Dumelang
Botswana is one of the great development success stories of Africa, with a GDP growth higher than even the Asian tiger economies. And it really shows. The roads are all paved, there is a sense of infrastructure, tap water is drinkable, people are well educated and ambitious. It almost doesn't feel like Africa at all, except that everywhere there is that huge expanse of sky, and clean air, and animals.
Gabarone (that g is a throat-clearing fricative sound) is a tiny place as capital cities go -- actually a small place by any standards. I arrived on a public holiday, Independence Day in fact, so it felt even quieter: a wide, low, flat town, its scatter of buildings well-distributed so that the town has no real centre and seems to exist in the confluence of many blank crossroads. From my third-floor hotel window I could easily see the edge of town just stopping and giving way to flat ochre earth and ultimately purple hills to the north. People amble. It feels very safe, though not the most atmospheric city I've ever visited.
Right now I'm actually up in Maun (that's bisyllabic -- there are no diphthongs and almost no monosyllables in Tswana), on the edge of the Okavango Delta. It's a lot hotter than the capital and full of small birds with bright blue bellies. I've hired a 4x4 and tomorrow I'm heading into the extreme northwest, near the Angolan border. The airline lost my tripod so I'm filming everything handheld -- a style I enjoy, but it's a shame not to have the choice.
I blitzed my way through AS Byatt's Possession on the journey out here, and I think it might be the best book I've read all year. I stayed up all night writing notes on it, and then upset myself watching a Drew Barrymore romcom on the movie channel. I think travelling makes me a bit emotional.