Thakadu Lodge & Bushmen Walk

We crossed the border into Botswana today where we will spend the next 7 days. I still get butterflies each time we enter a new country. We are travelling east into the heart of the Kalahari to Ghanzi and staying at Thakadu Lodge. We had a guided one hour bushmen walk where a mom and her two children explained their culture, spoke their language and demonstrated their way of life prior to 1969 when the government intervened and enforced changes, making them sedentary as opposed to nomadic. The government also enforced compulsory education and integration into the British influenced modern way of life. These tours are offered to help the bushmen preserve their traditions, language and history. They explained their traditional medicines using the leaves, stalks and roots of bushes and trees to their fullest. They also demonstrated their fire starting techniques , their clothing , their uses of ostrich eggs and the 28 distinctive clicks in their tribes spoken dialect. Many tribes have their own dialect and they cannot understand the other tribe due to the varying number of click sounds which can range from 5 up to 200. The clicks are derived from sounds in nature. After dinner we watched some Springbok and Kudu at the waterhole.Read more