My Travel Adventures

After a few minutes’ worth of calculations, we managed to spend all our remaining Pula buying snacks at the airport in Maun. Hoping to see a bit of the Okavango Delta from above during our flight, we asked to be seated on the right side of the plane, but instead of lush green forests parcelled out by dark blue waterways, all we saw were dry riverbeds in a sea of greyish brown.

We were picked up for our trip to the Okavango Delta at half past seven in the morning and arrived at our destination – one of the mokoro stations at the NG32 Concession – some two hours later. The journey was not particularly pleasant. Our car was one of those large vehicles with open sides, and the wind chilled us down to our bones despite the blankets out driver gave us. Once we had left Maun, there were a few occasions that filled me with anxiety, like when our driver had to shift gears to pull through a particularly sandy part of the road, or when we slowed down to cross a narrow wooden bridge.

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.