Low in the water, a paddle in your hands and the Okavango sun on your back. You don’t get much closer to nature than this, says Robyn Keene-Young.
 For the second time in two days, I’m standing on the banks of Botswana’s Selinda Spillway, wringing Okavango water out of my T-shirt. While I shiver in the winter breeze, I consider the Bayei people who first came to the Okavango Delta along this watercourse. Fleeing the Lozi tribe, the Bayei poled their mekoro (dugouts) from the confluence of the Zambezi and Chobe Rivers, along the Linyanti River, then southwest down the Selinda Spillway to the Delta. Today, they’d be carrying their mekoro most of the way, since tectonic movements have disrupted the Spillway’s flow to the extent that it no longer links the great Okavango-Zambezi water systems. These days, most of the channel’s torso is overgrown with drought-loving wild sage.
Grant Nel of Linyanti Explorations had invited us to the Selinda reserve for a canoe expedition along a section of the Spillway that has recently been inundated by waters flowing from the Okavango’s northeastern shores. The Selinda’s rustic yet charming Motswiri Camp perches on the edge of this fickle waterway, offering a remote outpost to safari veterans who are shopping for something a little more wild, intimate and unscripted. Motswiri’s activities are not pre-arranged and guests determine their own timetable for exploring this secret spot of Okavango real estate on foot, by canoe or game drive vehicle.
It’s the height of the Okavango’s annual flood. There are four of us and two canoes. We set off, in the ankle-deep floodplains of the False Spillway, a channel north of the real Spillway. Grant outlines the plan to Force Gideon, who will be our one-man logistics crew. We will follow this channel west to the veterinary cordon fence, find a waterway that leads south connecting to the Selinda Spillway, then paddle east, downstream to camp. Force shakes his head anxiously. “Please, Mr Grant,” he pleads in broken English, “don’t lost!”
We spend the first hours trying to navigate ourselves out of the thick grass that clogs the shallows. It takes much portaging and tree-climbing to figure out exactly where the wet part is. So far our expedition has been largely ignored by the lesser jacanas dawdling along the edges and by yellowbilled egrets preoccupied with the pickings of the flooded grasslands. But we have spooked a small herd of kudu that alarm-barked and flared their white tails as they fled. Now, a perplexed giraffe is staring hard at us from behind the safety of a large feverberry tree.
Eventually, we come to stretches of knee-deep water, but my happiness at finally paddling is short-lived, when I discover that my fellow canoeist has a tendency to steer us into drowned vernonia bushes. In summer these plants dazzle the floodplains with small cornflower blue blossoms. But come July, they turn into a dull-coloured confetti of itchy and scratchy.
By midday, our total canoeing activity has amounted to crossing a handful of small lagoons with beguiling underwater gardens, and we’ve found a new menace in near-impenetrable swathes of sedge that flank the water. We make for a prominent fig tree, which Grant clambers up to deliver the encouraging news that he can see the veterinary fence.
After hours of hopscotching between termite mounds, scoping the horizon and studying the sway of drowned grass, we soon realise we are in the fervently hoped for, south-flowing, connecting channel. We follow hippo trails carved through the sedge and papyrus, to the Selinda Spillway, tapping our paddles on the canoes to avoid surprising the tracks’ owners.
A hippo appears fifteen minutes from camp. Just two scared nostrils peeking from the water. We decide to give him a wide berth, which means that we must tackle another field of dense sedge. Grant and I logjam in a thick patch, he stands up, carefully, to dislodge us and suddenly I’m falling through chilly water. “Ha! A spill in the Spillway,” we joke, and are both laughing so hard it takes some effort to clamber back into the canoe. Our boat has now taken on a hundred litres of delta water so we limp to the shore where I sneak around a bush to wring out my wet T-shirt.
That night, hungry and happily exhausted, we dry our clothes and shoes in front of the campfire, devour T-bone steaks and red wine then crawl into bed with hot water bottles. Lions and zebras heckle each other in the darkness.
In the morning, we parade sores, scratches, blisters and mysterious bites to each other. Then we coax aching limbs and snorkelling gear into the canoes for an easygoing downstream float. The water is completely transparent and thigh-high at its deepest. False mopanes and sycamore figs fringe the banks, where a bateleur buzzes a martial eagle perched on a dead tree.
“Is that a termite mound on the opposite shore?” asks Grant, peering through goggles, having hopped into the water to snorkel. The mound uncoils into two archetypal, thick-maned lions. They are huge, beautiful beasts, but are wary of us and the canoes. They sniff the air, eye us nervously, consider their options for a moment, then dissolve into the woodlands.
We stop for lunch under a towering leadwood tree, where I edge over to its portly trunk and settle back for a little nap. Yet something smells really strong in a raw, animal-like way. Grant discovers a blob of oily yellow paste on the back of my T-shirt, which he attributes to a scent-marking civet, and my companions back off holding their noses. I wander to the water’s edge and strip off my shirt to rinse away the offending gunk, my thoughts straying to Bayei pioneers. But civetone, as this secretion from civet perineal glands is known, is designed to withstand rain and shine in its role as a territorial advertisement, and no amount of scrubbing can dislodge the odour.
Back home, it takes three stints through the washing machine to finally eradicate the scent – and, relieved as I am, I’m strangely disappointed that my unique souvenir of wilderness and adventure has faded.
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