Colorful Divundu

“Colorful” is a good name for it, starting with the Elegant Grasshopper shown below, but also the various birds and, most of all, the people and culture in general. This is National Geographic Africa, quite off the tourist trail. However, enough tourists come through that it did not make us such an oddity, but most of them did not stay more than a day – if that. We stayed for a whole week. For many, I noticed, it was a place to fill up the gas tank, get more groceries and hard -nose it on to Katima Mulilo at the end of the Caprivi Strip. Or take the spur south to the more famous Maun, Botswana.

(BTW, currently we are in Malaysia, flying out to Borneo on Saturday!)

Elegant Grasshopper, Zonocerus elegans

Meves’s Starling, Lamprotornis mevesii. There are three or four shiny black birds in Divundu, not always easy to tell apart, but they are all striking.

Above and Below: Downtown Divundu. This is where a lot of Mom and Pop stores are, believe it or not.

We called this the “Business District”. Later in the day it is more alive with foot traffic. The metal building to the right is a “shebeen”, basically a bar.

Cows and people – and the occasional dust-blasting car – on the road in front of our guesthouse.

This was our digs. Notice the Springbok pelt on the wall. Not really the Radisson! But good enough for our tastes.

Fish trap on the Okavango River. This is actually a small-scale fishing weir. Bream, tilapia and tiger fish are caught in these waters.

Traveling the Okavango in traditional style. The makoros canoe – hollowed out in one piece from the African Ebony tree. This boat is not kind to sudden movements! Because there is no keel it is easy to tip over. Not a good idea for this crocodile-crowded river. Maybe “crowded” is too strong a word, but I did see them the last two times I crossed over on the bridge.

I would have to think that a sudden, loud splash might sound like a dinner bell to them.

Nile Crocodile. I was glad to spot this lazy lurker from the bridge spanning the Okovango River, and not in the canoe shown above.

I hurried across to the other side of the bridge to see this fellow floating downriver like a lazy log.
The next day we took a taxi out of town. The driver told us about a crocodile that almost pulled him in the river. He still had the scar.

Crested Barbet, Trachyphonus vaillantii. Taken at the Checkpoint where we waited for a ride on down the Caprivi strip

A bucket on her head, baby on her back, and phone in her hand. Triple-tasking.

White-crested Helmetshrike, Prionops plumatus. This was a flock of maybe ten birds, which strikes me as unusual for shrikes. Shrikes usually are just in ones or twos since they have to hunt for prey. These are definitely forest birds. We only saw them after quite a walk into the Kobe National Park.

Lilac-breasted Roller, Coracias caudatus

The White-fronted Bee-Eater, Merops bullockoides, was one of four different Bee-Eaters I saw in Divundu.

The tree that Zaccheus climbed, the “Sycamore” of the King James Bible is a fig tree with fruits growing from the trunk

Singing on their way to church.

On the way to fieldwork, some of them, others seem to be returning from the grocery store across the river.

These last four photos are from a private vehicle we were finally able to hitch. The guard at the checkpoint kindly did the “hitching” for us, asking driver after driver if they would take us. After an hour we succeeded. They called it “hiking”, meaning “hitch-hiking”!

Entering Bwabwata National Park.

Beautiful Ostriches showing off by the roadside.

This road had much more foot and donkey traffic than cars.

Next: Katima Mulilo