners in the bush around 6pm; 7.30pm dinner.
You can vary this with a bush walk (the only time your guide carries a gun) and they always have a night drive on offer. I spent one afternoon with three bushmen who showed me medicinal plants, how to find water in underground tubers and store it in ostrich eggs, which plants can be spun into rope, and which caterpillars can provide the best poison for arrow tips.
With General, I watched young impalas practise their fighting technique, pronking springboks, dozens of iridescent birds, jackal families, oryx, wildebeest and a lone tsessebe (Botswana's swiftest antelope). A pair of lionesses, as pale as the creamy tufts of feathered grasses around them, stalked past our vehicle, a mother teaching her daughter how to hunt.
From Dinaka, it's a 'van' (a four-seater light aircraft) followed by a helicopter-for-two to reach the new camp of Maxa in the Okavango Delta, one of the few landlocked deltas in the world. Two million years ago, much of Botswana was a lake, but as the earth shifted and rivers were diverted, less water flowed in and the lake disappeared. However, with the rains and the rivers that flow down from Angola, there is still water here all year round and the Okavango experiences Africa's second-biggest annual migration (after the Serengeti).
From the air, what look like fields of grass turn out to be reeds in shallow water. And, sometimes, not-so-shallow water. This didn't stop Shane (guide and co-owner of Maxa) driving through it – though, as the depth changes from day to day, he sometimes gets out, rolls up his trousers and wades through just to check. On my first afternoon, however, he suggested a different form of transport.
The mokoro used to be a traditional wooden dug-out canoe but is now, in order to conserve trees, made of fibreglass. Nevertheless, the principle is unchanged. In your small, narrow punt, the poler stands behind you as you glide through the parting reeds, past exquisite water lilies and thumbnail-sized frogs clinging onto the reeds where minuscule spiders weave even tinier webs. In the water, fish dart just below the surface, watched by kingfishers and herons and, in the branches of tall trees, fish eagles patiently wait. Arriving back on dry land, a table complete with flickering candles and ice buckets awaits for the ultimate sundowner (the sky didn't disappoint, a new moon appearing above a flame-red horizon).
Maxa faces a lagoon where hippos spend all day groaning, honking and blowing water like freshwater whales as they rise and fall lazily in their pool. There's a human pool here, too, with lagoon water filtered by reeds, a fire pit and a kind of treehouse with platforms, hammocks and far-reaching views. The next morning, Shane led four of us on a bushwalk through the early mist, explaining the skittish zebras and families of reproachful baboons – after more than 20 years without a camp, the animals here aren't yet used to humans.
There were signs of elephants but the creatures themselves were elusive – until the next morning. Out on a game drive, we came across a family of females with their young, about 30-strong. This was thrilling enough but as we moved on a young bull elephant appeared. He lowered his head, raised his trunk, flapped his ears ('See how big I am – be very afraid') and approached. Two more arrived in a stately, if rather alarming, parade, coming even closer. Shane was relaxed, telling us, 'You only need to worry if they stop flapping their ears.'
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Kanana camp is even deeper into the delta and teems with wildlife. Within minutes of starting my first drive, I was at a lagoon full of hippos with a couple of crocodiles on the bank. There was a small herd of buffalo, a pair of ostriches, a giraffe with her days-old calf, a family of hyenas, hundreds of impala and a magnificent lion with a lioness who looked suitably fearsome until they rolled onto their backs, paws in the air. But the highlight? A lioness, saintly in her patience, as her three cubs (about two months old) pounced on her and each other, rough-and-tumbled, stalked flying insects and sat up to box each other's ears. I could have watched them for hours (in fact, I did).
It was an intimate moment and one typical of Botswana. There is a freedom here that Blixen would surely recognise. You drive off-road, walk through the bush, sleep on platforms under the stars, fly in aircraft not so very much bigger than Denys Finch Hatton's [Karen Blixen's aristocratic lover]. There are never any crowds – well, except for the impala. It's just you and the wildlife. You could say Botswana is keeping it real. Or you could say it is simply a blessing. Pula.

