Doom: solver of all problems

The front wheel hit the puddle and instantly, the windscreen turned brown. I jumped out to sluice it with bottled water (the windscreen wiper reservoir was, of course, empty) and the smell hit me, curling my nose hairs and crimping my mouth. Something must have been using the puddle as a wallow and Livingstone was completely covered in what can only be described as a thin solution of shit. The smell was so bad even the flies vanished.

It had been a long drive from Swakopmund and we were running late, largely because I’d managed to slam the hatch on Livingstone’s tray cover while the pins were still open and bent them. Yes, I know. I’m great like that. Most game lodges start their afternoon activities at 4 or 4.30 and by the time we screeched to a halt in the parking bay, it was already 4.20. We had just enough time to dump our dust-covered bags, jam on our hats and climb into the safari vehicle.

Ongava is a private reserve on the border of Etosha National Park and I chose it thinking that even if Etosha turned out to be a fizzer, we’d be bound to see something in Ongava: they have one of the largest rhino conservancies in Namibia. We bumped along four-wheel drive tracks that wound through grassland reclaimed from mopani and thorn veldt. Zebra, springbok and blue wildebeest cantered out of our way. Giraffe browsed the thorn trees in the distance and kudu, eland and waterbuck (which weren’t native to the area, but had been introduced presumably because they were pretty) grazed nearby, placid as cows.

We were sharing the safari car with Frans, our guide, a gay couple from South Africa and a husband and wife team from the UK. Frans was a nice bloke and knew his birds and animals, but getting the information out of him was a challenge because his English left a bit to be desired. The gay boys were an odd match: Andrew was Storm Boy grown up – about my age, tall, rangy and tanned – while his partner David was about 50 and the classic dapper arts-scene lad with a neat grey goatee and a penchant for natural fibres. The Poms, on the other hand, were perfect for each other. Michael was a smart-arse sports coach and his wife Ruth, chinless but good-natured in the face of rampant chauvinism, took full advantage of her husband’s secret horror of insects. As you would.

Frans stopped the car and pointed at a bull rhino the size of a mini bus grazing about 200m away. His horns looked sharp and he was crusted in dark grey mud. “That’s Derek,” Frans said.

Immediately, Michael the Pom and I both asked, “Where’s Clive?” Sadly, there wasn’t a Clive. There was a Tony, though. The three big bulls had been named for the three directors of the company that owned the reserve.

Twelve rhinos, a sundowner and no lions later, we made it back to camp for dinner. We had enough time for a quick spit and polish and a look around our safari tent.

If this is tent living, I’m all for it. It had a board floor, twin beds under mosquito nets and a stone and canvas bathroom through a door at the back. The shower was open to the sky and the toilet roll holder was a hollowed gourd.

The only catch was finding a way of not being carried off by the mozzies while you were using the bathroom. We drenched ourselves in Peaceful Sleep and waited to be collected for dinner. After dark, no-one walked alone because there were no electric fences around the camp. The lions just wandered through whenever they fancied, so the guides went armed after twilight. Cameron, the manager, came to fetch us. He bore a remarkable resemblance to Richard Attenborough in Jurassic Park.

Dinner was served in an open-sided boma with a thatched roof. Lanterns on the table attracted insects of every size, including emperor moths as big as my hand. David, the South African guy, was sitting next to me and looked delicately affronted when a big cricket landed on his bread roll. “Doom,” he said, poking it off with his knife. “When you go home, fill your suitcase with Doom. It could solve all the world’s problems.”

Frans took us into Etosha the next morning. We had wanted to go for a whole day, thinking that with such a big park, we’d miss things, but they talked us out of it. Etosha is famous for its huge salt pan and the numbers of animals that crowd around its waterholes. The photos I’d seen had kudu, giraffe and zebra all drinking together in the middle of the day. Unfortunately, two weeks before we arrived, it had rained after a long dry. When that happens, the animals vanish into the bush because natural waterholes appear and they don’t have to crowd around the ones fed by National Parks’ bores. We drove through the park for a whole morning and saw two-thirds of bugger all. One black rhino in the distance, a couple of jackals, a chameleon and an osprey struggling not to choke on a whole mongoose were about the size of it, apart from a few antelope and zebra. The waterholes were deserted.

We grouched back to camp and had an afternoon nap. Ah, we know how to book holidays, we do. After all, we turned up in Cape Town in about the only month where the white pointers can’t be arsed jumping out of the water. Perhaps we should start a crappy travel agency – miss the stuff you wanted to see, every time, guaranteed! Yes, I do have a degree in whingeing. How did you know?

Crawling out later in the afternoon, the waterhole by the camp boma was packed with zebra and waterbuck.

A masked weaver was building a nest in a mopani tree overhanging the pool, obviously hoping that it would be good enough to attract the ladies.

Female masked weavers are merciless little bitches. A lad will spend three days weaving a lovely little home for her, but if she doesn’t think it’s up to scratch, she will nip it off at the point where he attached to the tree and all his hard work crashes to earth. Harsh. Very harsh.

