July 9

ERIN:
Sadly, we have now left the hyena antics and sand roads behind us and returned to the civilized world. I much prefer the roaring of lions to the rumbling of trucks on the road, but it had to happen sometime, I suppose. In the morning, we packed up all our things once again and decided, with another family vote, to leave Moremi National Park. We headed for Maun, where Roger and Jolene and Travis and Nicole had lived for 2 ½ years until just after Lisa was born. On the way out of Moremi, we gave our eyes one last workout looking for game. Since some of us were disappointed that we still had not experienced an elephant charge, we tried to provoke a bull elephant, but succeeded only in making him shake his head and let loose a foaming flood of elephant pee in the road before running away. Ah well; we’ll give it another try in Namibia. After 100 more kilometers of being jounced around in the backseat of Tau, we all cheered the long-awaited arrival of paved road and marveled at how comfortable driving suddenly became. As much as I miss the wildness of Moremi, it is nice to see normal people from Botswana again. In the parks, the only black people are the guides driving herds of white tourists around in safari vehicles. A significant part of this trip for me has been coming to terms with the position of undeserved privilege that light skin and money automatically give me. It’s easy to ignore it back at home, where I can surround myself with people like me and convince myself that I am normal. Here we are reminded every day, in big ways and small ones, of how incredibly privileged we are. Anyway, in the afternoon, we arrived at the Okavango River Lodge, where we enjoyed our first hot showers in days and realized that the tans we thought we had were really only layers of caked-on dust from the previous week. Renae and Lisa and Nicole and I decided to test out the tiny swimming pool here, screaming bloody murder when it turned out to be the temperature you would expect of a pool in a Pennsylvania winter, not a Botswana one. Then there was another tasty supper around the fire, followed by quite an entertaining conversation about the games the Weaver kids used to play when they were little. By 9:45, which is far later than our typical bedtime, we were all exhausted and fell asleep to the sounds of the next-door night club instead of the music of the baboons.

Erin