Past Nata

There are few villages in the 500km north of Francistown and only one in the 300km between Nata and Kazungula Ferry, the border crossing. Leaving Nata, the first road sign one sees, about 500m out of town, is a sign that warns about animals. Be particularly careful at night, it says.

We had been warned throughout Botswana of this area of road, and questioned about how we would deal with animals. "Do you have a gun?" was the standard question, followed by assertions that the road was riddled with elephants, lions, and buffalo. "15km out of town there are elephants," we were told.

The scenery in this part of Botwana had changed. The rest of the country up to here had been flat (or at least a constant uphill with maybe a single hill or so in one day), with grassland and shrubland, the small thorny shrubs. Just south of Nata we had seen some full grown trees, but at Nata, near the salt flats, we encountered palm trees and open grassland.

This stretch of road was very nice. There were several stretches with horrific potholes that had caused bent and broken axles and flats in several of the semis we saw...these stretches deterred most traffic from using this route and were navigable by bicycle and only lasted a few km before relatively smooth sailing. The road was narrow, two shoulder-less lanes, like a small county road in Wisconsin. The veldt was close on both sides of the road, and we were soon surrounded again by the shrub land of the veldt...though these shrubs were taller than the ones in southern Botswana and eventually began to grow into trees even further north.

I did worry a bit about the lions and hoped we wouldn't see any, but I was not too concerned all the same, as lions like to do their hunting at night, don't prefer humans (you don't hear too many stories about human-eating lions, especially with all the other tasty game out there), and probably don't hang around the roads much.

We were excited to see elephants, and elephants we indeed saw: elephants crossing the road, elephants eating branches, elephants making loud and weird and prehistoric noises. Our mid-Western raised boys compared the number of elephants we saw each of the three days we rode on this road to the number of whitetail deer they see in Wisconsin. We saw elephants, zebras, giraffes, and baboons. We even wandered off the road into the veldt at one point to try to get closer and take better pictures of a group of 11 giraffe, picking our way through the poky yellow grass and only sort of keeping an eye out for snakes.

Our first day riding a big strong tailwind picked us up and blew us 65 km in three hours. It rained on us and then left us, with a sun to dry us all off. It left us near a cell phone repeater tower, not far from the road, where we decided to spend the night...in an compound with a 2m tall fence with razorwire on the top. Fortunately for us the compound wasn't even locked, just closed with a little bit of twisted wire. And I definately slept better in that compound than I would have out of it, for on the short (~50m) access road to the gate of the compound, there in the fine sand, were a bunch of prints from a large cat, and soon after entering the compound we saw several large elephants next to the gate (you have to be careful at night in the bush as an elephant can walk right over you without thinking twice). The other nice thing about the compound was the ladder to the cellphone repeater tower. The ladder went all the way up to the top, which was ~200ft up from the ground. I didn't climb up, but the others did and had a fabulous view of the surrounding area and even climbed up early the next morning to experience the sunset from a bird's eye view.

Another tidbit to add: the land through Botswana was flat, especially north of Francistown. On the way to Francistown the road was flat but we were climbing. After Francistown and especially north of Nata the road was just flat, no rise, no fall. When we crossed into Zambia we began to see more trees with green foliage (instead of the thorn trees in Botswana) and more hills, but the land is still relatively flat and has been since Bloemfontein, South Africa).