BOTSWANA'S WILD WEST

Just the name GHANZI conjures up images, even if you don't know the town or its background. Everyone who has lived in Botswana for some years has their own individual concept of the town and being a fairly frequent visitor, I felt I should record my impressions of the place.

It is situated in the West of Botswana on the edge of an area of the country where a relatively shallow layer of calcite underlies the Kalahari sands. This means the water table is higher than normal and it is relatively easy to extract groundwater for cattle ranching. When the early Boer travellers from South Africa explored this area, a group of them decided to settle here and raise cattle. They staked out huge areas of land and gradually developed these with boreholes, windmills, homes and roads. They also created the town of Ghanzi to serve there needs for provisions, recreation and communication, very Wild West!

The road from the capital Gaborone to Ghanzi was a trial of endurance for both driver and vehicle. Huge trucks have carved the sandy road into a nightmare of gouged out troughs and peaks that could leave normal 4x4 vehicles stranded on their differentials with all wheel spinning in the air. The width between the ruts was too wide for most vehicles which meant you had to continually lurch from left side in to right side in and the occupants were thrown from one side of the vehicle to the other hour after hour. Tree stumps and rocks frequently destroyed tyres and wheels and simple punctures were too frequent to be worthy of a mention. Parts of the road are composed of what is called 'heavy sand' which comes from the experience of the first voortrekkers who found that when the ox drawn wagons entered these areas, the wagons seemed to become heavy. This is due to the fact that they sank into the sand that had almost no cohesive strength at all. These areas can be identified from some distance away, because previous travellers who had become stuck cut down bushes from either side of the road and spread them over the tracks to support the vehicle; you soon become very adept at spotting these trouble spots!

The tiny settlements where one could expect to find a borehole, a shop with some meallie meal and Coca-Cola could be over 100 miles apart and if you planned to stop overnight, then it was under canvas or the stars. I only made the trip by road one or two times, but I was a much more frequent visitor by air. Since I held a British Instrument Meteorology Conditions Rating, one of the principal benefits in Botswana was that one could fly direct from point to point, without having to follow the air corridors, which basically followed the main roads. In retrospect, it seems a little foolhardy that one could set off on a roughly North by North West heading out of Gaborone and fly for over three hours over some of the worlds most inhospitable terrain in a little single engine aircraft. One just didn't think about survival prospects if we suffered a defect that demanded a forced landing. Although flight plans were mandatory for such flights, radio communications were unreliable, radio navigation aids were few and far between and the terrain did not lend itself to safe forced landings.

The most reliable navigation technique was to tune the Automatic Direction Finder to Radio Botswana and keep the needle at 180 degrees on the tail, while maintaining the correct compass course for Ghanzi. Cross winds created drift, which in due course became apparent and required correction by amending the aircraft heading; good sound practical navigation! I remember being a passenger with a commercial pilot from Pretoria who was flying me from Lobatse to Ghanzi and he had never flown the route before. He had the correct maps, routes and radio navigation aid frequencies, but the map detail was so limited and the range of the navigation aids so small that he found himself completely unable to confirm his position after an hour and he became very uneasy. I mentioned that I was a pilot and had flown the route before and I have never seen such a look of relief (however misplaced!) replace doubt.. I knew that we had not crossed the main road and that if we steered a little west of our current track we would converge with this well before we got in range of the Ghanzi NDB. To me it didn't really matter that we didn't know exactly where we were; provided we were alert to the first signs of the radio beacon coming alive and followed any major track going North West, we would be funnelled to Ghanzi eventually!

On arrival at Ghanzi airport the pilot is very much on his own; you park at your own discretion, fill out the arrival log in an abandoned office and set off with baggage in hand to find transport, accommodation and fuel. The walk across the airstrip, over the stile and up past the Oasis Store, the permanently squeaking windmill, Wally Vice's collection of wildfowl and the abandoned broken wagons is straight out of High Noon! Sun beating down, dry dusty street with no one around and at the end of the street The Kalahari Arms Hotel with clean beds and cold beer.

Another feature of the street is Kingsley Butler's car; would you believe an Austin Allegro! With the road to Ghanzi littered with broken down trucks, Land Cruisers and assorted 4x4 vehicles it comes as a great surprise to see such a mundane, pussy cat of a car so far from tarmac. He brought it out on the back of a Bedford J5 and finds it trundles around the town's dusty main roads (two!) without trouble!

After booking in to the hotel with Richard Spring and quenching our thirst, a walk down to the Oasis store is necessary to ensure that you can secure enough aviation fuel for the return trip. If you call anytime between 10.00 and 16.00 (the heat of the day!) Wally Vice will be found at siesta. When found, he will usually be able to advise you that there is a drum of avgas on the back of his truck, the key is behind the sun visor and the chamois leather is in the glove box..You climb into his battered old Chevrolet and drive it down to the strip where you back it up gingerly to the Cessna, hoping that the brakes work. The chamois leather laid in the fuel funnel should trap any water that has found its way into the fuel drum (unlikely) and the hand operated pump lifts about 20 litres a minute up into the fuel tanks depending how energetic you are. It's a good feeling to see the plane settling as it takes on a full load of fuel.

A night spent in the Kalahari Arms gives you the chance to meet a few of the districts characters as they come in from the surrounding farms. The Vickerman brothers must be classed among the largest landowners in the world, rivalling the Texas barons, yet nothing further from 'Dallas' could be imagined. They are concerned only with the day to day events in a small community, what the predictions are for the rains, when the next consignment of cattle is setting off to the abattoir and what the latest gossip is from Gaborone and Johannesburg.

The new tarred road from Gaborone to Ghanzi must have changed forever the character of the town as it was in the 1970's. Maybe someday I will visit it again and compare notes.