Home » Botswana » Jul 22, 2004 Xugana Lodge, Okavango Delta, Botswana

Imagine an isolated island on a wide and vast delta waterway, surrounded by a gentle lagoon fed by narrow channels lined with papyrus and tall reeds. Imagine gently waking to nature’s alarm clock as, one by one, the birds greet the growing steel-gray of dawn with a fugue of disparate song melding into a beautiful symphony of the awakening earth. Imagine quiet afternoons, the sun dappled through the trees offering a play of shadow and light, rolling dreamily in the light breeze over the fern covered loam; the lagoon rippling in rhythm with the moving shadow. Imagine that same lagoon reflecting the burnt orange fire of the evening sun dropping to the horizon, the sky ablaze with color. <br />

Jul 22, 2004 Xugana Lodge, Okavango Delta, Botswana

Tom Schueneman
2006-03-27 15:38:52

Displayed times (last time: )

right now. The power of the natural world, the perfect order, purpose, and immeasurable beauty. This needs to be reported as well. I may not be putting life and limb on the line to get the story (we did need a gun for our hike this morning, if only for insurance purposes and not, fortunately, to actually be used), but the least I can do is tell a different story of Africa from the one so often reported. It is the story found, for me, mostly in the quiet moments of the inner soul, reaching out to an undeniable force, the primordial source, the beginning. The long, long road from the path my ancestors followed to where I am today. Carrying around a camera trying to capture it in a glance of light...

You’ll have to excuse me; I’m from northern California and prone to such talk. I sometimes get an overwhelming urge to go hug a tree. I know it sounds crazy – but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Come out here to southern Africa if you don’t believe me. There’s human history, and then there’s history. The story of a natural world perfecting itself over countless millennia, growing out of an unknowable source, an expression of something far greater than anything we could possibly imagine. Come, Grasshopper, and learn...

In any case, I won’t try to carry the conversation too far beyond my capacity to sustain it. I just hope that Botswana can maintain the fine line they have thus far successfully balanced with high-end tourism and the preservation of their incomparable natural resources. It seems to me that this works for Africa; Human tragedy, genocide, poverty and hunger, not so much.

But I digress anyway...

We will leave Xugana Lodge in the morning, flying back the way we came, more or less, in a light plane for more exploration in the Moremi Game Reserve along the Khwai River Valley.

It’s been a pleasurable two days in this lovely spot. Last evening, after we arrived and had time to settle ...