The Okavango's world-famous aquatic taximan

| Friday June 14, 2013 00:00

The inside of an average Gaborone taxi is both a mobile armoury teeming with an assortment of deadly weapons of bodily destruction and a perpetually active war zone.This description should make it easy to imagine how homicidal drivers of such taxis would get if, like Ndunda Ushuka, they had limitless opportunities to take passengers within five metres of a pimple-faced, non-vegetarian crocodile posed stiff against the bank of the Okavango River.

Its serial-killer teeth clenched, the crocodile feigns sleep while stealing glances at human cuisine stopping by and is probably estimating how long it would take to polish off an entire boatload. When its carnivorous fantasies do overwhelm it for a split second, the suntanning reptile opens its eyes fully to cast a chilling death stare on the thrill seekers disrupting its late-afternoon beauty routine.There is little doubt that in the hands of a Gaborone taximan, this opportunity would be used to settle disputes over fares. As a matter of fact, the five-metre mark would become something of a High Court with such taxi drivers assuming the dual roles of applicant and judge.

However, up in the Okavango Delta, 'the Customer is King' is not a corny line in cornier marketing spiel. Navigating a water taxi within that mark is not meant to set up a scenario to extort fares from passengers but as a visual treat for passengers. Despite the absolute lack of criminal intent on Ushuka's part, when his speed boat gets that close to the crocodile for the very first time, one instantly gets a heart-in-the-mouth feeling, and a split second later, a strange bitter taste that must be of the heart exploding in the mouth.Engine running and his hand firm on the tilt arm of the boat (the 'accelerator pedal,' as it were), Ushuka reels out in a rose-tinted monologue of associative thought about the general behaviour of crocodiles. If it moves, he explains, it would only be to belly-crawl into the water and swim away from, and not towards, the boat party. While his words offer some measure of comfort, the mean demeanour and elaborate ruse of the crocodile tell one to worry.

A delta boy from sole to crown, Ushuka is, in ways literal and otherwise, a safe pair of hands because he entered his vocation with all the built-in advantages that someone who practically grew up in this river would have. When he was only knee-high to a sneaky crocodile, this Mohembo West native trawled the river to seek out food, building materials and childhood adventure.As early as then, he formed the ambition to work in the bush when he came of age. And so when he went to Maun in 1998, he was not looking for an office job. 'I wanted to work in delta camps and be among animals,' Ushuka says. He instead found himself among plumbing equipment working as an assistant for a plumber cousin then at an electronic appliances shop in the same position. His mind still in the bush, he scoured around for bush work that would enable him to connect to his central passion.

Oddly enough, when he found it, the skills he had acquired at these two jobs came in handy. A tourist operation based in Maun offered him a handyman's job and, determined to impress and go as far as he could, he did - by his account - work hard enough for his employers to take notice. When after three weeks he was asked to choose between waiting at tables, working in the kitchen and guiding, Ushuka's choice was naturally the most obvious one. However, the level of guiding he started with was quite basic in that it required little more than knowledge of trees and birds in the area. Yearning for better job satisfaction, he asked management to put him through a specialist guide course at a school in Maun. He enrolled, passed the examinations and went back to work where he continued to pick up more useful skills and responsibilities, at one point working as an assistant to professional guides.

Ushuka was coasting along nicely when disaster - literally - struck. At the same time that he had been planning his career path, deep in the mountains of Afghanistan, a luxuriantly bearded Middle-Eastern man was also making his own plans that would collide violently with Ushuka's on September 11, 2001. This happened at a time that a United States company called Old Adventure had made arrangements to send tourists to Maun. However, after Al Qaeda struck US targets using passenger aircraft, flying was the last thing on anyone's mind, especially the retirees whom Ushuka would have shown around the delta. With air travel taking a nosedive, tourist operations in Botswana faced an uphill struggle and after sometime, Ushuka's company had no choice but to hollow out its workforce. The tourism part of the delta doesn't accommodate the jobless in the way that cities and towns do. And so when he was retrenched, Ushuka had to go back home. The next job took a long time coming, but when it did, it was well worth the wait.

Unlike Notwane or Shashe rivers, the Okavango is not a river that one can ford on foot. The result is that in the delta, the equivalent of a 'staff combi' that picks up staff members at designated stops in the morning is a motorboat that does the same sort of thing at points along the river bank. Far from eyes that would have disapproved, Ushuka used the opportunity of these trips to learn how to drive a boat and later acquired a licence which he has used to log thousands of hours along the Drotsky's Cabins-Xaro Lodge channel. Owned by a father-son team, the latter are high-ticket hospitality establishments nestled in pristine enclaves along the Okavango River in the Shakawe area. On account of who owns them, these operations have a very close working relationship.

