The men

Deck: Man at work

Although our yard is huge according to Europeans, we don’t have enough shady spots to loiter. This weekend Bashi and Bram realised the deck our landlord Bester envisioned in front of the house.

Deck: Lady at Leisure

If you have it, use it!

Expotition

December 28 early in the morning our New Years Eve expotition starts: we have to reach Maun the last day of 2006 before midnight, because Klaas organizes a ‘we have food & firecrackers, bring your own booze & chair’-Do in his Cuisine Rouge.
First stop: Serowe & Khama Rhino Sanctuary. Soon after Gabs we discover Arab Contractors is still working on the new road to the north; around the tropic of Capricorn the A1 just sucks. After the usual fatcakes at Kate’s Kitchen in Mahalapye we’re strong enough to reach Serowe and drive around the village to see people. Figures: we’ll camp with Hamish, so it starts to rain big time.
A bit later than predicted because of ‘Spoorloos’ we reach the Rhino’s. It looks as lovely as always – and very, very green, due to the good, early rains this year. At the reserved campsite we find two Maboeroe and writing in the sand: ‘Bram site 5’. 5 is as far away as possible from the Maboeroe-herd that overflowed the park, and has a typical Bowie-camp on it. While we set up camp Jeff & Motushi & co arrive, so it’s time for the first game-drive.
After two days of camping, loitering around the fire and game-spotting we move up north via Laru la Tau. Even without the Bowie-crowd it keeps raining, so it’s green, green, green. On our way to Maun we encounter a flock of vultures. Whatever they ate is totally finished except for a pool of blood. Walking around Maud discovers the only leftover: a cow’s tail.
December 31st we do reach Maun – as ever a weird, intriguing border-town close to the Okavango-delta, inhabited by white safari-organizers, crazy pilots and other people living from the many tourists; refugees from neighbouring countries; and some locals. Wherever the tourist-money goes, it’s not to the community; the yards look very poor.
We manage to survive New Years Eve at la Cuisine Rouge, and party on till January 2nd. Than the we put the Dutch guests on a plane into the delta, and have the old Hilux thoroughly serviced in Pietjes garage.
Time to go back home and try to earn some thebe’s. On our way back we camp in Nata Bird Sanctuary. That’s so lovely we just have to spend an extra night. Driving back to Morwa we discover half of Botswana has to get home after the Xmas-break.

Mo(u)rning after

After a hard night we try to ignore the sunset of the first day of 2007. The night-watches are ever so tired after defending the yard against all these people walking and firecrackers flying around. The people have to recuperate because the party goes on.

WWS 11

Where We Sleep 11: Nata Bird Sanctuary Community Project Camping
Maud camped here in ’89, Bram

WWS 10

Where We Sleep 10: Piet’s place near Maun (Okavango Delta)
Piet, who came to Botswana in ’78 in the same plane as Bram, has built a beautiful house near to Maun. As always we can use his guestroom, and when we drift in with two extra Dutchies, he offers Joost & Christina his attic.
As an extra attraction for Maud there’s not only the 3 Mechelse Shepherds, but also a Chiwawa caught in the body of a huge Ridgeback.

WWS 9

Where We Sleep 9: Laru la Tau near Xhumaga
This camping-spot honours its name: in the morning we discovered ditau-footprints all over the camp. We decided to take a walk in de empty riverbed nearby that is the border to a big national park. We saw some kudu, impala and wildebeest the evening before, so we hoped for more. The many zebra-skeletons we encountered showed this riverbed really is a popular lion-snackbar. That cut our hike short.

WWS 8

Where We Sleep 8: Khama Rhino Sanctuary near Serowe
The first thing to do with guests is to camp in KRS, a beautiful little game-park that concentrates on breeding rhino’s. We started with a small group, just us four and Hamish with his boys, but as Botswana soil is fertile parties tent to grow big time. Motushi decided to join with Tender and baby Tom. Yvonne, getting bored with village-life after studying in bubbling Mafeking, joined also. Hearing his daughter would go camping with all this elderly party-animals Jeff felt he had to stop over on his way from Maun to Morwa (because of all this dangerous men or the party?). Poor Jeff didn’t know he would discover ‘stroepwaffels’ and be as much an addict as Hamish.

WSWU 2

Who Slept With Us 2: Christina & Joost arrived from the Netherlands with stroopwafels, muntendrop, koffie & filtersakkies (future guests, remember this shopping list), and other goodies. Of course we had to show them off to the (other) Dutchman from Morwa, Hille, so we walked over to his bar for an afternoon Saint Louis or two.

