Past member, Gillian Bremnar paid us a visit on her return to Dunedin with a presentation titled “Retirement with a Difference”.Gillian’s husband, Graeme, relocated to Botswana, upon a contract Graeme had with the University of Botswana in 2018. They packed up their lives into a container, including Graeme’s Landrover Defender (which has been very useful over there), however due to some visa issues, had to return to New Zealand. Graeme returned again in May 2019 with Gillian following November 2019.
Botswana is a land-locked country in Southern Africa, the size of France in land size, but has a population of around 2.2m, due to 2/3 of the land being taken up by the Kalahari Desert. The capital is Gaborone, but the locals call it “Gabz”. With the land relatively flat, roads are very straight with few corners, with a speed limit of 120kmh – due to roaming cows and elephant, it is recommended to not drive at night as there are many deaths from driving into animals at night!
They purchased 16ha land under a company structure with two locals, and began developing the property with a brick and concrete main home, wooden out-houses/guest-houses. The two extra houses were built in 5-10 days each, without requiring consent, for around NZ$35,000). Whilst relatively cheap and fast, the builds are labour only, so they had to source all building materials (which can often be in short supply) and project manage, and workmanship can be poor with some windows not opening properly, and a shed with a leaking roof due to the corrugated iron being nailed to the valley and not the peak of the corrugations. With the rainy season November to March providing plentiful drinking water, the dry season required a 120m deep bore hole to be drilled on their property using a special tree as a guide to where to drill. The bore provides ~5,000L water/day, and to provide for irrigation storage on the property they built a swimming pool, which took 9,000L of cement to build.
With Graeme’s contract with the University, they have now focused on further developing their business plans, which includes:
- developing a wedding venue that was a previously deforested part of their property that was parched earth, and now is grassed area with BBQ and a dam for a water feature backdrop, however with the impacts of Covid-19, there is less demand for wedding venues at present.
- developing “self-drive tours” for foreign tourists, giving guidance on suitable places to stay and areas to visit. Botswana is generally a safe place to visit (snakes and scorpions an exception), with good roads and amazing places such as an elephant watering hole where accommodation villas and restaurant surround the hole with the elephants as interested in the people as the other way around.
- Developing a nocturnal wildlife tour (in conjunction with their son), with animals such as pythons, porcupine.
Covid-19 has been an interesting experience, where there have been 70,000 cases and over 1,100 deaths. Government management has been to restrict movement between parts of the country using permits, but has been easy to get around the rules. Due to a lack of alcohol supply, Graeme build a still to make their own rum – this choice was due to availability of ingredients over drink preference.
Gillian welcomes visitors, and said the best time to visit is May – July (winter) due to being more mild average temperatures around 28 degrees and dry.
