Maun to Kasane via Nata… S 17º 48’ 36” – E 25º 08’ 80”
Despite our best efforts, we only managed to leave Audi Camp at 8.00am. Allan insisted on having a full breakfast, and we sat around waiting for the telephone lines to “strengthen” so that our credit cards could work… Allan rolled his eyes heavenwards at this last comment by the receptionist… He would be hearing many more crazy explanations of incompetence before he reached Turkey…
We rolled out of Maun and back onto the A3. We encountered a road block just outside town, and this slowed our progress… A little further on, we had to cross another foot and mouth control post and after the first hour we had travelled a little over 75km…. I was very frustrated that this part of the trip was taking so long… We had planned to do the 300km to Nata in two and a half hours, to give ourselves enough time to get to Kasane before 4.00pm. This meant we had to ride at a constant 125km/h… We had been advised that the last stretch of today’s ride to Kasane of about 320km was littered with “potholes galore” and that the last 100km was crawling with elephant. Both bits of advice were later to prove spot on…
Another day, another foot and mouth control post, this time on the road to Nata…
We passed Matima, a tiny settlement which boasted about a half dozen huts and a large kraal, and then crossed the cattle grid into the Makgadikgadi Pans Game Reserve to the south of the A3. Game was immediately in evidence, and in a short space of time, we had disturbed a small herd of Giraffe, who lumbered alongside us for a few hundred metres before veering off into the bush. We also came across three Red Hartebeest gazing close to the verge of the road… I had stopped and was reaching for my camera to get the animals in a shot with parts of the bike showing, when Allan arrived, the Dakar making its customary racket… Naturally the Hartebeest thought they were being machine-gunned, and fled off into the bush… Until his arrival, they had been quite content to stand within 10 metres of where I had stopped… I glared at Allan, who shrugged his shoulders and mouthed, “Sorry Dude…!”
He then pointed over my shoulder and I turned to see a large bull Elephant ambling down the road towards us… I knew I needed to be as far away from Allan and his noisy bike as possible, and shouting “be careful” to him, I motored away, and passed the startled elephant before he had time to consider getting up to any mischief… Allan crept slowly forward, and as the elephant began shaking its head from side to side, he opened the throttle and roared past it… It turned tail and crashed away on the northern side of the road…
We passed Phuduhudu, and then had Nxai Pan National Park to the north of us and the Makgadikgadi Pans to the south… Every few kilometres, large signs warned of animals crossing, and to “alight from vehicles with caution”… Yeah, right…. Allan cruised up alongside me and enquired if I thought we would see any lion…
When I answered, “Hopefully not…!” he looked genuinely surprised!!
“Why not, it would be great to get some photos of lion and the bikes in the same frame!”
“I’ll send photos of lions feeding on you, with your bike in the background… Will that do…?” I asked…
An Aardvark on steroids takes an interest in the bikers passing through the Nxai Pan….
I slowed down to see more of the birds that were perched on the trees and bushes alongside the road, and was amazed at the number of raptors in this area… Yellow-billed Kites were the most common, but I also saw Kestrels, Falcons and a dozen or more White-backed Vultures feeding on a carcass just a few metres off the road. They hopped away as I rode up, but took to the air when Allan and his infernal Dakar arrived… Another photo opportunity missed…. This was becoming a bit much, and I decided to leave him behind, taking the “Big Fella” up to 150km/h for a few minutes until I could not see him in my rear view mirrors… I then settled down to a steady 100km/h and rumbled on, enjoying the solitude of riding through these reserves, seeing game and even stopping for awhile to watch a troop of baboon scratching about for food…
At Gweta, Allan caught up to me, and said he needed fuel. His bike has a longer range than mine and I was a bit surprised by this. I decided to chance a ride through to Nata before stopping for fuel, and while he negotiated a very large and deep puddle of water in front of the filling station, I rode on ahead… He almost always struck up a long and detailed conversation regarding the “donkey problem in Botswana” with anybody who would listen, and sometimes even got his video camera out to record their answers to his questions… I wasn’t in the mood for any more of this, and decided to meet him in Nata…
I stopped at the sign indicating “Baines’ Baobabs” and considered going off-road to take a photo. I had travelled only a few metres when I felt my front wheel start to sink deeper into the thick sand than I was comfortable with… I decided to skip the visit to this famous landmark, and rode carefully back to the tar road… All along the road, huge puddles of water had gathered, indicating that this area had received more than its fair share of rain in recent days…
Going off-road was not advisable as water had collected in every culvert and hollow…
Long-tailed Starlings flitted across the A3, dropping into the long grass alongside the road, Carmine Bee-eaters looped and dipped in front of the bike, sometimes coming so close that I had to involuntarily duck my head because I thought they would fly into me… At Nata, I waited for Allan, who finally rode up and decided to refuel again, as we were not sure whether or not we could get fuel at Pandamantenga. He bought two fried chicken drumsticks from the supermarket at the Caltex Filling Station, proclaiming a few minutes later that they “tasted like they’d been cooked a few days previously”… I advised him that they probably were…! I skipped the chicken and ate a few tennis biscuits washed down with bottled water…
It was 12.30pm before we exited Nata, at least an hour behind our planned schedule, and I stopped to take a photo of the signage indicating the distances we still had to travel… Allan stopped next to me and I took off my helmet, indicating that we needed to talk… I spent the next few minutes advising him that we were about to tackle a difficult stretch of road, and that despite this, we had to “shake the lead out”. The previous evening, Nick More had called to enquire whether or not I would be interested in spending a few days on a friend’s houseboat… We had swiftly made the necessary calls and arranged to meet the owner later today…
Signage outside Nata, where I gave Allan what he later referred to as “The Speech”…
Due to our late start, we were not going to make the rendezvous with the houseboat, and I called ahead to advise Ralph Oxenham of our situation… He gave me a few addresses in Kasane where we could hole up for the night, and I plugged one of them, Water Lily Lodge, into my GPS… It indicated that our ETA would be 4.30pm… I also mentioned to Allan that there were bound to be many elephant on this road, especially after Pandamantenga, and UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES was he to hoot at them (which he did whenever he passed a donkey, goat or cow in close proximity to the road!!) I told him to stick close to me, and if we came across a herd of elephant on the road, we should stop a safe distance away, and then wait for a car or bus to come by, and then tuck in behind them… Elephants moved out of the way for bigger vehicles, but I was not so sure they would move for a motorcycle… Especially one that was making a racket as loud as Allan’s…!
