THE RIVER IS ALIVE AGAIN!
The Boteti River deep in the Kalahari Desert dried up in 1993! A hundred thousand zebra and wildebeest perished, other animals died or had to leave the area. The river went into a coma, to support just a fraction of the life that it once nurtured. Incredibly, thankfully the remnant survivors of those great herds managed to hang on by a thread, getting their sustenance from a few small seeps and holes dug by elephants, and some artificially created waterholes. The more miserable the situation there seemed, the more we hoped for a miracle. I always believed the river would flow again, it was just a question of time. And now it is time! There are a number of influencing factors that determine the flow of the river, or not. Seismic activity, the ever changing delta landscape, and most importantly the regional rainfall occurrences. We are apparently in for a few decades of higher rainfall in the region and that means the Boteti River will be flowing for a while.
The Boteti River drains a small fraction of water from the Okavango Delta to flow two hundred kilometres into the saltpans of the dry Kalahari. Meno A Kwena Tented Camp is located where the river flows into the Makgadikgadi Pans National Park. This is the dry season range for Southern Africa’s largest remaining wildlife migration. The water from the Angolan highlands, hundreds of kilometres to the north, that fell during the 2007/2008 summer rains arrived at Meno A Kwena for the first time since 1993! It was Tuesday the 25th November that water flowed down the dry riverbed for the first time in fifteen years! The river awakens from her dry coffin in the desert. Read more…