Taking flight

The flight from Gaborone to Maun took just under an hour and a half in a small prop-engine plane with 14 rows of 4 seats. I sat down in my window seat, 2 rows back from the front, and I watched the propellers spin faster and faster until we were high in the sky. The propellers slowed down as we turned back in the opposite direction, leading me to question whether there was a problem with the plane. Once we picked up speed again going the opposite direction, I knew we were headed for the gateway to the Okavango Delta.

Much of Botswana between the populated south and the frontier town of Maun is a vast wilderness. When I started my PhD work, I had imagined a place where busy villages dot the roadside, selling you nothing you need but everything you want, where people are difficult, but welcoming and immediately make you a part of the story, whether you want it or not. But my first two months in Botswana in the winter of 2016 looked and felt much more like the vast scrub and harsh desert that spread out for hundreds of miles before me on this plane ride, and my travel to my field site this time around feels more lonely than overwhelming.

From above in the plane, all you can see are vast stretches of sand held together with scrub, undulating sand dunes spotted with brown, low lying shrubs- a brown sea as far as the eye can see. Occasionally, the seemingly endless Kalahari was split by a sand road- a perfectly straight line that somehow made either side of the line seem different enough in color and texture. When I focused hard, I could occasionally make out a tree with dark green leaves, and I wondered how it was that anything green could survive in the summertime heat without water.  

Before I knew it, the pilot announced that we were approaching Maun. The sparse green turned more frequent and lined the mostly dry waterways. But it was the plots of cleared land signaling fertility that gave away the approaching city. All plots fenced in with wooden posts take a variety of haphazard shapes, including hexagons and rectangles, but never the typical circle associated with the mechanized farming of the industrialized West.

The increasing concentration of houses was the last telltale sign of our arrival, and only a few minutes later we were gliding down onto the runway. It was a little shaky on touchdown, and I learned later from a pilot friend that there’s an increased turbulence due to the extreme heat of the summer that makes flying between 10am and the late afternoon tricky. I was glad to take an early flight.