Botswana: First Impressions
I'm at Gaborone airport, and I'm about to leave Botswana. It's nicely landscaped, and is the biggest airport in the country-but still the size of a small high school.
The airport at Maun (pronounced 'ma-oon') was even smaller. It didn't have a baggage carosel; baggage was taken out of the plain with a pick-up truck and plonked on a counter. Some of the locals placed their baggage on the tops of their heads and wandered off. In case that didn't make me feel like I was in another world, I was met at the exit by a woman who was chasing out some stray goats. The airport must be strict on its no goats policy.
The goats, rachaelbrennan and I crossed the road for lunch. We ran into a friend of hers from France; apparently Botswana as a country is like San Francisco as a city: you're always running into people you know. Food in Botswana doesn't cater for special diets as much as in South Africa, but I was still able to come up with a list of sandwich ingredients that I liked.
Over lunch, we talked about what to do with the three days I had in the country, one less than planned due to the previous day's stuffup at the airport. We decided to do pretty much what he'd previously planned, except to have a one-day mokoro ride instead of an overnight one. But first, we had to wander around town and run some errands.
Maun looks amazingly like Black Rock City. As we walked around the playa-white dirt streets, I kept having the feeling that I'd left my bicycle behind somewhere, the one with the fuzzy seats and EL wire. One of the errands Rachael had to run was to obtain a receipt for some welding she had arranged the previous week. The welder's business was a sheet of corregated iron held up by four poles, with a few pieces of equipment next to a long extension cord that disappeared into the dust. The welder wasn't there, so we did as Burners do: decided to come back later and hope he'd be there then.
One thing Maun has that Black Rock doesn't is a river. rachaelbrennan and I sat by it to chill for about an hour. In that time, a few cows and donkeys passed by; whoever they belong to appreciates the fact that these animals will wander around town and feed themselves.
There were much more interesting animals wandering along the other side of the river. The first one I saw was a giraffe. I named it Eddie. Then there were zebras, and another type of animal... I can't remember what it was. I've seen so many animals in the last few days!
I'm on the plane now. Overall, Air Botswana has been one of the worst airlines I've flown with. They have a 10-minute boarding window, which is why it was such a disaster when they sent me to the wrong gate the other day. They don't know their own seat plans-I asked for a window seat and they gave me a seat D, which sort of makes sense for tiny four-abreast planes, except they're lettered A, C, D and F. They don't allow the use of electronics on board at any time-no laptops or MP3 players, not even at cruising altitude. And on the ground it's worst of all: there's hardly ever any staff available to answer questions, you have to wait ages to check in, and you can't even check in early because they only want to know about you if your flight leaves in the next hour or two. And my previous flight's landing was the worst I'd experienced in a good ten years!
I don't mind this flight so much, though. It was weird that once I went through security, we had to wander around the tarmac to figure out which one our flight was... I'm not sure what the point of security was anyhow, given that there was a big, unattended, open gate pretty close to where we got let out. The correct plane was labelled Air Zara-I didn't realise zarabee had her own airline! And it was open seating, so we could sit anywhere we liked. And I was first on the plane. I went straight to business class, of course! This doesn't redeem Air Botswana, but I see it as travel karma making up for paying business class rates for a cattle class seat a few weeks ago.
Update
Hmmmm... my baggage didn't arrive at Heathrow. Guess which airline managed to fuck up transferring baggage at Jo'burg? I guess I shouldn't be too hard on them; after all, they only had six hours to do it!