Retrospective: 2016

This year has been a stressful for much of the world. However, 2016 is the year we started our journey to sluff off as much of this stress as possible. We visited Stockholm, Sweden for Christmas and New Year's; Maun, Botswana in February; Southern Queensland in July-October; New South Wales in November; and Melbourne in December. Here is a collection of images in a slightly jumbled order to inspire you and restore your spirit after the long slog that 2016 has been.

Enjoy.

Home Again!

Sorry to disappear on you. The trip home was exhausting and we are only now recovering. Work on the house took a bit longer than expected and the floors downstairs received the final (I hope) coat of polyurethane today and we are staying in a hotel until it is safe to walk on (at least tomorrow). I'll try to get a post up about the "fun" we had on the way home on an 18 ½ hour flight from Johannesburg. I need a day or two to recover first. Be patient.

Baboons

Just so you understand what you are seeing here: all the photos in this post were taken inside the city limits of Maun almost directly across the river from the town center. There are two main roads, one on each side of the river. This is on the side of the river where we are living.

By the Boteti River in the Noonday Sun

White Stork.

Riding out of town  we spied a clutch of White Storks in a field alongside the road. We had a fun bird day even if there were no new birds to add to our lists.

Country Life

As far as we can tell, most folks in Maun have electricity although some (many...most?) do not have running water. We know this because even first thing in the morning, Kitsiso and KB have charged cell phones, but we also see lots of people carrying water from the river.

Out of town, even electricity is scarce.

The Local Scene

Terri (in the bed) and Emma doing what they do best.

There are three roads that lead out of Maun, and we've travelled each many times. Yesterday we spent some time exploring locally.

Roads

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.  Inigo Montoya

Roads are strange places in Botswana. Sure, they are sometimes paved and when they are, they are often painted with traffic-directing marks just like roads everywhere. But here, roads are so much more.

Makgadikgadi and Nxai Pan National Parks

White Stork.

With all the rain we've been having and our reluctance to get involved in driving on untarred roads where the chances of getting stuck are non-zero, we decided that Friday we'd drive on the tarred roads  and visit the Makgadikgadi and Nxai Pans. These salt pans are the remains of large lakes that used to exist here. In the southwestern portion of Makgadikgadi there is still a lake, but it is much smaller than when Livingstone first saw it. Nowadays, there is a the A3 that cuts through the park area on the way from Maun to Francistown. We came to the edge of this before. This time we went all the way.

Driving South Again

A pair of White-Backed Vultures alongside the road south of Maun.

I'm a little behind on the blogging since we've been on the go for a few days. This combined with the weather, had made it difficult to keep up.

Out Into the Bush (Just A Little)

After having our second breakfast at our usual place, Motsana, and seeing the sun come out, we decided to have a mini-safari. We decided to drive towards Moremi and stop when the roads got too bad. There were things to see even without actually getting into deep water or the game reserve itself.

National Goat in the Road Day

After a hard rain Wednesday morning, we discovered that it was National Goat in the Road Day. OK, so it is not really a national thing, we sure saw lots of goats in the road here in Maun.

More Rain

Today (Wednesday) we planned to leave early for a full day at the Moremi Game Reserve. However, during the night it began to rain. It was a steady, hard rain by the time we got up at 5:15 and by the time we finished our morning ablutions about 6:00, it was still going strong.

Everyday Life

Women fishing in the Thamalakane River.

We stopped at the Old Bridge Backpackers yesterday for lunch. Out by the old bridge, we saw three or four women seine for fish. We saw them though one of the gaps between the bridge supports. We could tell that the water was not deep - never more than about knee deep anywhere. Seems like a hard way to put food on the table.

Down by the River

The Thamalakane river just down from the house.

Sunday was a rest and recover day for us. It rained pretty steadily all morning and was cool (in the 70's) and pleasant. I discovered that we could actually watch Netflix on the computer. Apparently, Netflix is clever enough to stream a very low resolution version of the show so our wifi could handle it.

However, time marches on and dog-walking time approached. We knew this from the restlessness and incessant whining and barking. So off to the river we went, led by three happy dogs.

On the Road to the Boteti River

Saturday, we packed a light lunch and took a drive to the east. We headed out of Maun on the A3 toward Francistown. Of course we never got anywhere near that far, but we wanted to see how the scenery changed as we went away from the Okavango delta region. As you can see, the potholes are a constant of life on the road here.

The Morning Chorus

This is our first attempt at posting a video so this will be little rough. I shot this on the iPhone and dowloaded it to the computer into my photo software. Of course, that program does nothing for videos except catalog them, so I opened it in iMovie and down-sampled it to 720p, low quality to get the size to something I can upload from here. The video quality is bad and, frankly, not the point.

This video is here for the sounds. I wanted to share with you the sounds we wake to every morning. Including the radio from next door. The birds are wonderful.

On my browser, I see a still image in addition to the video and I don't know why. Ignore the man behind the curtain (at least until I get this figured out).

A Night at the Movies

At the Motsana Center where we like to go for a post-breakfast Coke and tea before we start the day, there are other activities to enjoy. On Thursdays (at least this week and next), there is a kind of dinner theater. The owner, the standing fellow in the distance, rearranges the furniture to face the stage area off to the left and pulls down the projection screen. Then using his DVD player, we watch the weekly movie. This week it was The Bridge of Spies. It was very good and a welcome relief from the inability to watch Netflix on the slow network connections available here.

Driving home in the dark was an entirely different experience. There are no street lights and very few houses have lights you can see from the road. The dense vegetation also limits the reach of any domestic outdoor lights. Last night it was cloudy so there was no starlight or moon to guide us. It was just bloody dark!

All the roads looked different when viewed only from the car headlights. One stretch has a multitude of color-coded reflectors (with colors indicating side roads, passing/no-passing, etc.) embedded in the road making it feel like we were landing a plane. When this guidance disappeared, it suddenly got almost cave dark. Distances seems longer. We were convinced at least three times that we'd passed our road.

But in the end, after a nice evening out, we got home safely to our little retreat.

Exchange Rate

We've found a morning routine of going to the Piano Cafe at Motsana for a tea and a Coke after breakfast at home. We have, over the space of 2-2.5 hours, a bottle of still water, two Coke Lites, a fresh, warm bran muffin with butter and two jars of jam, and a pot of tea for one. Total cost after converting to US: $5.61. Think about that.

A Few Birds

The Pied Kingfisher.

We headed to the Old Backpackers for such yesterday and had a really good bacon cheese burger with fries. Nice and juicy! While there, we saw our friend the Pied Kingfisher again posing for us. But the real show of the day was viewed from Glen's front porch.

On Roads

Yesterday we drove back out to Shorobe for another look about. A couple new things I noticed this time around.