![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/files\/2015\/05\/bot.jpg\")
<\/a>morning game drive in Chobe National Park we came upon an unusual sight\u20143 lionesses and 2 cubs feasting on a downed elephant.\u00a0 By the time we got there, the real delicacy, the trunk, was gone, and mom and two cubs were tearing at the carcass.\u00a0 I was a little surprised that with all the impalas in the park (and we saw lots of them and other animals) the lions had gone after an elephant.\u00a0 I suppose that proves who is really king of the jungle.\u00a0 As I said, the park borders the river, and thus offers a little different animal environment than the drier environs I saw at Sabi-Sabi, which is almost south of here.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure those lions will sleep well tonight, or at least well-fed.\u00a0 We\u2019ll be back in the morning to see whether the scavengers in the food chain\u2014the hyenas, jackals, and vultures\u2014will be there, or whether the lions will still be feeding.<\/p>\nIronically, our dinner speaker was a woman who heads a Non Government Organization called Elephants Without Borders, which has gotten a grant from Paul Allen (a Microsoft founder) to survey the animal population in Africa.\u00a0 While much of our discussion focused on poaching, the real problem for animals in Africa involves habitat fragmentation.\u00a0 These are animals that need room to roam, and she noted we\u2019ve closed off many of their routes.\u00a0 In other words, as I suggested to her, the problem is not wildlife management, but people management.\u00a0 As the lions discovered this morning, they did help solve any surplus elephant population for a long time.<\/p>\n
This morning, a number of us crossed the Chobe River into Namibia (which I knew sort of from philately as German Southwest Africa), making country number 4 that I\u2019ve visited in southern Africa.\u00a0 Our goal was to visit a local village, and to get there, we had to migrate out of Botswana, take a ferry into Namibia, then go through customs\/immigration to get to the village which is on an island.\u00a0 According to our guide, about 2,000 people live on the island, which is bereft of electricity, water, and sanitation (\u201cwe use the bush,\u201d said the guide; \u201conly old people use latrines,\u201d he told us).\u00a0 There were 48 villages on the island; ours was named Kubufu, which means \u201cmaize,\u201d which grew on the island. At one time, the story goes, there were also lots of black mambas on the island, a deadly snake, but when the villagers dispatched them, they killed a python as well, and put that above the village because the python is the king of snakes, and warns others away.\u00a0 You better believe I kept an eye peeled on the road.<\/p>\n
We visited one house, which belonged to the village chief, who near as I can tell, controls the village.\u00a0 His permission had to be given to build the immigration point\u2014a relatively modern building that has a modern toilet, as I found out.<\/p>\n
Most houses were built of mud, with the final layer hand smoothed termite soil, which is very durable (hope the termites don\u2019t make the journey), fashioned around a wooden frame structure.\u00a0 If you want to get married (I already am), you tell your uncle or grandfather, who work out the arrangements, which includes building a house.\u00a0 The house consists of a tall reed fence, which assures some privacy, a one room house for you, with curtains to partition off some rooms, another one room house for guests or children over 7, and a kitchen.\u00a0 The chief\u2019s house was rather attractive, with an unclosed dining area, an outdoor kitchen (cooking is over charcoal or fire), and some solar-generated electricity.\u00a0 All shopping is done across the river in Kasane, the town we\u2019re in.<\/p>\n
I chose to take the river safari again in the evening, rather than jouncing overland in the Land Cruisers here.\u00a0 It was a good choice in terms of what we saw, because Botswana has 125,000 elephants, the largest number in the world, and most of them were down by the river\u2014there was one herd of probably 30, and it was great to be close enough to see them wading, One of the options our tour director\u2019s wife exercised (partly because she had been here before) was to go on a photo safari.\u00a0 It was pricey, but I might have done it had I known.\u00a0 She did an instructional class, a game drive on land, and then a safari cruise.\u00a0 They lent her a camera and lens combination that carried physical education credit\u2014it was a 100-500 mm lens, which needed a tripod.\u00a0 The boat they used had around ten photographers with their mounted cameras looking for all the world like some gunboat out of a bad scout skit, but the pictures I saw were truly professional looking.\u00a0 If ever you come here, at least remember to bring a good camera with a good lens; cell phones won\u2019t do it.<\/p>\n Well, the lion will sleep tonight, and from all I\u2019ve done today, I suspect I will too.<\/p>\n \u201cWimoweh, wimoweh, wimoweh.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Some of you are old enough to remember Pete Seger and the Weavers.\u00a0 I know I am.\u00a0 I remember seeing them sing at the old Roosevelt Auditorium at a benefit hosted by Studs Terkel for the striking coal miners in Kentucky.\u00a0 I remember telling Carolyn, \u201cHalf the audience is FBI,\u201d because both Seger and the … Continue reading “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-south-africa-may-2015"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1451"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8516,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1451\/revisions\/8516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>drinking, and throwing sand on themselves. The little ones seemed almost out of Disney cartoons, and I swear one said, \u201cI can fly,\u201d but bear in mind the cruise served adult beverages.\u00a0 There were also crocodiles on the banks, including a 4 meter one with its mouth open (that\u2019s how the animal <\/a>controls temperature), which made for some great pictures.<\/p>\n