From Johannesburg, I flew to Gabarone (“Gabs”), the capital city of Botswana to meet up with a new friend, Thabi, whom I had met through a classmate of mine when I was on campus at UC Berkeley earlier in April. Thabi is a serial; entrepreneur living and working in Gabarone. I stayed in a small one-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of town and had a rental car to get me from place to place, which was necessary because Uber and taxis aren’t really a thing around Gabarone. I found a nearby gym a 7-minute drive from where I was staying called Jack’s Gym, and though I don’t have photos, working out there each morning for a week was one of the highlights owing to old-school equipment and really strong men repping double my squat max without breaking a sweat.
Work was slow during my visit so I managed to explore some sites around Gabarone including Mokolodi Game Reserve where I saw a cheetah and a family of white rhinoceros during a 90-minute excursion riding in a four-wheel truck. It wasn’t exactly a safari, but it reminded me of the safaris I did in Sri Lanka a couple of years ago.
I really liked the food in Botswana that I ate. I made a point of eating chicken livers with spicy peri peri sauce every single day for lunch. I visited a traditional restaurant that served grilled ox tail which was the best I’ve ever eaten – so tender that you didn’t need a knife to pull it off the bone — it fell right off with the stab of my fork.
Another highlight from my time in Gabarone was meeting with Thabi’s team of software engineers. They work really hard to deliver for their clients on tight timelines and amidst uncertain and changing requirements. I worked from the coworking space that they used for a couple of days and enjoyed meeting other young entrepreneurs from Gabs including a couple of photographers. The three of us had great conversations — photography is a versatile medium and there is a lot of room for individual styles and creativity despite the nature of capturing subjects can be thought of as an otherwise passive process.
