Where the Earth Remembers: The Place in Botswana I Never Finished

I didn’t intend to stay in Botswana.

When I look back now, though, it seems that a series of improbable events conspired to make

sure I did. Three friends and I had traveled to Zambia to see a total eclipse of the sun. From

there, we flew to Maun, Botswana, where San Bushmen were supposed to meet us at the

airport and drive us to Ghanzi, quite far south. We were going to spend a few days there before

continuing our travels.

They weren’t at the airport, a one-room rondavel in a town that most people left as soon as they

could.

Two of my friends stayed behind to wait for them. Another friend had become very ill, so I

hitchhiked with her into Maun looking for a clinic and a doctor.

As if the day weren’t already strange enough, the electricity went out across northern Botswana.

It was getting dark when I saw a man standing on the porch of the clinic as he was locking up.

He was the senior physician, an Englishman named Dr. Richard Thompson.

We persuaded him to see my friend.

By flashlight, he decided she needed to be hospitalized for the night.

Just then, my other two friends appeared—with the San guides who had finally arrived after

having a flat tire.

They continued on toward Ghanzi.

I stayed behind.

The next day my friend was released, and we took a small bush plane to join the others. We

stayed in Ghanzi for four days.

Then another friend became very ill.

I called Dr. Thompson.

He told me he would keep the clinic open until we returned that night.

My friend had pneumonia and was hospitalized.

I saw Richard every day until she was well enough to leave.

And then I stayed.

The others went home.I stayed for over a month.

Eventually, I went back to the United States, only to be persuaded to return to Botswana and live

there with Richard. I stayed with him for more than a year, living in a little house on the banks of

the Thamalakane River – home of crocodiles, and hippos when the river flowed during the rainy

season.

Living in Botswana was not always romantic.

When I first moved there, I was one of the only white people in Maun, a woman with no job,

trying to figure out how to make a life in a dusty frontier town that seemed to be overrun with

wild donkeys. It was unbearably hot. I was lonely at times. I had begun working part-time at the

clinic where Richard worked, and I was becoming increasingly uneasy about the Nigerian

director, whom I had begun to suspect was not what he appeared to be.

It was complicated.

When Richard and I went to Scotland for his son’s wedding, I was grateful for the escape.

Scotland was cool. Green. Civilized. After Botswana, it felt like a reprieve.

And I didn’t want to go back.

We took the red-eye from London back to Africa.

At some point during the flight I woke up. The sky outside the window was still black, but dawn

was beginning.

And then I saw it.

It was as if someone had taken a knife and slit open the black sky, and it was bleeding red all

over to ignite the day.

I looked out the window and thought:

Damn. Just like Africa, always so dramatic.

And I realized I was glad to be going back.

I think that was when I understood that Africa had gotten under my skin.

It wasn’t because life there was easy.

It wasn’t.

It wasn’t because everything was beautiful.

It wasn’t.It was something deeper than that.

Africa demanded my attention. It made me look. It made me listen. It made me notice things I

could easily ignore elsewhere.

And once I had learned to notice them, I couldn’t quite forget how.

But, the relationship didn’t last.

Africa did.

It took me a while to understand the difference.

When I eventually returned to the United States, something in me had changed. I no longer felt

quite as though I fit into my own culture. Gradually, I realized that what I had fallen in love with

wasn’t Richard.

It was Africa.

I discovered that I didn’t know how to explain where I had been. People asked about Botswana,

and I could tell them where I had lived and what I had done, but none of that really conveyed

what had happened to me. I felt I had experienced something too deep to simply step back into

the person I had been before.- they could never quite understand the person who had come home.

Since then, I have returned to Botswana many, many times, leading small groups on safari. I

have watched the country change and have watched myself change with it.

I think what stays with me is not any particular animal sighting, or even the extraordinary

landscapes.

It is the feeling of being completely present.

Sitting still in the early morning and hearing the call of an African Fish Eagle.

Beginning to recognize the habits of the animals around you—not because someone has pointed

them out, but because you have been quiet long enough to notice.

Breathing in the smell of sage in the cool morning air.

Watching the light change across the bush.

And suddenly realizing that all the things we spend so much of our lives acquiring seem

remarkably unnecessary.

Life is already happening.

Here. And when I am in Africa, I become attuned to it.

That is what keeps drawing me back.

And perhaps that is why, after all these years, I am returning to one particular place I visited only

once.

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The Tsodilo Hills.

I went there in 2002 because of a book.

This time, I am going because there is something I never finished discovering. And, now I am

taking a small group back with me.

There are places we visit and places that stay with us.

Sometimes we know immediately why. Sometimes we don’t.

For me, Tsodilo has always belonged to the second category.

I first went there in 2002, drawn by Laurens van der Post’s The Lost World of the Kalahari. I had

read about the San people’s beliefs surrounding these remote hills and their understanding of the

place as sacred. I wanted to see it for myself.

Richard and I camped there for two nights. We hiked among the hills and saw some of the

ancient paintings. And then we left.

What I remember most clearly is not what we saw, but what we missed.

