Choppa-chaw’s Botswana Birthday
05/15/10
I felt romance in my blood. My senses were reeling in the thickened morning darkness. The rising sun shimmered through the branches slowly, dancing around with leaf-shaped shadows by my feet. Boxie-boo and I, alone in this moment, were surrounded by flickering light. The sound of crunching leaves. Birds singing. As if in a lucid dream, I wondered whether I was awake. The 5:30 a.m. air was crisp. I stretched, reaching my arms forward, then bent my back forward, stood up and pulled up my shorts.
“The toilet is all your’s, sweetheart,” I said, using a shovel to throw dirt over my morning bombs while Boxie-boo held a flashlight in my direction. Oh, romance.
Believe us or not, Boxie-boo and I agreed that we’d rather use this toilet than the squatting holes of public bathrooms in China. Unlike China, our delta bathroom was not covered in poop and urine, the ground was not sticky, and most importantly, it smelt of Mother Nature instead of feces and piss. After we were finished, we hung the toilet paper on a branch, rinsed our hands in a bucket of water and then ate bananas for breakfast.
“Happy Birthday, Mom,” I said, leading Choppa-chaw with a flashlight to the hole. She turned 57 in the Okavango Delta. At first, my birthday wish surprised her as she did not remember.
“Ya know, this experience just makes me laugh,” she said. It was definitely a different start to a birthday than normal.
For four-and-a-half hours, we walked on sand pushing through hip-level bushes. With each step forward, we slide a few inches backwards in the sand, the shrubbery scraping along our legs, dampening our pants by the ankles. Our guide John peered across the tall grasses with exaggerated concentration, pointing at easy-to-spot herds of zebras and wildebeests. We saw giraffes, one elephant, more ostriches, while resident hippos made the sound of sucked-in air during laughter, as if amused by our uneventful afternoon. After multiple safaris, only predators were found to be exciting discoveries.
“Lion tracks,” John said in a different voice. Our narrow line-up behind him tightened. I found a new energy to scan the bushes. “More tracks,” he said in a fierce whisper. With propped up prairie dog expressions, the group of us skimmed the horizon for movement and scanned shaded tree hollows for orange.
Meanwhile, Boxie-boo wore her boredom more visible than a nudist at a funeral. Her shoulders pointed forward. Neck bent towards her back. She had the body language of a five-year-old girl entering a dentist’s office. Then after an hour, the tracks led to water.
“The lions must have spotted us and crossed here,” John said, wearing a red and white striped shirt. His colleague wore bright blue, with yellow, green and pink stripes. While the tourists wore proper dull colours, they wore bright enough colours to fit in during a gay pride parade. I wondered how it spotted us.
At night, we boarded mokoros for a sunset cruise. Being Choppa-chaw’s birthday, I rode with her while Boxie-boo rode with Bob. The formerly-dating-German couple Julia and Till were so kind as to give Choppa-chaw a glass of red wine as a birthday present. Boxie-boo and I had given her a giant Dairy Milk chocolate bar, Choppa-chaw’s favourite.
The only movement around us were calm curves of water, triangular from our boat’s shape. The fading sun dipped below the surface of the earth sending bonfire flames across the water. In the beaming orange on black silk, our boats appeared to be nothing but shadows. With an explosion of orange in her eyes, Choppa-chaw described the drifting clouds as floating white continents.
I felt the distinct feeling of being abducted by the African wild by the sharp sound of bugs pinging like a spoon on an empty glass bottle; a constant, rain on tin pitch, listening closely to the background of frogs singing over top an orchestra of humming crickets. With each dancing sway of floating flowers, I felt the ambient breath of the delta - an air that feathered through tall grasses across the liquid shadows, leaving us to silently welcome the reaching moon, a storm of soft white light that penetrated the darkness.
That’s all for now.
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