Chobe Riverbank Trees

Last month, I took a trip to Africa to see Victoria Falls and the animals I came to love from visiting zoos as a kid in England. OK, so maybe Vic Falls was a detour to someplace that I couldn't miss since I was in the neighborhood; it was mostly about the animals. And I was not disappointed. I got to see a ton of them over the six days we spent in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Namibia and Botswana. It changed my perspective on so many things, and not just about the creatures we saw there. I couldn't have been happier with my latest trip of a lifetime.

We saw wildlife last month from hotel room balconies, front porches of tents and decks of houseboats in addition to passing them a few feet away in the streets of Victoria Falls. But the best up close and almost personal game viewing came from either the back of a modified souped up pickup truck (it really was so much more than that…) or a small 12 to 15 foot long boat equipped with an outboard motor and a cooler of water, sodas and plenty of Tafel beer. It was our time in the small boat that was perhaps the most rewarding of the six days we spent on the dark continent. 

We were in a small boat on a river because we spent our third and fourth nights in Africa on one of the Ichobezi Safariboats cruising up and down the Chobe River which defines the border between Namibia and Botswana. One of the perks of staying in the four cabin houseboat is the exclusive use of one of the tender boats tugged behind the big boat which you and your pilot (David, in our case) could take out a couple or three times in a day to get a close up look at elephants, Cape buffalo, crocodiles and whatever else happened to be on the banks of the river. Not hippos though. We kept our distance there.

Our first trips on the tender boat were all about getting to see the largest possible mammals we could find. Get me to some elephants (check), giraffes (check) and hippos (check and run). We had no time or patience for birds (we can see birds at home), baboons (saw them in Victoria Falls) or anything else. Get us to the good stuff. And David did. We spent some incredible time watching families of elephants graze and some nervous seconds fleeing from a chasing adult male hippopotamus. 

The time we spent on the small boat was so precious and such a luxury. And thankfully we got a lot of it. After our first two hours on day one, we spent over six hours on three separate excursions the next day in addition to a quick journey the day we left the houseboat behind. We were lucky to spend so much time right on the surface of the water and close to the riverbank that we started to appreciate more than just the large mammals and reptiles that we traveled for longer than a day to reach.

By the third tender boat trip on day two, we wanted to find kingfishers in the reeds near the water's edge and African jacanas (or Jesus birds) walking on the lily pads that floated near the shore. We also sought out monitor lizards and vervet monkeys and kudu and puku and spoonbills and vultures. And in that time, I started to look at other living things on the riverbanks like the trees. And I realized that the trees there are absolutely incredible.

A family of kudu and a couple of baboons by the edge of the Chobe River.

We visited southern Africa in the fourth month of five straight without rain. The water we traveled on was therefore really low; so low in fact that a lot of the land we cruised by and watched wildlife standing on would be covered by water during the height of the rainy season. And not just by a bit. the water level in the Chobe River was a good six feet lower when we were there than it would be a few months later.

The banks of the Chobe are made up of a thin layer of soil covering a base layer of hard basalt rock and the trees that grow there use the soil and the water in the soil to grow large. When fully grown, the trees there are 50 feet or more high and provide shelter and habitat for the animals that live on and drink by the shore of the river. But each time the river rises, it washes away some of the soil that covers the layer of rock that is invisible beneath the bank of the river and it takes away what is sustaining these ancient trees on the edge of the river. 

Eventually, the trees nearest the bank of the river are stripped of what gave them their existence, their roots are fully exposed and they are left clinging to the basalt underlayment for dear life. When you cruise by the trees on the shore you can see their desperate struggle to stay upright. They are literally grasping at everything they can hold onto. Eventually, the beautiful scene of these decades old majestic trees is going to come to a tragic end. They collapse and end up providing a new habitat for monkeys and reptiles at the river's edge. Ultimately nothing in Africa is wasted. I found these trees just fantastic to look at. I hope someone reading this post will also and maybe appreciate them on a trip of their own in the future.

This tree eventually lost its battle to survive...

and provided a sunning spot for a Nile crocodile.