Our first week in Botswana will be spent in Sefhophe, the village where Dia is working.
The second week we'll be riding off road and camping among the wildlife, in areas of the country with far more animals than people. I'll get to be the driver of a 4x4 Toyota truck exploring the edges of the Okavango Delta and the remote salt flats (called "Pans") in the Kalahari. By then I should be accustomed to driving on the left side of the road, though on many days there won't be much of a road.
The term wildlife does not begin to describe the variety of creatures found in Botswana. The country has in recent decades made preserving the native species of lions, elephants, zebras, giraffes, hippos and rhinos a high priority. There are many national parks, a no nonsense "shoot to kill" policy against poachers, and a budding infrastructure for ecotourists like us who will get to camp on the ground up close to lions and other fierce creatures.
Dia has told us that she and her Peace Corps friends have gone out to reserves and heard hippos so close to their camp they could hear them breathing. She also says that most Batswana would never think of doing anything so daring, which seems to me a sensible way to carry oneself in the presence of such massive carnivores.
As we plan our trip, I find it amusing to watch Ellen demonstrating such enthusiasm for sleeping out on the Pans with lions just yards away, when it has proved difficult to get her to consider camping in the Adirondacks where a noisy raccoon is the most likely predator we might encounter.
She has been assured by others who have done this and blogged about it that the lions will not bother our tent. Apparently lions perceive tents as large stones and do not bother them. Presumably the lions are aware of this. The other possibility is that those who slept in tents not mistaken for stones did not live to blog about it. We'll see.