Visiting Botswana

I finally arrived in Gaborone after more than the 30 hrs it took to get here. There were delays by Air Botswana that meant I remained in Johannesburg for longer than expected. But I arrived this evening around 7pm Central African Time. My host at the lodgings has gone out of his way to lay on everything almost to excess. What I have seen of this city so far has lived up to my expectations.

Clear blue sky from horizon to horizon with not a hint of a cloud anywhere. I am informed by two reliable sources that no rain has fallen here since March of this year. This, now, is September, 2025, as the southern hemisphere is emerging from its winter.

Daytime temperatures can top 33°C (91.4°F), but night-time temperatures plummet to 10°C - 11°C (50°F - 52°F). This is a difference in temperature similar to what obtains in other arid, or semi arid, regions with low humidity (dry air) and no proximity to large bodies of water to mitigate the heat loss - (water traps heat and cools more slowly than land). The absence of clouds also necessarily implies that the heat of the daytime freely escapes into the atmosphere at night, with no cloud cover acting as a blanket to hold back the heat from escaping.

Overall, it's hot and dry here, but not too harsh; nothing like what we see, for example, in the Sahel regions of West Africa. Here, after all, is outside the tropics; it is south of the Tropic of Capricorn. The Tropic of Capricorn passes near Gaborone, the city is just south of the line, placing it just outside the tropics.

Taking this drive out of town was only one of the items on our itinerary today. We did lots of other things besides, including my first solo adventure into a wineshop to make purchases while trying out a new language. Suffice it to say then that I'm having a lot of new experiences that I hope someday to be able to talk about.