By: Colin Lane, University of Vermont
After spending a couple days in Maun we shipped out for Mopane camp, our second camp in NG34. The drive was slightly shorter than the trip to Kaziikini, and after three hours we arrived at our destination in the middle of nowhere. I almost did a double take when we first arrived because there was truly nothing there, just a small, bare opening between the mopane and a patch of Kalahari apple-leaf trees. An elephant trail passed right through the center of the clearing where a large mopane stood, but that was it. It was up to us to turn the area into a campsite.
The first order of business was to dig a latrine. Sam, SB, and I took a shovel, tarp, and some rope and walked down the trail until we were a suitable distance from the rest of camp. To be honest, SB did most of the digging, but I got on my knees and scooped out more sand with my hands once the shovel became inefficient. The tarp was tied up to a tree and some large sticks we shoved in the ground to provide some privacy, with one of the branches serving as a convenient toilet paper holder. Finally, a seat with a hole was placed over the hole in the ground. It was more of a scorching-hot canvas throne than a porcelain one, but it was much nicer than squatting.
The rest of the group worked quickly, so by the time we were finished with the latrine, the tents were set up along with most of the kitchen. Next, we worked together to hang up our shade tarp. This would be the most essential part of our campsite, as we would come to find out later in the week when the temperatures hit high 90s to low 100°F by midday. The sand burned if you walked on it barefoot. There weren’t many anchor points available, so we had to get creative with how we tied the corners. After checking the trees for snakes, we climbed up on chairs, Lucy (the truck), and the tree trunks themselves to loop the rope as high as possible. A large mopane stick helped prop up the center. Once the tarp was up, we reached the beginning of the hottest part of the day, so we spent the next few hours sitting in the shade. In the meantime, Stephanie and Sam sat atop Lucy and stitched up some of the larger holes in the tarp.
We had fewer wild visitors in Mopane than at previous campsites, at least in terms of mammals. I missed our near-nightly visits from the hyenas, the collective of whom we lovingly named Peewee after the Setswana word “phiri”. That’s not to say we didn’t have a few interesting encounters at least. One of the first mornings, about twenty minutes before my alarm was set to go off, a group of elephants wandered down the trail they’d made. I laid silent and listened as they walked around the edge of camp, thankfully on the side opposite our tents. They wouldn’t have done anything to our tents of course, but I still would’ve been nervous having an elephant step a few meters from my head. I heard them grumbling a couple times as they crunched through the mopane leaves. They weren’t happy having us in the middle of their path, but they quickly moved on and didn’t pass back through for the remainder of the trip.
A few nights later, we had a different visitor on the opposite end of the size scale. We just finished dinner, so we were cleaning up and sitting around the fire. I stepped out of the kitchen tent to hear Berkley shout from near the dish pit. Sun-spiders are frequent, harmless visitors to our campsites, even if they are unsettling to look at and like to scuttle over your shoes. This time it was a different arachnid though, a thick-tailed scorpion. We gathered around at a respectable distance to watch as she huddled down in a groove in the sand. We assumed the scorpion was a female because we saw a few babies moving around nearby. She sat still because she was afraid of us, which allowed us to grab the black light and make her glow. After a few minutes of watching her, Lily and SB relocated her and the babies using a bowl and a stick.
