Home » Zambia » Day 6. Thu 22nd April Dqãe Qare.

We get up at six to repack the Land Rover, as Ken is concerned that the heavy rain showers may have got into the dried food. However, everything is OK, although there is unaccountably a large amount of water in the cool box.

Day 6. Thu 22nd April Dqãe Qare.

DaveMidgley
2005-10-22 10:13:44

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We get up at six to repack the Land Rover, as Ken is concerned that the heavy rain showers may have got into the dried food. However, everything is OK, although there is unaccountably a large amount of water in the cool box.

Amanda provides an excellent breakfast of muesli, yoghurt and delicious spicy cakes, and we head off at about 7:30 for Maun - we are entering Mark and Delia Owens' country.

Sunshine spots two big bull elephants and we stop to photograph them. They are too far away for the Fuji, so I dig out the diginocs. Remarkably these have stayed together quite well, although they eat batteries, and changing them involves taking all the sellotape off and then sellotaping them up again tightly. Nevertheless they do seem to work, although the controls are not exactly intuitive. They have no view screen, so I won't know if I've got anything worth keeping until I get to a computer*.
We stop off in Nata to buy water, food, bread, pink sausage and fruit, and then find a shady tree, without too much litter, for lunch. The bread rolls that Julie bought turn out to be filled with cream, but this is only discovered after she has put sausage in two of them and given them to Pete and Ken!

In Mark and Delia's time Maun (pronounced Ma-oon) was little more than the Riley's Hotel. Now it is a thriving town, but with little of interest to us, so we fill up with diesel and drive on. This is the closest we will come to the inland delta of the Okavango. Although one of the most famous places in this part of Africa, Ken has not put it on the intinerary, he feels it is too touristy for hardened adventurers like us.

Tonight we stay at the Dqãe Qare Bushman Game Farm, which is half way between Dekar and Ghanzi. (Dqãe Qare translates as "Steenbok biltong"). We first drive the extra 30KM to Ghanzi to finish stocking up for our stay in the Kalahari Game Reserve. We will need food and water (and beer) for six days. Ken buys huge slabs of meat and sausage from the local family butcher, and the Land Rover is bursting at the seams. As well as enough bottled drinking water for us all we have two twenty-litre containers of water for cooking and washing, and two big tanks of diesel. We are now saving our water bottles and filling them with tap water, removing the labels to distinguish them from the drinking water.

The bushman lodge is several kilometres off the road into the game farm. Our arrival is greeted by three ostriches, two female and one male. The male displays proudly in front of one of the females, but she is only interested in us and our vehicles and comes right up to have a look. (Note, the safest place around an ostrich is behind, they can disembowel you with a kick, but they can only kick forwards.)
Ken, Julie and I take a walk into the bush for sundowners while Pete and Kathy have a knicker wash. The sunset is magnificent, and the moon is about two days away from eating Venus.

There is no restaurant here, we eat out own food, but the farm staff cook it for us, under Ken's watchful eye.

We are all pretty tired after another long day's driving, especially Ken after his night in a saggy bed in an unventilated (and unmosquitonetted) grass hut. Unfortunately this time he is unable to negotiate a room to himself, so he and I must share, and I have a bad night and keep him awake all night snoring.