The easiest way to get from one to the other is by boat - that is when Ushuka's water taxi becomes useful. This is how Xaro advertises this service on its website: 'You can only reach this luxury private lodge by a pre-arranged boat transfer from Drotsky's Cabins, so your mother-in-law will not be able to drop in unannounced! The cost of the transfer will be only BWP15 per person.' The lodge held back because there is a lot more it can brag about. For those struggling with credit problems, this is a place where it would be safe to take calls from deputy sheriffs, for once not having to lie about your whereabouts. You can actually invite the sheriffs to come over - if they can walk or drive their cars on water. The panoramic view of the delta explains why a good number of Hollywood stars spend as much time on movie sets as they do here - or 'Africa' as they would most likely call Botswana. Vast forests of lush green reed border the ribbon of water channels that lead to the lodge.On clear days, sunlight glistens off the water surface and everywhere you look there is a steady glow of water. At sunset, the moon waxes yellow on the horizon, and an hour or so later, a smattering of stars splashed across the night sky shine brighter than they do in brightly lit built-up areas.

To be clear, Ushuka is not really a water taximan in that his boat is not a public conveyance, but he operates a special service somewhat similar to that of a hotel shuttle that picks up and drops off guests. When guests staying at Xaro have business to conduct in Shakawe, they travel by boat to Drotsky's where they are offered tea by friendly staff before transferring to a land vehicle. The return trip is undertaken via similar transport modes and guests given the same halfway-house treatment. Customer service standards at both places are authentically First World and on social media platforms, First Worlders themselves lavish glowing praise on the hosts for their incredible kindness and warmth. Naturally this raises the possibility that the objectively awful work ethic of Gaborone waiting staff might be humanised if there was a YES boot camp operated by hospitality establishments in the delta. It helps that there is an army camp in Shakawe.

There may be little or no traffic in the river but boat drivers are still expected to observe certain river-use protocols. After the encounter with the sneaky crocodile, the boat roars off downstream in an easterly direction towards Xaro Lodge, promptly precipitating a gust of cold wind flecked with a flight of reddish insects that habitually clog the delta and clobber protected eyes.To survive these winter episodes, passengers need to be swaddled in the mink blankets that lodge management lugs out of storage upon request. For Ushuka, a beanie and pair of sunglasses have become must-wear items but he has no protection against the wind whipping his cheeks.Two or three bends later, the outline of a building that hugs the artificially even banks of the river comes skeletally into view.

The boat slows down and passes the lodge at a stately speed. Suddenly it is spring. The temperatures soften again and you can hear the waves stretching and straining rhythmically. As Ushuka later explains, this is standard safety procedure. A speeding boat would cause strong waves that would wash up on and erode the river banks. This would affect the structural integrity of river-frontage property if not cause it to disappear altogether. Virtually all such property has boats docked on floating jetties and strong waves might also cause the boats to knock against each other, damaging the hulls in the process. When he has passed the property, Ushuka leans on the accelerator again - hard. The engine howls and the water whooshes as the boat cuts through it. Promptly, it is winter.

Anybody who can drive a boat can navigate Shashe or Metsimotlhabe rivers, but the Okavango offers an unusual challenge in that it has numerous channels. However, for Ushuka this is a cinch.  'This path is easy but there are those with numerous and narrow channels,' he says. As a young boy, he transversed the maze of delta channels with dug-out canoes with as much frequency as Gaborone's most active social butterfly tools around town. Predictably, at the ripe old age of 34, he knows the channels like the back of his hand. 'Delta channels are just like streets; over time, you get to know them as well as someone who lives in a town knows its streets,' he adds. Besides the bream fish and the tswii tubers, the Okavango has a life-affirming element in other more profound ways for those who live along it. One recent morning, a woman from a nearby village called Samochima was carrying a baby on her back and two recycled water bottles in her hand stood waiting by the riverside.

To enquiries from curious strangers, she explained that she had come to draw the rapidly flowing water in the middle of the river. The problem though is that to get to this part of the river, she needed to bum a short boat ride to and from the source and was hoping that a Good Samaritan boat driver would happen along. By the grace of God, anointed-water entrepreneurs are still in the dark about the healing powers of the Okavango River water and continue to sell Gaborone Dam water to CEDA applicants and criminal-case defendants who need to wash off bad luck. Were that not the case, neighbouring countries like Angola and Namibia, whose people also get sustenance from this river system, would have launched an urgent application at the international court.