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West Australian
21 hours ago
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When I travel to a different country I like to try local cultural experiences. It's a way of understanding the social customs and traditions of a society that is different to our own. And that's how I found myself mostly naked and sliding all over an array of marble surfaces at a Turkish hammam. A hammam, in case you weren't aware, is like a day spa, if the day spa therapists like to take turns beating and almost drowning you. It's obviously amazing. But maybe you can't get yourself to Istanbul anytime soon, so let me run you through my experience. Firstly, I was shown through into a small change room where I stripped down and attempted to pop on a comically small pair of disposable knickers. It is not immediately apparent which is the front, and which is the back, but honestly, they are so tiny I don't think it matters. I then wrapped a Turkish towel around myself and was led into the steam room where I sat for about 15 minutes pondering my life choices. Next, my therapist, or Hammummy, as I liked to call her, fetched me and took me by the hand to a flat piece of marble next to a pool. It's around this point that I noticed she has slipped into a fetching pair of black bathers, which should have been the first red flag. But I didn't have time to think about that, because my towel was removed and I was ordered to lie on my back — yes, boobs akimbo — on the marble slab while two Hammummies started scrubbing me with large mitts with the consistency of pot scourers. At some point one of them took my hand and made me feel the complete layers of skin that were now in small piles all over my abdomen. Yes, it was vaguely gross. Next these two women took me by the hands and led me over to the corner of the room where they proceeded to pour great buckets of water over my head. We all hoped my recently removed skin wasn't going to block the drains. They then led me back to the marble slab and covered me in vast amounts of foam before massaging me vigorously. Like, really vigorously. The laws of physics state that foam plus marble plus four firm hands equals substantial sliding all over the place. I was constantly concerned that I was going to slip right onto the floor, which was also marble. It was at this point that I realised the reason they constantly held my hands when moving about was to literally stop me from falling over. Rumours of my clumsiness had preceded me. And as if it wasn't slippery enough with all that foam and water, the next step was to slather me in a clay mask. 'Like Cleopatra' one of the Hammummies whispered. I did not feel like the Queen of the Nile, let me tell you. More dousing with buckets of water was next, including a particularly humiliating episode where I sat slumped on a step in my disposable knickers while the Hammummies washed my hair. At one stage, between being practically drowned, I glanced over at the only other women in the hammam to see that she too was being summarily soaked. And it wasn't a pretty sight. Imagine what she thought of me. Then it was off for an aromatherapy massage because I had decided to treat myself and get the full works. By this stage, all I wanted to do was slip back into my properly-fitting undies and get out of there, but I had to withstand 40 minutes of relaxation. Unfortunately — and here's a plot twist you probably didn't see coming — my capacity to relax was somewhat hampered by the fact that just minutes before this experience had started, my friend and house sitter had called to tell me that my dog had run off on his dog walker and was currently at large in the North Fremantle area. This sort of issue is concerning enough when you're overseas, but when you're wearing ill-fitting disposable underwear and your mobile phone is locked away, it's practically torture. By the time I was scrubbed and pummelled to within an inch of my life, I'm happy to report that my dog had been found in the river by a lovely lady named Susie and was in the care of the Fremantle rangers, who in my dog's best interests were refusing to release him to just anyone, even if that person happened to be my very devoted house sitter who definitely did not sign up for this. Anyway, I don't know if you've ever had to send a flurry of text messages and emails whilst only wearing a Turkish towel and covered in oil, but it's trickier than you might imagine. In the end, though, my dog got to go home, my skin had never looked fresher and I didn't fall over. I guess we would call that a win.

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The Age
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Stockpiling for lunch from hotel breakfast buffets: Can I give thieves a serve?
This story is part of the July 26 edition of Good Weekend. See all 15 stories. One of the great joys of travelling is starting the day with an excellent breakfast buffet. However, my happiness is regularly eroded by the sight of other guests taking extra food to also service their lunch needs. Can I call them out for their despicable theft or do I just quietly accept that people are awful? S.F., New Lambton, NSW You're going to hate me, but I'm one of those awful, despicable, breakfast-buffet thieves. I've walked away from hotel breakfast buffets with muffins, Danish pastries, croissants, doughnuts and yoghurt tubs stuffed in my pockets and bag – and then later, for lunch, I've enjoyed a squashed, greasy, indeterminate pastry-wad, washed down with a tub of body-heated yoghurt flavoured with berries and listeria. For free! But as much as you may hate me, am I technically a thief? The dictionary defines 'theft' as 'appropriating property belonging to another without their permission or consent, with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it'. (I stole that definition without permission or consent, with the intent to deprive the dictionary of it.) Loading But I paid for the hotel buffet like every other guest, so am I any worse than your standard buffet greed-monger? Those hotel guests who go back for seconds, thirds, fourths, building an inverted food pyramid on their plates, with mounds of bacon perched on a stack of pancakes, balanced on clumps of omelettes, teetering on a single slice of honeydew melon?