Spending three days with our mokoro guides was an incredible way to learn about the local plants and how the local people live with the teeming life in the Okavongo Delta at their backdoor.  Many people were forced to leave the islands where  we camped and move to higher ground due to climate change causing more flooding, but they still fish and travel these waters daily.  They made wonderful teachers, and I learned enough to have a fighting chance should I ever be stranded on an island in the middle of the great Okavongo Delta. Demonstration on how to drink clean water through a waterlily stemDon't Camp Under the Sausage Tree.  Sandy, one of our mokoro pollers during our two days bush camping in the Okavango Delta is holding a footlong seed pod from the tree behind us, aptly called a sausage tree.  The "don't camp under this tree" seems obvious when we feel the solid weight of that pod - it would punch through any tent top.  The pod looks like an enormous narrow sweet potato.  The tree trunk is used to make a very good mokoro.  The inside of these pods are spongy and can be soaked and used for washing.  In traditional medicine, women who aren't producing enough milk will have their breasts cut and juice from the pod put into the cuts and blood from her breasts put into the pods.  This is the traditional remedy.  I think if nothing else the breast would weep for mercy.Sausage tree podsAvoid open water while in the mokoro if at all possibleAs I was getting slapped in the face by reeds and plants scooting along through the thick plants in our little Mokoro, I wondered why we were in the reeds instead of the perfectly open reed-free water nearby.  We learned after