Wade in the water -- scary water, creepy water....

My first walk in the bush upon my return to Botswana turned out to be a world apart from my Wilderness Safaris experience last July. First of all, I hadn’t signed up for a walk at all. I’d signed up for a mokoro ride. As I did last summer, I was traveling through water channels lined with papyrus, this time in the original, leaky wooden boats carved from mokoro trees, not the plastic boats of July designed to be more environmentally friendly. Local “polers” whom our driver picked up at a compound of huts made of mud and dung spread straw over the watery flooring to make placesfor us to sit. There was a jovial couple from California: Charles Rudolph and Jennifer Jones (he from Santa Cruz and she from a tiny town near Oakhurst outside Yosemite. Dorothy K., I forgot to ask if he knew your piano man Tom).

Charles had been made “redundant” by his computer sales job in London, so he took the buyout money and set off on an adventure with Jennifer. They went to 4X4 driving school outside Krueger National Park in South Africa for about 3 hours of practice off-road driving and navigating, rented their truck and camping gear in Joburg, then headed, maps in hand, for Swaziland, Zimbabwe and Botswana. They signed up for the Audi Camp day trip, the place they were camping for a few days. The other guy on the mokoro outing = a regular Mr. Mean guy – insisted that he bought a single-person Land Rover ride and a single-person mokoro trip. Imagine my horror when the camp manager said I’d been assigned to ride with him in the mokoro. (Another reason I hate being single on some days.) I paid extra not to have to sit with him after he uttered an obscenity at Jennifer when she was trying to get us started; we were already late and Mr. Mean was being nasty with the Audi Camp manager. The four of us, however, had to ride in the vehicle together for 1 ½ hours, and we all steered clear of Mr. Mean as much as one can in that situation.

The real reason the day was very different is that the local polers didn’t inspire as much confidence that our safety was front and center. It was bloody hot. The sun was beating down, and we didn’t know how long we would be riding. It was gorgeous, though, with the water lilies popping open in all their glory. Summer is scorching here, and there was little protection from the sun, except for our hats pulled snug. We were all sweating buckets (except Mr. Mean, who was shirtless and in my estimation in need of a man bra) when we glided to a grassy bank so that water could be bailed from one boat. When our lead poler got back in his boat, he winced, reached down and plucked a leech from his foot. It then wrapped around his finger in a neat circle, a leech ring. Still wincing, he showed it off to us before tossing it ashore.

EEK, PREY, LEAVE! – (perhaps there begins my parody of Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir.)

At our next stop, we are told to get out and start hauling all our belongings. We were going on a “game walk.” We had no idea about this, at least I didn’t. We were walking through full-on bush. My microfiber REI pants attracted all manner of thistles, which scratched and cut me through the fabric. Youch. I was covered. We plowed on like that for a bit, then the lead poler stopped, surprised. Aiyeh. The usually dry spot we needed to traverse had flooded. He tells us we must take off our shoes and wade through the water.

One thing I promised the former U.S. ambassador and his wife in Texas was that I would not go swimming or frolicking in water in Botswana. This game walk jaunt thus was not in the plan. I was thinking of that leech, along with various diseases that the CDC warns about, especially the one in which a worm that must be nigh on invisible crawls up your woo-woo and causes grave and irreparable damage. I was the whiny gal. Are you sure we should do this? Won’t there be leeches? No comment. The poler was on a mission to deliver our mokoro experience in all its splendor, not to mention by the clock. No one else was balking and so off we waded – through thigh-high water. Every scratch, every prick on my feet in the muck – I was sure it was a leech the size of an ottoman. The only thing worse was knowing we’d have to wade through the same muck on the way back.

I’ve had this thought sometimes during my travels over the years: I PAID for this kind of fun? What am I crazy? But what was I to do? I had no choice but to carry on, grimly, imagining with the furor of the worst hypochondriac that it would be only minutes before some river illness struck me down, and, no doubt, the lead poler would leave me because he was, after all, on a schedule. (Now, I know that with my family reading this, all sorts of alarm bells will go off, and this pretty much seals the deal that my Martha Stewart mother will come nowhere near Botswana. But I can’t forgo describing the adventure. I promise in the future a gentle and safety-conscious mokoro trip, should my mother ever wake up with an urge to board a plane to come see me. Mom, they do have luxury hotels here, and your outdoor activity could be confined to a crossword puzzle session at poolside. Really, I’d love to see you and Dad.)

The way things were going it was no surprise that when we got to the hippo pool -- our destination it turns out -- there were no hippos. Lead poler looked through the binoculars (mine, of course) and pointed to some black spot afar, but I couldn’t tell if it was a hippo or a rock. We ate our lunch and returned the way we came. Mr. Mean, however, couldn’t get enough. He’d been muttering all the way, off and on, about whether we might see anacondas in his broken English (he was from Brazil). Before we got back on the Land Rover, Mr. Mean asked once more about anacondas and, I guess satisfied by a poler’s answer, plunged into the river for a long swim. Where’s an anaconda when you need one?