Reserve the first rain zebra move in Nyae Nyae and eastern Etosha, late November to January

Plains zebra in the east of Namibia spend the back half of the year inside walking distance of water they cannot leave. From July onward the grass out on the open ground is standing dead, down around three percent crude protein, and the herds work in family groups of six or eight close to the springs, out to feed and back to drink and out again. None of that is a move. Then, on some evening between about the tenth of November and the first week of December, cloud that has been stacking since two in the afternoon opens and puts twenty five or forty millimeters on the ground in ninety minutes, and the whole arrangement comes apart at once.

Green shows on calcrete four to seven days after that first fall. New growth carries twelve to fifteen percent protein against the three percent the animals have been living on, and they can find it from a long way off. Inside a week of the first real storm, zebra that were pinned to a spring are twenty kilometers out, then fifty, in some years a hundred and thirty, on ground that had nothing standing on it in October. They travel as columns, a stallion and four or five mares and their foals strung one behind another, and where the new grass is thickest those columns pool into groups of several hundred and now and then into low thousands.

That is what the nine nights are for, and it is why there are nine of them rather than three. Five are spent in the Nyae Nyae, the sand and pan country running east from Grootfontein to the border, where forty odd shallow pans fill within hours of a storm and the tracks between them are the only way through. Four are spent on the eastern flats of Etosha, north and east of the white pan, where the grass comes up early and a column crossing open ground can be watched for an hour without moving the vehicle.

The first storm and the six days after it

The rain here does not arrive as a season. It arrives as one afternoon. Cloud builds from about 14:00, the light goes brown, wind comes ahead of it hard enough to take the top off a pan, and then the storm sits over ten or fifteen kilometers of ground for an hour and a half and moves on. Twenty millimeters is enough to start everything. Forty is a proper one.

What happens that same evening is easier to notice than the grass. Winged termites come off the ground in hundreds of thousands within two hours of the wetting, and every bird and jackal in the district works them until dark. Frogs that have been buried since April are calling from a pan by the second night, loud enough at fifty meters to make conversation difficult. Neither of those is why you came, but both are how you know the clock has started.

The grass is four to seven days behind the storm. First a haze of green that you can only see at a low sun angle, then a definite flush, then ankle height by about the third week. The zebra do not wait for ankle height. Groups start pulling away from water two or three days after the first fall, feeling their way out along the flats, and the first proper columns are usually on the move inside a week. Mares drop foals through the same weeks, and by late December most groups you sit with have foals in them, brown rather than black on the stripes and standing shorter than the mother's belly.

Why the window shuts in the middle of January

The window closes for the opposite reason to the one people expect. It does not close because the rain stops. It closes because the rain becomes ordinary.

By the second week of January storms have gone through most of the eastern half of the country several times over, and grass of a usable quality is up on the flats, in the mopane, in the sand country and on the pan margins all at once. When that happens there is no longer anywhere better to walk to, and animals that were moving in columns of four hundred break back into family groups spread thinly over a very large area. They are still there. They are simply no longer doing the thing this trip is sold on.

Two practical edges arrive at the same time. Tracks in the conservancy soften, the clay margins of the bigger pans hold water, and there are days in mid January when a vehicle can reach half the pans it could reach in November. The operating company's last dated departure is usually the second week of January for that reason, set in October and then corrected against what has actually fallen. A costed answer against particular dates comes back from this office inside two to four working days, and it takes that long precisely because somebody has to check the current rain readings before a figure means anything.

Three quarters of the day, and the four hours nobody uses

Coffee at 05:15 and out at 05:45, which in the park half of the trip means sitting at the gate as it opens. The first block runs until about 11:15 and it is the one that matters, because the columns walk in the cool and because low light across flat grass shows you movement two kilometers off. A morning covers around 70 kilometers, no more: the limit inside the park is 60 an hour and the point is to stop.

Back out at 15:15, and the afternoon block runs to 19:05 in the conservancy or to sunset at the gate in the park. The afternoon is the one that gets rained on, and being rained on is not a failure of the day. Standing storms move slowly enough that a driver can put the vehicle where the edge of the cell has just passed, on grass that is wet and steaming with animals grazing hard on it, which is the hour a driver will rearrange an afternoon to reach.

The four hours in the middle belong to you and there is no way to make them productive. Air at 34 to 38 degrees, zebra standing motionless in whatever shade they can find, and cloud building overhead. The camp has shade, cold water and a book, and on the two tracker days the middle of the day goes under a tree while somebody explains what they dug up that morning. The night is not programmed at all. Nine nights of this trip end with dinner, and the one thing anybody does after dark is listen to the pans.

Grass, water, and what a poor year looks like

It is worth being plain about the failure case. If the first storm holds off until the third week of December, and that happens, the grass is three weeks behind and the herds are still working out of the springs when you arrive. You would still see zebra, in twos and sixes rather than in columns, along with elephant, giraffe, oryx and whatever else is tied to the same water. It would be a quiet nine nights in an empty part of the country, and not the thing described here. Nature is not underwritten here by anybody, not by the company running your dates and not by this office, and the nine night length is the only hedge available: it puts you on the ground across enough days that a slow start does not take the whole stay with it.

Nothing described above is property of this office. The tents, the room at the eastern gate, the vehicle, the cold box and the rain gauge belong to other people, and the company running your dates writes your invoice itself, on its own paper and under terms it set, and sends it to you directly. The air ticket into the country is your own piece of work and does not sit anywhere inside the figure quoted here. Where the trip needs a park entry permit or a levy payable to the conservancy, the operating company obtains and pays both as part of running the days.

To start, send the weeks you can travel in, how many of you there are, and whether you want the conservancy half first or last. Roving Hours Bookings LLC answers from Orlando, Orange, Florida. Call +1 (407) 629-3157 or write to bookings@rovinghours.com, and anything that needs fixing on a quote already sent should go to corrections@rovinghours.com. The office address is 1350 N. Orange Avenue, Suite 221, Orlando, FL 32789.