From Victoria Falls to the Skeleton Coast – Day 3: The North Korean heritage of Gaborone

While Air Botswana offers a direct connection between Kasane and Maun (pronounced, as I found out at the Kazungula border crossing, “Maoon”), this flight is not operated every day. With my packed itinerary, I decided I could not wait for the following day to fly, so I opted for a flight from Kasane to Maun with a layover in Gaborone. In the few days leading up to this journey, Air Botswana bombarded me incessantly with announcements of scheduling changes, but the layover time remained more than sufficient at almost five hours instead of the original seven or eight.

Wei and I left Livingstone for Kasane at quarter to eight in the morning. Our plane was originally supposed to depart at around nine but in the final iteration of the ever-changing schedule this became quarter to twelve. The delay gave us plenty time to solve a minor drama that had arisen during the course of our journey planning: Having joined my trip quite late, Wei had not yet received her visa to Botswana. This could have spelled the end of Wei’s participation in this trip, but we did not despair. Despite all information on the English-language internet pointing to the contrary, Wei learned from a post on Xiaohongshu that it was, in fact, possible for a Chinese citizen to obtain a visa on arrival at the Kazungula border crossing.

The Chinese internet did not lie. Once we arrived at the border post, we were attended by a travel agent working for the company that had arranged our transfer. We explained our situation and, much to my relief, all she asked for was a copy of Wei’s passport. It took a while to process the request, but in the end, we pulled through. We met our second driver and boarded our second car with more than two hours to spare until our flight.

The flight to Gaborone took us over the Makgadikgadi Pans National Park – a beige splotch over the speckled orange landscape. The sight was helpfully pointed out to us by the pilot, from whom I also learned that Gaborone is pronounced more like “Khaboronie” with a very phlegmy KH and a rolled R. We touched down in the capital just before one. After eating lunch and exchanging some money at the airport, we embarked on the most uncertain part of the day’s journey: finding a driver who would take us on a quick tour of the city centre and bring us back to the airport in time for our evening flight to Maun.

We followed the signs to the exit hoping to find the usual gaggle of taxi drivers, but when we got there, the platform was empty. Perhaps, we thought, the taxi stand was elsewhere, but when we asked a security worker where we might find a taxi, he agreed with our initial assessment that at present, there were none. More helpfully, he asked us to wait a moment while he went back inside to look for a driver. He emerged a few minutes later as a small white sedan pulled up. It showed no obvious signs of being a taxi, and as we began to converse with the driver, it became evident that driving was not his day job.

The man initially wavered about how much money to ask for a trip to the centre and had absolutely no idea how much to ask for an itinerary with three stops and a return journey. After a few phone calls, he established that it would cost some two-hundred-forty Pula to make one journey into the town centre, but uncertain of the distance between the three stops – two of which he did not recognise – he hesitated to name a final price for the journey. Still, the man seemed quite earnest in his uncertainty, and we did not have much of an alternative, so we climbed into the car and hoped for the best.

What our driver lacked in driving experience, he made up for with his earnest endeavours to make our trip informative. On our way to the Three Dikgosi Monument, he pointed out several important buildings and told us stories about the recent floods, after which he accompanied us onto the square with the statues of the three statesmen. As I found out later, the three dikgosi are the tribal chiefs Khama III, Sebele I, and Bathoen I. They are memorialised for their 1895 journey to Great Britain, where they lobbied Queen Victoria to protect Bechuanaland from encroachment by Cecil Rhodes’ British South Africa Company. The statue was built by North Korea’s Mansudae Overseas Projects company, which has constructed revolutionary statues in a number of (mostly African) countries.

From the Three Dikgosi Monument, we guided our clueless driver to our next stop using the offline version of Google Maps. Following the usual polite greetings, he sweettalked our way past the guard and got us into the parking lot of the ISKCON Temple (whose acronym stands for International Society for Krishna Consciousness). Although we could not enter the building, we took a few pictures from the outside and strolled around the gardens full of peacocks.

Finally, we made our way into the Cathedral of Christ the King. We understood the building to be closed, but some event was just wrapping up in the parking lot, and our driver took pains to make the acquaintance of several people at its epicentre. First, we spoke to one of the sisters clad in rich purple, who explained that it was the Feast Day of Saint Anne. Then, we spoke to an elderly man who told us he was one of the only five remaining officials who oversaw the first Bechuanaland elections in 1965. He seemed like the type to talk forever and ever, but he realised that either his historical knowledge or our capacity for comprehending it was not all that strong, and what could have been a long reminiscence mostly stayed confined to repeating that the area where the cathedral stood had been a place “where we hunted wild animals” up until Botswana’s independence.

The old man’s monologue touched on a very tangible aspect of Botswana’s history. Following independence, Botswana’s mineral wealth helped it become one of the richest countries in Africa. According to the most recent statistics, the country is the continent’s sixth richest in terms of GDP per capita, trailing only the islands of Mauritius and the Seychelles, the oil-rich countries of Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, and Egypt. This wealth is apparent in the capital’s broad, well-paved roads, the luxuriousness of its suburban buildings, and the exaggerated proportions of its sleepy airport. In Livingstone, the generously spaced two story-buildings along wide roads gave me the impression that I was somewhere in a poorer version of Kansas or Nebraska, but in Gaborone I felt more like in a quiet Californian suburb.

We returned to the airport well in advance of our flight, giving the apparently impromptu driver fifty-two dollars for his services. The only hitch in our otherwise suspiciously smooth trip was that a few minutes later, an airport employee came up to us to say that the money we had given the driver could not be exchanged because it had ink on it; fortunately it was just one twenty-dollar note. The only other noteworthy experience from our journey was the aeroplane catering, which included baobab and marula juice.