You can touch the water

by HRM on November 13, 2012

African travelogue: part 5

Rousseau, Carnival Evening

Our contributing editor, Lacey Haynes, recently traveled through Africa. We will be releasing weekly installments from her travel log.

Okavango Delta – Botswana
Tuesday, early evening

Chillie, a smiling story teller whose tribe is native to the delta, propels the Makoro through shallow water by standing in the stern and pushing with a pole. The boat is traditionally made by digging out a large tree. I am grateful for the ease and silence of a boat moving through water. He points out a king fisher, an eagle, and the heartbreakingly beautiful, painted reed frog. We pull up close and I smile to its tiny body; red and precious in the long grass. Chillie speaks with one of the other guides in a language I do not know. I ask what he is saying. He twinkles, “we are so happy to see you smile like that at him.” Later he says that when he dies he’d like to come back as the painted reed frog.

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