Francistown, Botswana

We are in Francistown right now at an internet cafe where some joyful music is playing. There is a mural on the wall featuring a map of Botswana, including our destination in Botswana: Kasane, in the northeast corner, where we will be taking a ferry into Zambia.

Outside it is very hot. weather.com says it is only 86F here, but it feels hotter, at least 95F or 100F! The sun is very intense. Beating down all day, it can be so tiring. The past few days, to deal with the sun, I have been folding my bandana on the diagonal and then tying it around my head, over my baseball cap, babushka-style. I'm thinking of bringing back the old-fashioned bonnet for bike touring here.

Across the way is Mr. Chang's Chinese Restaurant. Chinese has been a much more useful language here than we thought...in almost every town we have met at least one Chinese person! From the owners of one of the main groceries in Bultfontein, South Africa (who didn't own a separate living residence and slept on the floor of the grocery) to the large crew of a construction site in Gaborone (who agreed in Chinese to let us stay at the construction site and who slept on the construction site themselves) to the Chinese restaurant here, we have been finding many Chinese people to communicate with. Minwah is the most fluent, but Orian and I get a chance to practice our Chinese as well.

Minwah has gotten two marriage proposals, one from a guy at the bar in Serule yesterday, where we stopped to eat fat cakes (bread dough deep fried, the local specialty, available for 1 pula (or ~12 cents), and one from a police officer in Mahalapye. She's going to have to start telling people she's married! A lot of people want U.S. work visas.

Our favorite camping spots have been the cow fields by the side of the road. There are many gates with local dirt roads, and we follow these a little ways, through the thorn trees and sleep amidst the cow pies. But they are very nice spots with threes and the cows have eaten the underbrush so they are quite open, and we get the occasional bovine visit. The cows here all wear bells so that their owners can find them amongst the low bushes of the veldt.

We have been getting up early to ride in the cool part of the day. Have experienced part of the saying, "the night is darkest right before the dawn"...We are so far from light pollution here that even with the thin crescent moon the other night, the light was bright enough to see in the tent and move about. Then, about 5:15-6:00, as the sun's rays peeked above the horizon, brightening the sky but not the ground, it was difficult to move around.

Should take us about another week to get to Kasane and Livingstone, Zambia, is another day past that. Expect some more posts from us then as well as picture updates! And check out the pictures B.J. Welling posted for us.

We've had some pretty interesting experiences so far in Botswana and are looking forward to some more. As we head north, past Nata, we hear we will have to watch out for the wildlife...keep an eye out for elephants, baboons, and the like.