The drama, the gore and the dust, the incessant struggle for survival, for sexual relevance, for superiority — Peter Beard called raw nature in the wild, “the greatest show on Earth.” And I’m not sure there is any better place to watch it than in Botswana. Especially in and around the Okavango delta.
I am, for example, endlessly fascinated about the interfamily, and intra-clan politics of lions, but somehow more still in this place of such teeming density, variety, and diversity. I try to tell friends of mine than have been on safari elsewhere, that the game viewing in Botswana is like that on steroids. And maybe mushrooms. That latter because the landscape here is so utterly otherworldly, both more raw and wild, and more painterly than anywhere else. It looks computer generated, somehow, but more real than anything I’ve ever seen — what I imagine the world must have looked like a billion years ago, or will look like a billion years hence.
In part, I feel like I have to campaign for Botswana because we lack referents for it. In the US and UK, any way, we know East Africa. They have been running shooting and photography safaris there in some form or another for more than a hundred years. We have Out of Africa. We have The Lion King. So it is easy, in Kenya, in Tanzania, to feel a gene-deep familiarity with the landscapes and the action found there. Botswana is simply nothing like that. The first cultural connection I call to mind here is always Jeff VanderMeer. I don’t know any other place than in his Southern Reach series, say, where nature seems so unfathomably weird. So beautiful and so deranged. Nowhere else in whatever tiny film and fiction library I keep in my brain where nature itself has such agency, such pattern. Where nature is sentient. And, is, if not exactly antagonistic, certainly not benign either. Driving through the grassy clearings between channels in the delta, the first thing you notice is how active nature is. Everything is both eating something and being consumed itself by something else. Trees grown from evacuated termite mounds are being strangled to death by various creepers which are then being eaten alive by still another layer of flora. And that, before we even get to the brutality of daily life for the animals. Killing or being killed. Dominating or being demolished by their own. It is a very very tough neighborhood to grow up in, if you are a cat, or an antelope. But my god, can anything be more beautiful. More, somehow, genuine.
This morning as I was walking to breakfast in the predawn glow I noticed a leopard track directly in the Vans-print I left last night. Which the guides were happy to tease me meant that some lovely kitty cat was stalking me. But which I took to be some sort of sign. Who knows. The whole night an elephant hung out by my terrace, sometimes even walking in circles around my tent. As if it were trying to stay close. Trying to protect me — it occurs to me now. Funny, the way the bush makes your brain work. Sadly, I only have a couple of rides left and then I am back to the world.
Incredible adventure.