OKAVANGO RIVER OF DREAMS
CHAPTER 1: PARADISE
We start our story with a lioness, hunting the fringes of the deep upper Okavango waters. Her encounter with a buffalo doesn’t go the way she anticipated, and she is left for dead. However, she has more resilience than one thinks, but her story doesn’t end there. Fekeetsa is the main character of the first Chapter (Paradise) as she struggles to overcome her challenges.
The other personalities we find, in this opening, include the river itself. Rainwater in the highlands takes 6 months to find its way to the Okavango, and that means it gets to the biggest concentration of wildlife, in the region, at exactly the right time. Mid-winter, in the dry season.
It is home to some of the most precious and largest elephant concentrations on the planet. Leopards, swimming baboons, day old African jacana chicks all make up the tapestry of this paradise. We go underwater with crocodiles, and massive migrations of barbel fish. We float on, passed male lions and Fekeetsa, swirling Carmine bee-eaters and down to the islands, as the reed beds burn spectacularly, tumbling seeds down to flourish in the land of Chapter 2.
OKAVANGO RIVER OF DREAMS
CHAPTER 2: LIMBO
Suddenly the water slows and starts to deposit nutrients on the underlying flat Kalahari sands, and the land thrives. All of this is because of one single magic trick here… termites, and their castles of clay. The water finds its way around the islands and gets opened up by elephants and fighting hippos. Here, we look at a pride of lions, with two brothers, not opposed to taking on the largest prey.
Flashy Little Bee-eaters and kingfishers dart in and out of scenes, across the 15,000 sq. km of the delta, as lions swim the shallows, and hyenas find their dens occupied by strange bed fellows: warthogs. Bush babies float through the treetops at night and the scarlet sun sets behind palms, as we move down, tumbling forward towards the end of the delta. A hot place of extremes in Chapter 3.
OKAVANGO RIVER OF DREAMS
CHAPTER 3: INFERNO
As the late season heat rises, extraordinary things happen in the Okavango. Water stops flowing and that is when animals seems to come out of everywhere, from deep in the Okavango, as the rainwater pools dry, and from every corner. We start this chapter with a female leopard, Moporota. Her name comes from the local name for the Sausage tree, that she often uses to hide in. A swift bite to the neck of any impala below, and a discreet climb back into the tree keeps her kill a secret from the lions.
If Paradise is about a lioness, and Limbo is about males, then the third phase here, when it comes to lions, is about nomads, expelled into the inferno. Extreme conditions force them away, but the leopard turns to scavenging, and finds a giraffe. Within minutes, the local Painted Dog pack is there as well. They have sixteen new puppies to feed, so a free meal for them is important.
As we go further downstream, and into the salt pans (an ancient extension of the Okavango) we see the real impact of this system, and its harshness. Tens of thousands of zebras leave the water of the Okavango and head south-east, just to get to salt they don’t have access to in the lushness of paradise.
Someone’s paradise is someone else’s purgatory and the other way around.
The desert works well for some.
Everyone is looking for something.