The floods are here

Have been seeing pictures posted on facebook in the past week by friends who live here in Maun of the floodwaters covering the roads to their home.


[photo from Sitatunga Dispatches, the blog of Elena, for whom we house sat a couple of months back]

I don't think we have anything to worry about here at our house. The real heavy flooding is supposed to hit on Friday, the day that we're traveling up to Gumare for a writers' workshop. Flooding is predicted to possibly continue until the end of August. It's going to be a wet few years, they say (the local flood-pattern experts, that is… not your typical, generic "they"). Still, when we head northwest, we'll get all our electronics off the floor. The complex that we're living in has been around for a fair amount of time, long enough to even show up on Google satellite maps, so I doubt that we'll have an issue.

My main concern is actually the route to Gumare. I'll have to keep an ear to the ground for the next couple of days, make sure we're not driving into a problem. Gumare doesn't flood, I hear, but the roads around it occasionally do. North of it, really. I remember well the writers' workshop around this same time of the year, a few years back, where we had reservations at a river camp in Sepopa that was flooded and had to leave the car at the flood edge to take a mokoro to the camp.


I would say "those were the days" but, as I'm beginning to think, these may be the days again. At least accommodation is now available in Gumare so we don't have to drive back and forth through the worst of the flood plain during this time of year anymore. I'll actually be able to walk back and forth to the workshop from where we're staying; thanks be to God!