Dugouts vs Dugouts

As I said, There are lots of tourist activities in this area that involve paddling around on the rivers in dugout canoes. Most of the canoes that are used now are in fact fibre-glass replicas because they are trying to preserve the trees that the canoes are made out of... There is a big trade in these canoes for wealthy tourist/lodge home decore, and the trees have become endangered... So I think the modern equivalent is a good idea...
But, I also get to see quite a few of the originals.. they are as I said used as bars and tables and bench seats at all the lodges.
And, having used dugouts several times in South America I cant help but compare them...And the local variety are far more primitive than the ones in South America!
It seems the Okavango version was introduced to the area by the San people about 500 yesrs ago or so... but as far as I can see they are of a very primitive design. They are literally a dug-out tree trunk with a roughly hewn nose and tail and a flattened bottom for passage through the often very shallow swamp areas.
By contrast, the Amazonian variety are much more sophisticated, in that the tree trunk for their canoes is effectively "peeled" which means that the canoe which is nominally a semi-circle in cross-section becomes twice as large as the trunk it came from, while the Okavango version is only about three-quarters of the trunk size (cos the top and bottom get carved away).
The difference may have something to do with the types of trees being used (the African ones use very dense and heavy hard-woods that may not lend themselves to the "peeling" type build process, but it looks to me like the South American canoe culture is quite a bit older than the African canoe culture.

Just my observations.