A few nights in a super-exclusive, eco-friendly tented camp or lodge in the heart of Botswana’s Okavango Delta doesn’t come cheap. But you are guaranteed a once-in-a-lifetime experience and memories you will treasure forever.

It’s also perfect for those who shun mass market safari packages and superficial ‘zoo-like’ private reserves. But while you enjoy your ‘natural bush’ experience in relative comfort in some of these top-class lodges, have you ever wondered how much work goes into making your stay as pleasant and accident-free as possible?

Keeping food cool without modern refrigerators, putting fresh food on the table and shuttling staff and guests to and from the camp in the rainy season, requires quick and creative thinking from the staff. On the surface everything may seem to run like clockwork, but there’s much more going on behind the scenes than meets the eye.

Tubu Tree, built in 2002, is a cosy five-tent camp. Each tent is slightly raised off the ground but there are no fences and no armed guards to ward off dangerous animals. Just like we have the right to visit their habitat, the animals also have full rights to enter the camp.

It’s exciting but also a bit nerve-wracking, especially when Nicki, one of the housekeepers, tells us she came face to face recently with a leopard in the camp’s main toilet. “I said to him ‘are you a leopard?’” she recalls. Luckily the leopard took one look at her and leapt out of the window.

The staff at Tubu Tree, like the other camps in the Okavango Delta, work a seven-day shift, doing three months on, one month off. Most of the staff come from the local communities around the Delta, but there are expats like Canadian-born Justin and South African Jacky, who have spent two years at the camp, pretty long by camp manager standards.

Like in many other camps in the Delta they are a couple. Many camps prefer to hire couples as it means the managers will find it less lonely, and, hopefully, stay longer.

The alarm clocks for the managers go off at 4.20 every morning. They need to make sure everything is in order before the guests get up at 5.30 a.m. for their morning game drive.

Some of us moan about rush hour traffic, but for the staff at Tubu Tree, they rise during the predators’ ‘hunting time’. It’s not uncommon to have hyenas sniffing at the door or elephants sticking their trunk into the shower. They’ve even once had a pair of lions mating outside their tent. Another camp manager had a resident crocodile under his tent during the flood season.

“Our families don’t really understand what we are doing. They think we see leopards at camp every day,” admit Jacky and Justin, “but we don’t really. It can happen, but it doesn’t happen every day.”

The biggest challenges of working in the bush, according to the two managers, are the logistics, and not knowing what’s going to happen each day. “But that’s also part of the fun,” says Jacky. “There’s never a dull moment and you never know what the guests are going to be like.”

Besides looking after the guests’ best interests, the local wildlife also adds quite a few challenges. “One time last year, at 4 a.m. some elephants burst our water pipes…there are lots of challenges every day,” she adds.

The camp’s kitchen is a favourite hang-out spot for the local hyenas who try to break in if they are really hungry. The large steel locks on the door and the teeth marks on the side of the chest freezer bear witness to this. The baboons also visit the kitchen daily but, unlike the hyenas, which are less subtle, they try to ‘sneak’ in.

With wild animals loitering in the neighbourhood, the staff have to be very careful not to leave any food or rubbish lying around. “This would encourage them to start ‘begging’ or scavenging for food leftovers,” explains Justin, something that the camps want to avoid at all costs.

Garbage is also carefully handled. It is separated – for example, food waste is burned – and then taken out of the camp, either by plane or truck. Every effort is made to keep the camps as natural and environmentally friendly as possible so as not to interfere with the Delta’s natural ecosystem. Wilderness Safaris which markets – and, or, manages – many of the camps in the Delta is meticulous about this.

Every Friday, the camp gets fresh supplies. The staff try to keep stocks up in case they are left stranded during the rainy season and never let a plane come or leave empty handed. The camp also has a supply of gas and oil drums for petrol which luckily the elephants don’t touch.

Far away from towns and camps, Tubu Tree uses water from its own springs and runs its own generator eight hours a day which provides enough electricity to power the camp. Great care is taken to use resources efficiently and guests are encouraged not to charge batteries and to turn lights off when possible.

Laundry is done by hand in the camp’s two-basin laundry room and hung out in the sun to dry (or indoors during rainy season). A small hut with metal gauze around it and a cold tap flowing over it, is used as a natural ‘cooling room’.

In the evenings, the camp staff hang out together, huddling around the fire in the winter, or weaving colourful baskets for the camp’s shop. There are no TVs or internet so the only news they get from the outside world during their three-month work stint comes from the guests or through radio contact with the Delta’s ‘capital’ Maun, a 30-minute flight away.

A 15-minute flight away from Tubu Tree lies the water-based Xigera camp run by South African husband and wife team Mike and Anne Marchington – who have spent 20 years travelling in southern Africa. Mike tells us that he used to jog in the bush, one time trekking right past a pride of lions. “I was so focused on their prints that I forgot to look out for the lions,” he laughs.

These two bush veterans take pretty much everything in their stride and are keen to pass on their experience and knowledge to new staff. They’re also very comfortable with the camp’s ‘shy resident’ hyena who visits every night. “Knowledge is power so if you know how the animals react, you will be ok,” says Mike. “If you come face to face with her, just step back, treat her as a lady and let her go first.”

We have an emergency horn in our room but are warned that it is only to be used in case of medical emergencies. And this, we learn, does not apply to a snake or a tarantula in the tent or a leopard on the balcony!

‘What can an animal do to you? It won’t hop into your tent and eat you’ seems to be the general consensus in the Delta of the chilled-out staff who live there year-round.

It’s us visitors who think that we will be eaten by man-eating lions, attacked by crocodiles or trampled on by an elephant … the minute we spot one.

More about the Okavango Delta

The Okavango Delta is a 15,000 square-kilometre swamp, formed where the Okavango River empties on to a basin in the arid Kalahari Desert. What makes it even more unique is that it is filled with water that comes from 1,000 kilometres away.

It is considered one of the most spectacular landscapes in Africa and ranks high on the wish list for visitors to the ‘Dark Continent’. On the downside, it is quite a trek to get there and it is expensive. But that’s what also makes a visit to the Okavango Delta so special. It has two seasons – wet and dry – and both make for unique and entirely different experiences.

Unlike South Africa, which has gone down the high-volume, lower priced route, Botswana has strictly controlled its tourism industry to keep it more exclusive and upmarket. This means that there’s a limit to the number of guests allowed in the parks at a given time and you won’t see 10 jeeps parked around a family of cheetahs with drivers frantically radioing other guides to let them know about their find.

Instead, the whole safari experience in Botswana is kept intimate, personal and the animals enjoy their peace and quiet, unthreatened by humans, helped by the fact that animals outnumber people as the population of Botswana is just around two million.

Botswana wildlife is also lucky that they live in a wealthy country – some say one of the wealthiest in Africa with a healthy supply of diamond mines and a GDP per capita of almost $14,000. As a result, poaching hasn’t been as extreme as in other African countries. And because the animals have not been hunted, they’re not overly aggressive towards humans.

Getting around and where to stay

Wilderness Safaris (www.wilderness-safaris.com) runs a great network of lodges and camps throughout the Delta and southern Africa and own a local air charter company so you can book everything in one go.

If you want to read more about the Okavango Delta and southern Africa, visit my blog http://alannaheames.wordpress.com/ .

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