The Elephant Valley Lodge

After the morning run at Mowana, we packed up our stuff and prepared to move to our final lodge, romantically called Elephant Valley Lodge. This lodge is also in Chobe Park, only about a half hour from Mowana. Again, Dragonfly wanted Gwenna to see the types of accommodations available and that was why we were moving yet again.

This was a different type of lodging in that we were to stay in “luxury tents.” The setting had been described as one where the elephants roamed freely on the grounds and the sounds of the jungle would lull us to sleep at night. Our dear friends the Rothsteins had stayed in tents during one of their African safaris and Marion had told me that it was a wonderful experience—just be sure the tents are air-conditioned.

You guessed it—they were not. When we arrived there, we were greeted warmly as was the norm, offered a cool drink and given an orientation to the place. Sean, the manager, young and handsome, asked us whether we wanted to do a river cruise or a land run that afternoon. The plan was that Gwenna and Don would be leaving the next morning for Switzerland where Gwenna was attending an annual meeting for her industry, and Tom and I would stay on another day at Elephant Valley before leaving for the long trip home. Since this would be their last game experience, we decided on the river cruise since the weather had grown quite hot.

Then we were shown to our tents. Ours was in one direction and Gwenna’s and Don’s in the opposite direction. We were already having misgivings because Sean had showed us a couple of the closer tents in an effort to familiarize Gwenna with the complex. To say they were hot is an understatement.

From the outside they are bona fide tents made of canvas with flaps for doors and windows and seated on a small wood deck. Inside they were furnished with proper furniture—twin beds, small dressing table, luggage rack. But luxurious, they were not. No closet or armoire, just a couple of shelves and a rod for hanging things. Two hangers. The bathroom had a sink, a shower whose fixtures were attached to a real tree that was growing through the floor, and a toilet. The bathroom floor was made of slats that the water could flow through. Sean flipped on the fan which did nothing but move the scorching air around a wee bit.

Of course, spoiled rotten by all of our previous accommodations, this, which was to be our African swan song, came as quite a disappointment. Tom and I managed to change into something a bit cooler and then went in search of Don and Gwenna’s tent; I thought maybe theirs was air conditioned and ours was not—in which case we would demand equal treatment.

Well, although on the opposite end of the camp, their tent was similar to ours, i.e., hotter n’ hell. But Gwenna, ever the planner, had an idea. She would call our contact with Dragonfly, and arrange for us to leave with them in the morning and return to the Royal Livingstone where we could spend our last night relaxing in cool luxury rather than sweating here in the bush. This sounded great to us. All we had to do was to endure this one night.

When we went back to the lobby to meet our guide for the river cruise, Gwenna made the call and all was arranged. Since this was a change, we would pay for the Royal and worry later about getting a refund for the second night at Elephant Valley. Gwenna returned from her phone call and said she had put us in the Zambezi Sun, the sister hotel to the Royal Livingstone, because it was about a third of the price. This was fine—we had seen it on our walk to the falls and it looked attractive though not as luxurious as the Royal. And at least it would be cool.

The day grew hotter and hotter—42 Centigrade according to Sean, which, by our quick calculations is about 114 Fahrenheit. Tom was about to have a stroke. Mind you, so far the weather had not been uncomfortably hot at all, maybe a little hot at the African village, but otherwise it was not.

Now it was time to make the most of the rest of the day and get through the night. We got into the range vehicle with Ren, a nice enough young man who had driven us to Elephant Valley from Mowana, who said he would be our guide for the river cruise. Hrumph, we all secretly thought, Ren is a driver pretending to be a guide. My Catholic guilt decided that this comeuppance was our punishment for having had the rest of the trip turn out so beautifully.

We drove quite a distance, sweating profusely, and finally arrived practically back at Mowana! I mean literally five minutes away! We could have just stayed there, we grumbled out of earshot of Ren. We went down to the boat, Ren carried a cooler with who-knew-what in it and a plate of Biltong and dried fruit. Biltong is an African jerky which we had come to love and eat at every opportunity. Off we go onto the river, and although the boat had a cover, the sun was so high in the afternoon sky that it was literally impossible to stay in the shade. We moved around like flapping fish trying to avoid the relentless sun.

