Okavango Delta - Botswana

The sociologist, Eric Maslow, proposed a hierarchy of human development. A stairway, as it were, which mankind could climb from the slime of creation to the fullness of human potential. At the bottom of this "stairway" were the basic human needs of food and shelter, and at the top, a category he called "self actualisation", a point from which we can develop our inner life and contemplate the more serious issues such as Life, The Universe and Everything In It. In the West we strive to live at the top end of Maslow's Scale, but here in Africa, as in much of the developing world, life never proceeds much beyond the first two or three steps.
Today we are in the Okavango Delta. A vast maze of waterways created as the Okavango River runs down from the Angolan plateau and ribbons out across the Botswanan Delta before finally evaporating into the sands of the Kalahari Desert. Here there is very little in the way of social development. No electricity, no clean water supply, no roads, shops or indeed anywhere to recharge one's ipod or camera battery. Just water. Shallow riverlets of it running between three to four metre high walls of papyrus and bamboo. Between these slender fingers of water, smaller channels made by hippos create roadways for the locals who navigate them in small dugout canoes (makoros) punted by long bamboo poles. It's a tropical environment where fish, mammals, birds and man have existed (at the bottom end of Maslow's Scale) since the dawn of time. And here we are. Completely separated from the world as we know it with only food (enormous plastic boxes of it speedboated in from the supermarket three hours away) and shelter, (luxury safari tents curtesy of the camp owner).
Here we will survive the next two or three days at the bottom end of the scale - just food and shelter. Oh yes, and a small petrol generator to crank up the beer fridge and a large solar panel to give us endless hot showers.
I'm sure it never occured to Maslow that such simple luxuries as cold beers and hot showers could catapult mankind across centuries of evolution from survival to self actualisation in mere seconds.