Adventure on the Okavango: The Conservationist

Jer Thorp: What we are trying to do with this expedition is to produce threads that can lead from this untouched wilderness out into the public. And those threads can be grasped by anybody, anybody who wants to find a connection to this place.

Steve: Visible from space the Okavango Delta was voted in as our planet's 1000th UNESCO World Heritage Site in June last year. Now this was a long overdue accolade for a wilderness beyond comparison. The jewel of the Kalahari. Every year we haul ourselves across the Okavango Delta in Northern Botswana. These 350 kilometer, 18 day expeditions take us across a living wilderness. It is considered to be the most valuable wetland on our planet. The most valuable protected wetland.

The Okavango Delta is home to the largest remaining population of elephants on our planet. The native population there is around 150,000 elephant. That's over half of the elephants remaining on the African continent. We lose 100 elephants every single day on the continent. That's every 15 minutes an elephant is shot for its ivory. The lions. Over 2000 lions are found in the Okavango Delta. Many people don't know it but we are more likely to lose lions in Africa than elephants. This is the super pride, this is the Matata pride means problem animals. That is Bob Marley on the side there, he's got a dreadlock coming out of his chin, great Sphinx of a lion. Him and his four brothers rule the largest pride in the Okavango and I know them well. The Kalahari leopard. It's the largest leopard in Africa. Keystone populations of hyena. Rhino find sanctuary in the Okavango Delta. Buffalo, the great herds still exist there. Fifty thousand buffalo in that system. Cheetah, wild dog...

If we lose this system in its current state, the Okavango Delta and its catchment, we will lose these species in that region. And that is their heartland. It is our call to action to look north to the source into the catchment in Angola, a country that has remained closed to us for many, many years. Thirty years of civil war were fought up in that catchment. We are taking four Ba'yei river Bushmen with us, to go down that river. That's going to happen in two months’ time. Now this is in Angola. Angola is a unique country in Southern Africa. It is now the second largest oil producer. It is booming between seven and 22 percent growth rate, every single year. This is the skyline of Luanda. Five years ago there was not one tall building in Luanda. Now there are many. Now you look here into the catchment and you wonder why it has remained untouched. It has remained the largest undeveloped river catchment on Earth. The only river that is longer without dams is the Yukon in Canada. The largest land battles in Africa since World War Two were fought in this catchment. The densest minefields, land minefields in Africa are in this catchment. This is one of the remotest places in Southern Africa. This is the source of the Okavango. This is where we are going to launch our expedition from.

Now, two years ago we identified this site, there was no signs of roads, there was no signs of any kind of deforestation. This has happened since then, it's happening every single day. Angola is being torn apart, the clock is ticking. We have two or three years to achieve what we want to achieve. That is new national parks, game reserves wildlife management areas, wildlife corridors, all the way up that river. We are working with the Governor of that province who really wants to see this happen. He is one of the most powerful people in Angola and is going to drive this process for us. There is hope. This is Khobono Mank'etu. He is my friend and mentor. He is a Ba'yei river bushman. The Ba'yei arrived in the late 1700's into the Okavango Delta with a revolutionary new technology. The mokoro, an 18-foot dug out canoe that would forever change our human experience in that remote wilderness. It was the first time that human beings actually accessed the central wilderness was these guys.

So, the Ba'yei have taught us to pull ourselves safely in these channels, to avoid the wildlife to drink the waters of the Okavango. The mother Okavango that gives them everything. From the day we start to the day we end you can drink it any time from the water. That is how pure this system is. We harvest fish, smoke it in the traditional way. We live off water lilies, the rhizomes and the seeds and the pollinated flowers. We listen to the swororo. That is the music of that wilderness. They teach you how to interact with the animals. This is an elephant, I'm just saying I'm unarmed, I'm not big, I'm just unarmed I'm holding nothing and I'm passing. To avoid the hippos. It's a grumpy animal, very much misunderstood. But if you give them the space, they're not going to harm you. Crocodiles, now you have these... sometimes the water is murky, sometimes it's clear. You often see them under you. This is probably a three meter crocodile. This one here is a 15 foot Nile crocodile. It's about 20 yards ahead of us. I'm putting pressure on it to try and move it down the channel. It's feeling claustrophobic, it now thinks that we're another crocodile so it's wheeling around at us. It's coming around, it's coming around. Now I can tell you your heart is pumping as this is happening. There is nothing I can do to avoid this animal so I've pulled off to the side I've told the television presenter in the front to hold the paddle, just I meant for him to barricade himself he ended up hitting the animal. Look at this approach.