A couple of minutes later, in the middle of the river, the boat suddenly stops cold. Oh no, says Ren, my helper must have put the extra gas tank in that other boat! We have no gas! Things are deteriorating from worse to worser, if that’s possible, we thought. We will die on this boat, petrified by the sun, turned into biltong, and then eaten by crocs and hippos.

About a hundred yards away, on shore, was a small dock and beyond it a small building. Just then two men walked out of the building and down to the dock. Call them for help, Don ordered. We didn’t have oars, but there was a pole aboard our vessel and Ren began poling laboriously toward the dock.

Here came a cultural difference. In the US, if you are on the water and you come across another boat in distress, not only is it a Rule of the Road that you have to help that boat, but you do it willingly and cheerfully! And immediately! This has always been our experience when boating in the US. Ren seemed reluctant to ask these guys for help, and they weren’t offering any. But Don was insistent. Tell them we’ll pay them, he said, ever the resourceful one. And anyway, all we really needed was a ride, or a tow, back to the other dock, to pick up the gas tank. (Of course, the nagging feeling was, what if the helper hadn’t put the gas tank on the other boat either).

Anyway, bottom line, Ren convinced a rather sullen stranger to drive him back to the other dock in his small boat, leaving us stranded in the hot sun, not sure whether we would ever see him again. He left, we broke into the cooler and found some beers, and decided if we were going to die, we would die drunk and with a plateful of biltong in our stomachs.

But happily, Ren returned in short order with the full tank of gas, the other guy smiling by now, we offered him a beer and a snack which he gratefully accepted and we were quickly on our way.

Now here is an example of a situation going from the ridiculous to the sublime. Although happy to be out of that fix, we still (at least I didn’t) hold out much hope for the rest of the evening. Too hot, and, I’m ashamed to admit, I kind of thought, what else can we see that we haven’t already seen?

But in what now seems a very short time, the sun sank on the horizon allowing for some cool breezes, Ren turned out to be every bit as knowledgeable as the rest of the guides we had had, and we saw some wildlife, if not new species, in situations we hadn’t seen before. We saw a herd of elephants come out of the bush, approach the river, and cross the river, all the while protecting a couple of babies who hardly seemed large enough to make the crossing at all. We were so close to the elephants that we could watch them as if in a movie. We saw so many hippos, both in the water and grazing on land. We saw four giraffes on the bank of the river, closer than we had been able to see previously and not obscured by trees and brush.

And so many birds. We saw a flock of egrets (pure white) covering a bare tree, and right next to it a flock of storks (all black) covering another bare tree. And never the twain shall meet. We saw the most beautiful African darter (they are also called snake bats because they look like snakes in the water) sitting on a tree right in front of us. And finally, we saw the most beautiful sunset we had seen anywhere. As it began to grow dark and we headed back to the dock we could not have been more thrilled. Nor did we harbor any more negative thoughts about inconsequential things like heat.

Driving back to the lodge—it was by now completely dark—I happened to look up at the sky since I had the clearest view from the vehicle. There, in the sky, was a thin sliver of a crescent moon, with the crescent on the bottom like a smile. On either side of the moon was a bright spot, so close that the three formed a single entity. Look, sez I, and Ren almost drove off the road! He pulled over to the side and we marveled at this beautiful and unusual sight. He had no idea what it was and neither did we. We had never seen anything like it. We surmised that the two bright spots on either side of the moon were planets since they did not twinkle like stars. It was a most ethereal, even surreal, sight, the perfect ending to our perfect run.

The next morning I went to the lobby where there was one lone computer and looked up the phenomenon on Google. I couldn’t find a name for it, but I did discover that the crescent was flanked by Venus on the left and Jupiter on the right, and although not all that rare, it is still a sight that thrills astronomers and laymen alike, and we were very lucky to see it.

I’ll save the rest of the evening for another posting since this one has grown quite long-winded.