There are some 4,500 rock paintings at Tsodilo. We barely began to understand them. We didn’t

find the sacred cave I had wanted to see. We had no one to help us interpret the landscape or

understand the stories it held.

I left with a feeling I couldn’t quite articulate: I had been somewhere extraordinary, but I hadn’t

really met it.

For years, I carried that unfinished experience with me.

Now, finally, I have the opportunity to return—not simply to see Tsodilo again, but to spend time

there with people who can help us look more deeply.

My great friend Dean Liprini, an expert on the sacred sites of southern Africa, will guide us,

together with a San elder from the Tsodilo area.

This time, I want to slow down. I want to listen. I want to learn what I couldn’t have learned on

that first visit.

I don’t expect to come away with all the answers. But I hope to leave with a deeper understanding of a place that has been waiting in the back of

my mind for twenty-four years.

At Tsodilo, I want to learn to see what I couldn’t see the first time. To listen to the stories held in

those hills, to understand a little more of what they have meant to the people who have lived

alongside them for thousands of years.

But there is another kind of knowing that Africa has taught me over the years. It doesn’t come

from learning the history of a place or understanding what you are looking at. It comes from

being still long enough to feel yourself become part of it.

For me, there are few places where that happens more readily than along the Khwai River, where

we will go next.

Last year, I had a special experience at Khwai that will always stay with me. We were camped in

our usual place along the Khwai River. I woke to fog, and by the time I stepped outside, the sun

was just beginning to rise.

I stood there watching the world emerge from the darkness. The river, the trees, the mist, the first

light spreading across the sky. I felt the earth coming alive around me, and I could do nothing but

stand still and take it all in.

Then a Goliath Heron flew overhead.

I could hardly breathe. It was all so beautiful. But it wasn’t just the beauty of what I was seeing. I

was in it. Fully alive, fully present. Not standing apart, watching the world happen, but right

there, in the middle of it.

I was in the tapestry life was weaving.

I didn’t know Peace had taken a photograph. I was too busy being there. We will spend 4 nights at a remote lodge on the Khwai River in the middle of it all… expect to

experience something sublime.

Four nights at Khwai is a gift. There is time to settle in, to stop thinking about what comes next,

and to let the rhythms of the river become your own.

And then, as always, the journey continues.

From Khwai, we will fly by bush plane to Chobe, where Peace Shamuka will be waiting for us.

Peace was given his name before he was born. His family knew that peace was the gift he would

bring to his village.

I have known him for many years, and I can tell you that the name fits.

Peace is a place of calm. He is also the head of the Botswana Guides Association and a guide of

long experience. Biologists I have travelled with, people who have spent years studying wildlife,

have called him the best naturalist they have ever known.

I have watched him find a cheetah when we wanted to see one – not easy. I have watched him

repair a broken-down 4×4 in the middle of nowhere. And I have watched him find a way through

the occasional difficult client situation without making anyone feel that there was a problem at

all.

Over the years, I have seen it all.

What I have come to appreciate most, though, is the quiet confidence he brings to everything. In

the bush, things don’t always go according to plan. Vehicles break down. Animals have their own

ideas about where they want to be. People bring their own expectations and worries along with

their luggage. Peace has a way of meeting whatever happens with patience, good judgment, and

a steadiness that makes everyone feel they are in capable hands.

We will spend three nights camping in Chobe with him. And for me, there is something deeply

satisfying about returning to the bush with someone who has been part of so many of my

journeys. We have shared years of mornings, wildlife encounters, unexpected complications, and

moments of wonder. I don’t have to explain to Peace why I keep coming back to Africa. He

already knows.

Whenever I leave, he reminds me.

“I know you are leaving, Debs, but your heart stays in Africa.”

And then, at the end of the journey, there is Victoria Falls.

After the quiet of the river and the intimacy of camping in the bush, the Falls are a different kind

of encounter with the natural world. The water thunders over the edge, the air fills with spray,

and the sheer scale of it is almost impossible to take in. Some places ask you to be still and listen. Others leave you standing there, humbled by forces

that have been at work for far longer than any of us can imagine.

Victoria Falls is one of those places.

And then, as every journey must, this one will end.

The journey ends, but what it leaves in us continues.

I didn’t intend to stay in Botswana.

I certainly didn’t imagine that, more than twenty years later, I would still be returning, still

finding new things to discover, still being surprised by how a place can get under your skin and

never quite let go.

The world seems increasingly noisy and hurried. I find myself longing for the wide spaces, the

changing light, the sound of birds at dawn, and the quiet of the bush. I want to be there long

enough to stop thinking about what comes next. To sit beside a river and watch the day unfold.

To feel the earth coming alive around me, and to remember that I am part of it.

I don’t go back to Africa expecting answers. I go because, when I am there, something in me

becomes quiet enough to listen. I notice things I might otherwise miss. I feel more fully alive.

After all these years, I still can’t entirely explain what Africa does to me. Perhaps I don’t need to.

I only know that I am longing to return.

You can find out about Deborah’s trips on her website, Timeless Baja.