The 2025 Botswana Journals, Ch. 16: We Can't Get There from Here

 

    It’s our last morning at Dinaka Lodge and the Dinaka Game Reserve, an area of semi-arid desert with acacia scrublands, which borders the northern edge of the Central  Kalahari Game Reserve.

    Our next destination is the Mashatu Game Reserve in southeastern Botswana, but there’s a problem with that!

The Central Kalahari is shown as an irregular hexagon in green .   Maun is due north.   Our next destination is Mashatu Game Reserve, shown at the far right point of land.

 

    Today, we confront the old canard, “You can’t get there from here.”

 

    That’s right.     To get to Mashatu, we need to catch a charter flight to Maun, a city located just north of Dinaka, where we will stay for two nights.  Then a scheduled airline flight will take us to Johannesburg in South Africa, where we will overnight once again at City Lodge.

      From there, a chartered flight to the privately-owned Mashatu airstrip.   It's a long way around, but that's how things are sometimes in Africa, particularly here, as there are no direct flights to Mashatu from Maun.   It's a privately-owned reserve with a private airstrip, and entry is controlled.

     First, though, we will make a short game drive into the semi-arid country of Dinaka Game Reserve.   All our luggage is packed and ready to fly out, except our cameras, of course.

Pale chanting goshawk.

Yellow-billed hawk.

Black-backed jackals.   Very calm and patient as we photographed them.

A Lifer animal for me--yellow mongoose.

    I took the photo below for two reasons.   One, the yellow mongoose are almost dead center, but the important reason is to show the kind of "roads" or "trails" we traveled on in the reserve.   These, being adjacent to the Kalahari desert, are sand.   Many of the roads in reserves in Kenya can be muddy.   Muddy like you've never seen before--except on Amchitka Island in the Aleutian Chain in Alaska, where a semi truck driver told me he could see waves of mud rolling in front of his truck, like ocean swells.   The mud was over his large tires.

Morning coffee/tea break with Booth

When one has coffee/tea breaks, there must be a place for um.... a girl bush.   In this case, the back side of a termite mound works well.

We see the Burchell's zebra foal again.   Burchell's zebras have a thin brown line between the usual zebra stripes.

And, of course, the male rhino was guarding his trail.

We said adieu to the loud and unusual Northern korhaan, another Lifer bird for me.

    Then, it's off to the airstrip for our Mack Air charter.

    A word about these small charter aircraft that serve much of Africa:   You seldom know until the day before or the day of your chartered flight what time it will arrive.  That's because the operators try to coordinate flights where they bring new guests to a place where they pick up returning guests.  The logistics of these flights must be incredibly complex.   

Factor into that that many people must be back at an international airport to catch their flights home.   I suspect that is why many return flights out of Africa leave near midnight.

A video of our Mack flight:

Happy to see a woman pilot.   I have been seeing more and more women get into aviation in Africa.

    And shortly,  we arrive in Maun, where a vehicle picks us up for a long, 19km drive (about 11 miles) on a road that is a mixture of partly paved and partly potholed, to Thamalakane Lodge.   Pronunciation is tricky, but I think it's tha-mah-lah-KAH-nay.   It's located on a gentle river of the same name that is part of the vast Okavango Delta system.

    Our arrival is delayed as one of our group (NOT ME) suddenly announces that she left a small bag with her passport in it, hanging on a hook in the women's restroom at the airport.   We turn around, go back over the postholes and pavement and she retrieves her bag intact.

Our cottage here.

What a nice welcome.

Do you see what's on the wall to the left of Sylvia?   It's an air conditioning unit that went on and never went off as long as we stayed here.

Very nice bathroom.

    

    The group has a relaxing get-together in the lounge.   It was here that we realized we were in a hotel, not a lodge as we photographers have come to expect of a lodge.   Our group organizers booked us here on the recommendation of a trusted source.

    Mind you, it's a very nice lodge with a helpful. and accommodating staff.  I would recommend it to anyone needing a place to stay in Maun.    It isn't a bush lodge, though.

The view in front of the lodge.

A magpie shrike.   Its long tail is hidden behind the post.

Tropical boubou, another kind of shrike.

    After a nice buffet dinner, it was off to bed.   Tomorrow, we will have an adventure.   We are scheduled to take a long ride in a mokoro on the river.   A mokoro, or makoro, is a dugout canoe, a traditional way to travel in Botswana's Okavango Delta.

    And, we are in for another surprise or two.