Loincloths and Beetles
Mobile Safari Itinerary
Remote settlement - Western Kalahari
5 days/4 nights with the Bushmen
This is an incredible opportunity to experience a dignified and sensitive Bushmen safari. It has always been difficult to offer a genuine, non-patronizing experience. However one of our preferred providers is working with the Bushmen to design this safari experience that will provide you with a fascinating insight into their unique way of life, sadly now all but extinct.
Your guide will be a fully qualified Zoologist/Biologist working in consultation with Community leaders to ensure a unique experience that combines both culture and wildlife insights.
You will stay in a private campsite comprised of traditional style Bushmen grass shelters designed to provide an authentic and non-intrusive interaction. Guests will sleep on proper beds between pure cotton sheets and old-fashioned army blankets and duvets. Private bucket showers and bush toilets are situated adjacent to each shelter.
Day 1 Arrive by plane at midday and transfer down a dusty road to a remote campsite deep in the ancestral gathering lands of the Zu/’hoasi Bushmen. After a delicious lunch, head off to your hut for a rest. After tea, walk through the bush to the nearby Bushmen village where you will be met in a traditional manner by the elders of the community.
Around the fire before dinner, listen to the history of the Bushmen people whose origins can be traced back to 30,000 years ago and learn about the complex political challenges that are confronting them today. Enjoy a delicious dinner under the stars. Sleep peacefully through the night under a fragrant shelter of wild grass thatch.
Day 2 Venture forth into the bush with the men, women, children and your guides. This will be your introduction to the Kalahari and Bushmen way of life. Your guide will point out the distinct ecological characteristics of this area and its animal and bird species. There will be spontaneous gathering and discussions about the uses of plants and wildlife by your Bushmen guides as they provide the link between culture and wild environment.
An adolescent Bushman girl knows more than 200 species of usable plants and an extraordinary variety of plants and herbs with both culinary and medicinal value. You will be shown how to use a digging stick to find suitable plants.
After lunch and a siesta, return to the Bushmen village where you will learn from the women how to prepare their bush foods using only the most basic of tools and an open fire. You will be able to sample a variety of foods from wild spinach and roast beetles to ostrich egg omelettes.
Some of the women will show you how they make beads from ostrich eggs and the simple, but striking jewelry that they make from porcupine quills, seeds and ostrich eggs. Leather is also decorated with both glass and ostrich beads to complex and beautiful effect.
As the sun sets and the evening draws close, the women can be requested to perform the melon dance, around the evening fire. This unselfconscious and free-spirited traditional dance represents the joyful celebration of a successful harvest.
Return to camp for a rather more conventional, but still delicious, meal and retire to bed.
Day 3 After a restful night’s sleep, meet the men after breakfast to prepare for a traditional hunt. Walk into the bush and search out the poison grub beetle, gathering suitable roots, sanseveria leaves and branches to make rope, bows and arrows. Return to camp for a lunch and siesta. After tea, return to the Bushmen village. Watch the men prepare bows, arrows and quivers while young boys demonstrate various traditional games that provide training for the hand-to-eye coordination skills that will be so necessary when on the hunt. After dinner, retire to bed in excited anticipation of the next day’s hunt
Day 4 Depart early after a hearty breakfast for a day’s traditional hunting with the men. Track, stalk and, hopefully, hunt down some wild quarry using traditional bows and arrows. A picnic on the way under a shady tree enables one to be flexible and react fast to the day’s events. Return to camp for dinner and slumber.
Day 5 Bid the community farewell before transferring to the airstrip to meet up with your light aircraft transfer for your onward journey.
Contact Duffle & Compass for the current cost of this itinerary.
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