Bloke piked on the afternoon game drive (uni assignment) and it turned out to be quite a good call. As we got into the safari vehicle, it started to rain. There were four heavy waterproof ponchos tucked behind the seats, but having learned from Victoria Falls that it’s better to be drenched in drizzle than your own sweat, I left them to the Poms and a Danish couple who were joining us. I was sitting up the back and because I was on my own, I shoved over into the middle and barely got a touch of the rain. The others got sweaty and looked like twits.

Michael the Pom wasn’t interested in seeing anything but lions. Frans would say, “Over there - giraffe” (with a hard G).
“I want a lion”.
“Over there – rhino.”
“I’ve seen lots of rhino.”
“Over there – yellow mongoose.”
“Well, at least it’s the right colour…”

There were plenty of jackals pootling about and Frans said they were always behind the lions. When we stopped for sundowners, there were some barking nearby. I wondered whether we were in front or behind. Whatever the case, I was willing to use Michael as bait.

That night at dinner there were several groups of new guests, a good half of whom fell into the “I love Africa apart from all the bloody living things” category. One elderly couple was English. He had been stationed in South Africa in the air training corps during World War II. I suppose he was settling a few ghosts and they had decided on a side trip to Namibia instead. A dung beetle landed in his bread and butter plate and I thought the poor old chap might pass out. He didn’t look much better at breakfast the next morning because sleeping in a tent was a bit beyond the pale.

Bloke stayed behind again to study, so I went rhino tracking on my own with Jack, a Zambian guide with corn-rowed hair and a white-white smile. We headed for the rhinos’ favourite spot on the reserve’s western plain, with Jack telling me about life as a guide. At Ongava, they worked six weeks on and two weeks off, he said. It’s a tough job of 18-hour days: up in time to do wake up calls at 5 and still going at 9 or 10 when the guests get packed away for the night. There’s supposed to be a siesta time for a few hours after lunch, but I don’t think the guides get time for a cat nap. To become a guide, you have to do a one-year course, learning off-road driving, animal behaviour, first aid and all the usual customer service skills for the hospitality industry. And did I mention they get paid bugger all? Auntie Redcap says, don’t forget to tip your guides.

After about 40 minutes of driving, we spotted Derek and hopped out of the car to follow him on foot. Jack unloaded a rifle and set off in the lead. Naturally, Derek caught a whiff of us and bolted, never to be seen again. It’s amazing how something that weighs three tones can disappear so effectively.

We followed his plate-sized spoor for about 10 minutes, then gave up and went back to the car. Further down the track, Jack spotted a female and her two calves out in the open. One of the calves was about two, but the other was only about nine months old.

Rhinos have poor eye sight, but their ears are good and their noses better, so we parked and walked quietly towards them, sketching a wide circle to keep downwind. A few springbok bounded away and a hyena watched us from the tree line, but the rhinos didn’t realise we were there. The baby was very alert and knew something was up, but mum and the older calf took no notice and kept cropping the grass. We got to within about 15m of them, so close we could hear them snorting as they ate.

We stood and watched for a good 15 minutes before we walked back to the car. There is nothing like being out on foot in an African park. You just feel too safe in the safari vehicles and I love the thought that there could be a lion behind any tree. I also added a fair bit to Poo Boot Tour of Africa II. I stepped in rhino and springbok and wildebeest and zebra and Ford knows what else. You could have started a crap library with the contents of the tread on my Blunnies.

We tried again with a herd of eight rhino grazing about 200m away, but they disappeared as quickly as Derek had. We tracked through trumpet thorn bushes until Jack lost the tracks. Altogether a pretty successful effort at rhino tracking, I thought. But then Jack had to go and tell me the story of the nature walk he’d done a couple of days ago.

He’d had two women out with him, both of whom were the skittish, screamy type. They thought they were going to see some nice birds when Jack noticed a jackal running back and forth across the track in front of them with bones. He stopped and bent down and saw a huge pair of pussycat paws under a bush not 20m from them. Without telling them why, he told the women to back up very quietly. They pulled back about 100m, only to see a big male walk out of the bush, across the road and into the bush on the other side. He disappeared and then let out a classic king of the jungle roar. Jack said his guests were just beside themselves because they thought the lion was following them. Big girls’ blouses - I was green with envy.

We left Ongava at lunchtime. Our final stop before heading back to Windhoek for our flight to Joburg was a cat sanctuary in the Watervale Plateau.

And here we are with another elephant...

On the off-chance that anyone is still interested, I've put some photos from Africa on a Flickr. They're in roughly reverse chronological order, I'm afraid, because I wasn't smart enough to get them the other way around the first time and now I don't have the energy to fix it. Half-hearted? Ja ja.

So, fill yer collective boots.

The depression of the penguins

I'm sorry it's taken me so long to post, but I think I broke my liver in Africa. It's been in a sling since I got home. On top of the jetlag, the after-effects of the No Jetlag pills (bloody herbal crap - don't go near it!), sleeplessness and the chesty bug I caught from our tour guide, I've been largely useless for the past week. Well, more useless than usual, anyway. Half-hearted hacks are never much use at the best of times. Nevertheless it might be a good idea to get a cup of tea, or possibly even a packed lunch. It's another long 'un.