We had gone barely 20kms before we encountered our first elephants… Two bulls crossed the road about a hundred metres in front of us, and we throttled back to allow them to get clear of the verge before buzzing past them… Both of them turned as we passed and shook their heads and flapped their ears at us… I pressured Allan to ride at 120km/h and often dropped back behind him to indicate he wasn’t going fast enough…
I was behind him when I saw him swerve violently towards the opposite side of the road… We had reached the “pothole section” which Ralph had warned us about!!! The next 100km was spent riding along the worst stretch of road that I had been on with a bike… In some places the road surface had disappeared completely, and we were forced to go straight through the potholes. I found that the southbound side of the road had fewer potholes than the northbound side had, and I therefore spent much of the time on the “wrong” side of the road. Allan soon figured out why I was riding there and followed suit… Then the rain came…
Elephant were a constant threat on the road to Kasane. (Took this “on the fly”)…
It rained hard for more than an hour; I struggled to see through the visor, and began hitting more and more of the potholes I was trying very hard to avoid… This and the occasional elephant standing on the verge of the road made for stressful riding… Allan was having the same problem, and he decided to slow down, to save his tyres and rims. I decided to keep up with an animal research vehicle which we had tagged onto the back of over an hour before… We had hidden behind this vehicle on a number of occasions to avoid elephant…
The lady driving this land-rover had an I-pod plugged into her ears and was rocking and rolling to the music, while blasting north along the A33 to Kasane. Soon Allan faded into the distance behind me, and I began to worry that we would run into elephant that would separate us… I dropped back, muttering a few choice words into my helmet…
We cruised past Pandamantenga at about 3.30pm and still had more than 100kms to go before we reached Kasane… We were tired now, and our arms ached from having to wrench the bike from side to side to avoid all the potholes… The rain had mercifully stopped and we picked up our pace again for the final run to Kasane and the Chobe River, on whose banks the little town resided…
We reached Kasangula at 4.30pm, and rode the last seven kilometres to the town of Kasane, further along on the road which eventually crosses into the Caprivi and on to Katima Mulilo, my original destination. I had ridden over 1000km through Botswana to get to this point, just 150km away from Katima!! I had also “lost” four days in doing so, and this irked me the most… I put these thoughts behind me as we got to the Water Lily Lodge, and discovered that while it was perfect for our needs, it was unfortunately full… We rode further down the main road and stopped at the Chobe Marina Lodge… their rates of US$500.00 per night had us back on our bikes before the receptionist could complete the list of what the hotel had to offer…
We eventually found lodging at the Chobe River Safari Lodge, but still had to pay more than we were comfortable with… But the sun had begun to dip below the horizon, so we had no real choice in the matter… We briefly flirted with the idea of pitching our tents alongside the road, or in the grounds of a hotel that would agree to this, but after the hard ride we had made, we decided to take the room at 680.00 Pula for the night. We carted all our kit to the room, put the air conditioner on full blast and flopped onto our respective beds…
The Chobe Safari Lodge, where we stayed after our hardest day’s ride so far….
We later spent some quality time at the bar, watching tender-boats cruise down the Chobe, dropping guests off at the various hotels on its banks. We punished a few Windhoek Lagers, and then went to dinner where we tried the Impala Stew, washed down with a bottle of Porcupine Ridge Cabernet Sauvignon, which Allan had bought at the local Spar before we checked in…
Our bikes parked at the Chobe Safari Lodge… “Doc” is in stealth mode…
We called to make arrangements for the houseboat crew to collect us at the Customs Office the following day, and that settled, went to bed… I was exhausted and managed to listen to only one track from Fleetwood Mac’s Greatest Hits, before falling into a dreamless sleep…
© 2008 TBMH
Leave a Reply