TSODILO HILLS

Tsodilo Hills in the Northwest corner of Botswana is even by todays standards, a difficult corner of the world to get to. Alec Campbell in his history of Botswana points out that there is an 800m landing strip just one kilometre to the South, but by road, it is 100 kilometres by four wheel drive after you get to Shakawe!

Its main claim to fame is the well preserved collection of bushman paintings which adorn many of the rocks, said to be 1,700 paintings on 200 sites on the hill, or more accurately a kopje, an Afrikaans term for a small outcrop of rock protruding out of the surrounding plain. There are no facilities at the hills although there is a small Bushman settlement and the residents are attuned to the needs of the occasional visitor and can take them to all the painting sites for a nominal fee. Since they don't speak either English or Setswana, this has the advantage of not influencing one's appreciation of the paintings, unlike a visitor to the Louvre!

Given this situation, it is understandable that I should someday undertake a flight to the hills with a party of friends, and my first one in June 1977 was not without its moments of drama. At the time I was flying a privately owned Cessna 206 equipped with a Robertson stall conversion kit which made it particularly suited to Botswana conditions. I doubt if there is another aircraft available which can carry six people with full baggage allowance, full fuel capacity with an endurance of over 6 hours, a range of nearly 1000 miles with the ability get in and out of strips of only 600 yards. This particular model had an optional belly pod slung under the fuselage, so on this trip where we planned to camp we took along everything, including a collapsible canvas kitchen sink. Another item of cookware that I had become attached to at that time was a combination frying/egg poaching pan which was the source of some amusement to the rest of the group since it tended to make quite a din, no matter how carefully packed.

The party comprised John & Mary Peacock, Barry & Josie Quinn and a friend whose name I can't remember (since identified by Mary as John Armstrong) and the plan was to fly to Maun, on to Shakawke for a bit of tiger fishing, down to Tsodilo Hills then return via Maun to Gaborone. The first hiccup arose when our plans to depart 30 minutes before sunrise appeared to be thwarted by the absence of a fuel pump attendant. However, I had a hacksaw and my vice grips, the electric power was on and I found the invoice book where it was usually kept under a nearby oil drum, so.... In ten minutes we were fuelled up, the BP invoice completed and signed and a note left suggesting that the lock chain was still long enough although one link shorter, sorry for any inconvenience! Such was the informality of civil aviation in Botswana in the seventies!

To be airborne on a crystal clear morning over the Kalahari and watch the sun rise under the starboard wing is rather special. The flight to Maun I suppose is best described as "uneventful" but at the time, I found any flight to be an adventure, reporting "operations normal" to Johannesburg on the HF radio every 30 minutes, plotting our course over the 1:1,000,000 map and being inordinately delighted to be able to recognise a map feature from time to time that confirmed we were more or less on course.

The only navigational aids we had were the magnetic compass and the Automatic Direction Finder (ADF) which at these distances was out of range of any Non Directional Beacon (NDB) which it was supposed to be tuned to. However, if we tuned the set to Radio Botswana (whose powerful transmitter was only a few kilometres from Gaborone Airport) it gave a reliable signal on which to fly a "back bearing". We also had some infrequent ground checks by reference to Jack Falconer's cordon fences, which intersected our route from time to time.

On arrival at Maun we stopped for breakfast at Riley's Hotel and in view of the fact that we would be operating from two relatively short dirt strips in the middle of the day, I did some calculations, checked the fuel contents and opted not to top up the fuel tanks in order to keep our weight down. Significant!

On to Shakawi, again flying on an ADF back bearing on the Maun NDB we travelled the length of the Okavango swamps from the fault line at its south eastern edge up to the north west corner or "pan handle".

The fishing camp is Shakawe is fairly luxurious, with tents permanently erected on concrete slabs by the end of the river although we set up our tents on the public camping ground a little downstream, close to the river. Very close to the river.

We spent that afternoon fishing from a boat in some pools in the river. That part of the river has lots of hippo around and they apparently are responsible for far more deaths among the local fisherman than crocodiles so we kept the motor running most of the time to make a quick getaway from time to time. Josie was lucky/skilful enough to land a nice 2-lb. tiger fish. Not quite enough to go round six of us and they are tricky fish to eat with lots of barbed bones to be wary of, but at least my egg poaching pan was put to good use.

