Sure Travel Journey 5.4 Spring 2019 | Page 31

THE WONDERS
Q DISCOVER
OF BOTSWANA WITH SURE
Sure Travel offers a number of packages
to Botswana, or we can customise any
itinerary to suit your needs, including
self-drive and 4x4 options. Contact your
nearest Sure Travel agency or call 0861
47 48 49 / visit www.suretravel.co.za.
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“
Kubu Island
was once perched
on the edge of a vast
primordial lake…
It is still very much
an island – but one
that pokes out of dust
rather than water
breathing calms and becomes shallow.
My heartbeat slows. I am first engulfed in
silence, then by it. I am a tiny, shrinking
speck; then I disappear completely.
They say that astronauts looking down
on Earth gain a sense of perspective
that changes them forever. They begin
to understand how much we are a part
of our planet, and how much it is a
part of us.
The astronauts are 400 km off the
surface of Earth, and while the top of
Kubu Island is only 10 m high, there is
something about this pile of boulders
that sends you into orbit.
Kubu Island was once perched on the
edge of a vast primordial lake. As the
water evaporated, it created the huge
Makgadikgadi Pan. Today, Kubu is still very
much an island – but one that pokes out
of the dust rather than the water.
Ancient tribes and civilisations have
migrated and lived here, first to fish from
its rocks and then to commune with
nature and its spirits. Anthropologists
and archaeologists have discovered
mysterious slab-like structures around
the island. Their usage has been lost in
time, but their meaning is clear: people
have been drawn to Kubu for eons
because it is an island in many ways, not
all of them physical.
Today, adventurers and tourists come
here to marvel at this strange pile of
boulders with baobab trees growing out of
it, like I had on a 4x4 expedition. It is not so
much a recreational activity as an edifying
one. Come for the photo opportunities;
stay for the epiphany of timelessness.
Oliver Sacks, the famous
neuroscientist, once visited a tiny island
in the Pacific Ocean and wrote: “The
sense of deep time brings a deep peace
with it, a detachment from the timescale,
the urgencies, of daily life… I feel part of
a larger, calmer identity; I feel a profound
sense of being at home, a sort of
companionship with the Earth.”
This is the gift that Kubu Isand gives
and the power that it has. This tiny,
weird outcrop – if not in the middle of
nowhere, then certainly on the edge of
it – can give you a sense of yourself that
very few places can. A sense of yourself
as a person on this planet and, somehow,
way beyond it.
MAKE MEMORIES FOR LIFE // 31
“