Tour d'Afrique - Cairo to Cape Town by Bike

The people:
• People? What people?
• The countryside did not contain people like every other country up until now. It was easy to cycle a whole day and see no one except our group, truck drivers and wildlife. The villages that we did go through had very friendly people in them, but these villages were very few and very far between. We actually had one guy drive way out of town chasing after us in his car because he thought we had turned the wrong way on our bikes.

The landscape:
• Flat, flat, flat!
• My maximum speeds for the day were not often all that much larger than my average speed. The roads were also super straight where at times I would travel for over 40km without even a bend in the road.
• There was however diversity in the vegetation. Flora is not a forté of mine, but what I can comment on is at times there were large open plains, other times, the grasses were taller and trees dotted the plain and other times it seemed to be a tall scrub that covered the land (by tall I mean over 3m).
• I was curious as to what the Kalahari desert looked like, but remembered that a desert is defined by the amount of annual rainfall that it receives. The Kalahari is not a desert like we think or like I saw farther north in the Sahara or Nubian deserts. It is covered in scrubby vegetation about 1-2m tall.

Infrastructure:
• The towns that are around are once again even more westernized. Electricity is now commonplace.
• Trucks as well as cars are generally in very good repair and cities though small are well developed.

The wildlife:
• Though I had seen a good deal of wildlife on the trip up to this point, it seemed very abundant in Botswana. I surmise that this is due to the low population density. In other countries it seemed that wildlife was contained to parks where it was visited by humans whereas in Botswana it seemed that the people were contained to the villages where they were visited by wildlife. I saw a huge warthog running through the streets of Kasane, our campsite was surrounded by hippos, elephants and apparently crocodiles (luckily separated by a tall electric fence, we saw giraffes, elephants and other large animals while riding along public highways, saw tonnes of wildlife in the Okavango Delta that were kept out of the city of Maun by a game fence, the list goes on.

Like Canada’s prairies, Botswana is a pretty flat place (even more flat I think) but contains a lot of surprising jewels. Fun place!