But that's the reality of this place. You're not in control of anything around you. You have to surrender yourself to probability, surrender yourself to the wilderness. Now it was in 2012, the last day of that expedition coming down the main channel, the Boro, fifty kilometers in one day, pulling as hard as we can. And to be honest all I was thinking about was burger and beer, burger and a beer. After 18 days of eating water lilies and fish. There were two Swana kids on the bank and they shouted out to us... “Lakuah, lakuah, lakuah.” That means white people, foreigners. The oldest Ba'yei with us Mr. K'etu-k'etu, father of Khobono Mank'etu, my friend and mentor, he shouted back at those, those kids on the bank. He said, “Hauna makua, Ba'yei hei'lah” which means there are no foreigners here, only Ba'yei. It is something that I wanted to hear my entire life to be considered as something or someone that was good for that wilderness, for the mother Okavango.

But as Ba'yei we enter that wilderness barefoot, unarmed with minimal food rations and very few possessions. But as digital Bushmen. In this new age of exploration we come with hundreds of pounds of batteries and solar panels tablet computers, cameras, all the paraphernalia of technology we need to share these experiences with the world. To do the science we need to do, to measure impacts in the future to understand exactly the way this wilderness is now before it is disturbed by developments upstream. And they are coming, we're seeing it every day in Angola. This is the magic of National Geographic... the Explorer program. I was fortunate enough to meet these three men Jer, who is going to be speaking now, Gregg Treinish in the back and Shah Selbe. They are going to change the future of the Okavango Delta and the river that supplies it for future generations. It is a powerful thing that came about because of this.

Now Jer has taken us from live blogging to live data expeditions. What you're seeing here is all of us in the central wilderness. You've got Jer is there, Chris, Steve and GB. We are on an island, we're just about to leave. It's eight o'clock and we're on the channel. What you're seeing popping up around us are what we're seeing. There is a short delay in our satellite link but this is literally in real time, that's real people, us in a remote wilderness trying to affect change, trying to explore it. Photographs will pop up and this system advances every single year. We're very excited to see what Jer achieves this year when he joins us.

Shah took us from little strips and pieces of paper writing down the water quality as we go down to environmental sensor platforms. Solar powered that can sit out there autonomously and send via cellular, via satellite, via Wi-Fi, a whole bunch of parameters of water quality. We're gonna expand that network to hundreds of these platforms throughout the Okavango Delta. As Shah puts it we're gonna be measuring the literal heartbeat of that wilderness in real time for the world to see. The whole world will be privy to the impacts when they come. And we'll explain that to people as it... as it arrives.

Gregg. Gregg is trying to figure out how to bring life to this network. We need people to connect the dots. So, he's looking at ways of safely getting volunteers in there, to go and maintain these platforms as we see them go down. We are talking about elephants and hippos and things trudging over them. That kind of thing is gonna happen and we're gonna need Gregg's volunteers to help us with that.

We did a Hangout in the last expedition. We arrived literally 20 minutes before we went live. This is one of the remotest locations but a wonderful experience and on cue, an elephant walked directly behind us at the end of it. It was about the third last day of the expedition. We were at Eagle Island and I got past this, this big, grumpy old hippo. He goes under the reeds, I pull off and another guy is quite far behind, Jer is with him. And this angry hippo comes, like two more angry hippos, now there's three of them, I am watching this go on and these things, literally tusks out in front of Jer slapping those go under his mokoro I turn around to pull away from this 'cause I don't want to get into trouble. In my mind I see Jer just being enveloped by a wave of hippo. Something like that but he captured that in the data. He is able to share that through the data. And I'm excited to see that now.