Caprivi: Okavango River & Mahango Game Reserve
Namibia & South Africa, July – August 2024
Day 2: Windhoek – Grootfontein
This day we drove via Rundu to Divundu, in the Caprivi Strip. Caprivi is a narrow protrusion of land in Northeast Namibia, bordered by Botswana, Angola and Zambia. It is Namibia’s most water-rich area, with the Okavango and Kwando rivers flowing through it from Angola, with the Okavango flowing into Botswana and the Kwando becoming the Chobe river, before merging with the mighty Zambezi river from Zambia, just before the famous Victoria Falls on the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe.
From Grootfontein we drove north and passed the vet fence. What was most striking was the enormous difference once we passed the fence. South of the fence the landscape was dominated by enormous cattle and wild farms and plantations, with very few traditional villages. It didn’t really feel particularly “Africa” to us. But once you pass the fence you suddenly arrive on a complete different planet, THIS is Africa, this is how we learnt about it at school, 40 years ago. And most striking was that it seemed that really nothing had changed, at least not for the majority of people living here. They are very, very poor and hardly have anything… It was Sunday, and some of the locals in larger villages wore their best cloths and just came out of church. Outside the villages the locals hardly seem to have cloths though, let alone something fancy for Sunday… Kids were playing along the road or outside the wooden walls surrounding their traditional mud houses. We all felt that we had to get out of our car and visit one of those traditional houses dotted along the almost perfectly straight road. We didn’t want to just stop and walk into someone’s privacy though, so we decided to find a rest stop near a few traditional houses and have lunch there. And then wait for the local kids to come to us first, have some good time together, share some cookies and snacks and then ask if they can show us around at their homes, which of course we knew they would be delighted to do. It’s impossible to describe this experience…
Day 3: Grootfontein – Divundu
This day we drove via Rundu to Divundu, in the Caprivi Strip. Caprivi is a narrow protrusion of land in Northeast Namibia, bordered by Botswana, Angola and Zambia. It is Namibia’s most water-rich area, with the Okavango and Kwando rivers flowing through it from Angola, with the Okavango flowing into Botswana and the Kwando becoming the Chobe river, before merging with the mighty Zambezi river from Zambia, just before the famous Victoria Falls on the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe.
From Grootfontein we drove north and passed the vet fence. What was most striking was the enormous difference once we passed the fence. South of the fence the landscape was dominated by enormous cattle and wild farms and plantations, with very few traditional villages. It didn’t really feel particularly “Africa” to us. But once you pass the fence you suddenly arrive on a complete different planet, THIS is Africa, this is how we learnt about it at school, 40 years ago. And most striking was that it seemed that really nothing had changed, at least not for the majority of people living here. They are very, very poor and hardly have anything… It was Sunday, and some of the locals in larger villages wore their best cloths and just came out of church. Outside the villages the locals hardly seem to have cloths though, let alone something fancy for Sunday… Kids were playing along the road or outside the wooden walls surrounding their traditional mud houses. We all felt that we had to get out of our car and visit one of those traditional houses dotted along the almost perfectly straight road. We didn’t want to just stop and walk into someone’s privacy though, so we decided to find a rest stop near a few traditional houses and have lunch there. And then wait for the local kids to come to us first, have some good time together, share some cookies and snacks and then ask if they can show us around at their homes, which of course we knew they would be delighted to do. It’s impossible to describe this experience…