Seasons Greetings

X-mas is all around!
The shops are exuberantly decorated.
Those who haven’t left to their home-village by now are seriously considering to wait till after X-mas because travelling is becoming more and more impossible.
Buying building-materials gets equally impossible. It seems like everyone is fighting over the last bags of cement, stones and doorframes, because X-mas is the time to go on with your house.
The goats that survived the many weddings just before X-mas have to beware.
We’re all dreaming of a white Christmas, and if the white is finished, we’ll take red, no ice, please.

Bashi

This master bathroom is mainly build by Bashi, as is the rest of the house. When we hear other people about building in Botswana, we realize without Bashi we would have been lost!

Landlord

Our landlord Bester, all dressed up for his job-interview with the EU, is as happy as we are with the building-results.

Google Earth 2

Being a mining engineer our neighbour Jeff owns a fancy gps, so he could tell us where we are. The coordinates of his plot are:
S 24 degrees 26’ 05.3”
E 026 degrees 04’ 08.4”
The last time he looked at GEarth the pictures were from around 2000, and the place seemed quite uninhabited.

Ours

Double event: Motushi hops over from Serowe, and Pelo’s daughter Yvonne comes back from college in Mafeking. They would sleep at Jeff’s, so our contribution is dinner. This makes us feel really officially settled in: loitering, eating, drinking, talking on our porch!
Yvonne is enjoying vegetables after 3 months of student-food, while her brother Edu Zachary enjoys sleep and daddy Jeff dreams of scouting - minerals of page 3-girls?

WWS 7

Where We Sleep 7: Finally settled in our master bedroom in Morwa.

WWS 6

Where We Sleep, 6th bedroom: Hille’s Sunset Bar in Morwa.
Because the house wasn’t totally ready on December 1st Jetske & Peter offered us two extra nights for free, braai included. When their spoiled rotten guests finally left, because they felt being nearby the building project would put just that extra bit of pressure, the house still was almost, but not enough, ready. Therefore Hille offered us his spacious office behind his Sunset Bar as a roof over our head.
Sounds like a dream come true to some people: living in a bar. It was great we could stay there, and it put a lot of pressure indeed, to our landlord and to the main builder, Bashi, who lives across Sunset and didn’t like it at all that we had to stay there.

WSWU 1

Google Earth

Our view

How to find our Morwa-mansion?
Go to Gaborone and face north. Look for the railroad to the north (direction Mahalapye), left from it is the old tar road up north, and a little more to the left is the A1 highway. Go to the A1, face north and look for the Pakhalane-crossroad (about 10 k’s north of Gaborone). At the right, you should be able to see the Pakhalane Golf Estate: golf-greens, mansions and a small lake. Follow the A1 further north. 14 k’s after Pakhalane there’s a tar crossroad. To the left you should see Bokaa with Bokaa-dam (a lake). Go right instead to enter Morwa. After 2 k’s on this small tar road take a left turn to enter the dirt road up to our house. First try to find Jeff and Pelo’s house: a green roof high up the hill. We’re on the other side of the dirt road a bit down from them. Depending on how recent the Google-pictures are you should see an empty plot, or a grey structure, a white house (2 weeks ago) or an apricot mansion (since yesterday). At night in the incredible starry skies we see the satellite passing about once an hour.

Who’s who

Our mansion

This month the white and the Dutch population of Morwa metropolis ‘our side of the railroad’ tripled. December 1st George moved in, and two days later we followed. Rumour has it that there are at least two whites at ‘the other side’, but this railroad seems to be like the Berlin Wall, so our side don’t know them.
If you enter our side and ask anyone for the Dutchman, people will direct you to Hille. He worked as a teacher all over Botswana and now owns Sunset Bar. Ask for the white man next to the graveyard and you’ll find LJ hailing from Michigan in the US, who is retiring in Morwa from his building company and carpentry workshop. That leaves the white man on the hill, our neighbour Jeff from Minnesota.
In other words: Morwa is a village without street-names or plot-numbers. People find you by your distinctive features. Around our plot for instance live the blind man who used to be a teacher, the old lady who’s plot everyone wants, and the man who works in Orapa.
We’re curious what our distinctive feature will be. The shopping bag, as our Nissan is called in Botswana, the bald white man, the woman who doesn’t allow catapulting at birds, or the empty fishpond?