That evening we were lucky enough to see a scene straight from a popular coffee table book on the Okavango "Sea of Land, Land of Water" re-enacted in front of our eyes. A herd of goats came down to the river's edge to drink, were spotted by a waiting crocodile on the opposite bank and sure enough, by slipping under water he sneaked up on the herd and snatched one from the group in a matter of moments, backing out into the river and drowning it in front of our eyes.

With the tiger fish eaten and stories told, we went to bed around nine and I brought into play another of my high tech. camping accessories, a lightweight "space blanket"; all the rage then for the gadget minded camper - light weight, strong, waterproof, zero conductivity, high thermal value. Trouble was, it rustled! Every twist & turn I made in the night, everyone knew about it, and that's not counting the times I rolled into the egg poacher...!

So, about midnight, John Peacock got out of the tent to stretch his legs or whatever, and having walked round the embers of the camp-fire, stepped straight off the 10 foot cliff we were camped beside into the crocodile infested river which was flowing by at around 10-15 miles per hour! Luckily he was not the only member of the party kept awake by my equipment - Barry heard the splash and the shout and leapt out of bed with a torch and began to look a round. He found John hanging onto a shrub at the rivers edge, quite unable to get himself out. Due to the cold weather, after undressing completely and putting on his regulation pyjamas, he had put all his outdoor clothes on top, so every bit of clothing he had brought was weighing him down (On my advice according to Mary!). Mary admitted later that she was too busy checking that she had the numbers of all the life insurance policies to help, so it was left to Josie and friend to help Barry pull him out (I alone had been sound asleep, undisturbed by my noisy space blanket!) Suffice to say that they got John out after getting him to drift downstream to where the bank was less steep. The crocodile was a bit slower off the mark at night and he made no re-appearance for which John was most grat eful! I'm not so sure about Mary though......

The following morning we were up bright and early and departed Shakawe strip around 9.00 a.m. for the short hop down to Tsodilo. I commented on the flight how economical this Cessna was, pointing to the fuel gauges, which were still recording about 2/3 full on both sides, after a flight the length of Botswana. Significant! We duly found the short strip lying to the south of the hills and were met as promised by a couple of Bushmen who didn't need to ask why we are there, but simply led us off in the direction of the hills and had us all scrambling round the painting sites for the next three hours.

After a picnic lunch we set off for Maun and after 10 minutes into the flight I began to doubt the fuel gauges in the plane, and as you do, gave the panel a sharp rap with my knuckles; horror of horrors, one gauge dropped down to the empty peg and the other, after a few more taps worked its way down to the 1/4 full mark. What to do? The dilemma was that Maun was the only strip anywhere within reach with fuel and with a radio navigation aid to ensure direct navigation. There were other strips in the Okavango Delta much nearer than Maun but could I find a tiny strip in the middle of that land of swamp and islands? How to get out? To get fuel in?

So... the last thing I wanted was five other people worrying about our fuel state so I spent around ten minutes re-doing flying times and fuel consumption rates since our departure from Gaborone. The standard rules should allow for a diversion to a nominated alternate landing site plus 45 minutes and my repeated calculations did not allow for any diversion time or any surplus time. It worked out that we were just on maximum range, suggesting that more careful pre-flight calculations at Gaborone should have dictated a refuel at Maun on our first visit, irrespective of how the gauges looked. I did tell the passengers that the fuel gauges had been reading high, but that we should be OK.

I would have dearly loved to extract the last drop of fuel from the port tank which was reading empty, running on it till the engine began to misfire from fuel starvation, quite a safe procedure since the engine readily restarts via the windmilling prop, but that would have had a devastating effect on the passengers, so I opted to run on the fuller tank for the duration of the flight and change over to the port tank only if and when the starboard tank ran dry . Not a very intelligent situation to get into and I can guarantee it will never be repeated; it was the longest 30 minutes of my life. What a beautiful sight when the fault line which marks the end of the Okavango came into view; better still when I could faintly make out Maun in the distance; just hang in there!

I requested a straight in approach and the final hurdle was cleared when I judged I was within gliding distance of the threshold - at least now we would live to tell the tale but would I be spared the embarrassment of being unable to get to the fuel pumps? I was! I switched off very promptly and ushered my passengers off to the airport buildings before I started refuelling. To this day I am apprehensive about anyone comparing my fuel uptake that day with the usable fuel capacity of a Cessna 206 - I took on board six more litres of fuel than is stated in the flight manual! If ever I felt like doing a Pope John Paul on the runway, that was the time (But I didn't, true to form!)