The finale to the trip was five nights in Cape Town:

Everything else aside, the people we met there were just outstanding. We stayed with a lovely couple named Felicity and Anton. They were friends of Oom Jaco’s, but when they offered to let us stay in the cottage on their farm, they didn’t know us from a bar of soap. They made us feel very welcome, putting on dinner for us when we were tired from traveling, a braai (barbecue) during the week and even filling the cottage fridge so we could make breakfast and sandwiches. I’ve never met such welcoming, generous and friendly people as I have on this holiday.

Cape Town must be the original city of contrasts. A bit of a cliché, I know, but it is difficult to reconcile for an Australian. The city is home to some of the most wretched shanty towns I’ve seen anywhere in the country: scraps of rusted tin, splinters of warped timber and torn plastic sheeting are woven into huts no bigger than my potting shed. They are crowded together by the hundred in townships on main roads. In some of the luckier ones, there are blue-for-boys-pink-for-girls amenities blocks. I couldn’t bring myself to photograph them in case the inhabitants saw me and thought I was treating them like zoo exhibits. And to tell the truth, I didn’t want to because they were so sad looking. Supposedly, the government promised to give everyone a proper house within something like five years, but it’s been 15 years and they’ve only built about 10 or 20 percent of what they promised.

Less than half an hour’s drive away, there are huge houses on manicured blocks that are sheltered from the road by tall electrified fences. One house was supposed to be a replica of Gatsby’s mansion in the film – just the same, ja, but bigger. If you could still buy such things, I’m sure the books in that library would have had uncut pages, just like Gatsby’s.

It's just one of those things. The Gatsby people will never understand why everyone hates them and and the others will never understand why the Gatsby people don't understand. Anton told us an awful story about Cape Town crime. An Indian guy he met tells this story to anyone who will listen. Once upon a time, an Indian man wanted to buy his daughter a nice sports car for her birthday. One day, he lost his mind and asked a gangster type to find one for him. A red MX-6, please, he said. No problem, said Mr Gangster. Mr Indian Guy didn't hear from Mr Gangster again for some time and might even have forgotten about the deal. A red MX-6 came up through legitimate means, so be bought it for his daughter, who was in her early 20s. Shortly afterwards, Mr Gangster called. "I've got that red MX-6 for you," he said. And he had. Mr Indian Guy's daughter was dead in a gutter - shot in the head by carjackers because one of Mr Gangster's people had killed her for her car. Mr Indian Guy is still in counselling. As one would be.

A lot of people in Cape Town have servants, but that’s the same all over South Africa. Someone asked me whether Australians had servants. When I said that some people might have a cleaner for a few hours a fortnight, or a man who mowed the lawn, but that was about as far as it went, she said, “Ohhh. South Africans would never survive in Australia.”

Cape Town’s Victoria and Albert Waterfront is also a sharp contrast to the shacks of the poor. It’s a working harbour and very picturesque, but they’ve taken advantage of that to fill it with restaurants and sniffy, expensive shops. It looks a bit like Circular Quay in Sydney and it feels like a tourist trap, despite the pretty buildings.

A swingbridge connects the wharfs and opens for boats.

The restuarants are excellent and travellers and locals alike throng there. But the only black faces seemed to belong to the staff in the restaurants and shops and the buskers who played jazz and Afropop to add authentic African atmosphere.

I think my guilt gland must be overactive. It certainly got a workout on the V&A Waterfront.

It is also the place to get the ferry to Robben Island. Robben Island is the ultimate in guilt travel, possibly even more so than Auschwitz. No-one expects you to come back from Poland with a T-shirt that says, “My mate went to Auschwitz and all she bought me was this crappy T-shirt”, but you can’t go to Cape Town without people saying, “Did you see Mandela’s cell?” I don’t think anyone really wants to go to Robben Island. You just have to go, to prove that you don’t agree with apartheid and you aren’t a nasty, evil racist. Instead, I’m a nasty, evil cynic.

So here’s Mandela’s cell.

But truly, even the penguins on Robben Island look depressed. There weren’t any fricken happy feet there.

See? Sad feet.

We had two guides during our guilt trip. The bus guide was a young man who said he was doing the job to pay for his university education and because he was a proud South African (in that order). He gave us a very stern and rambling lecture on politics as we were whisked past anything interesting (a shipwreck, the lepers’ cemetery) and left for an age to contemplate the dull bits (the limestone quarry, a random bit of road near the gaol). We weren’t allowed out of the bus, either, except to go into the gaol and follow a boardwalk to the colony of emo penguins.

The gaol guide was a former political prisoner. For some reason, this man and a number of other ex-political prisoners returned after apartheid finished and they now live on the island and work as guides in the gaol. He said it was an act of reconciliation, but I don’t buy it. If it were me, I’d want to get the hell out of the place. I pondered it long and hard and came to the uncharitable conclusion that they stayed on to be martyrs. Plus, where else could they talk three times a day about having been heroes of democracy? (See previous comment re unflattering cynicism.) Robben Island gets more visitors every year than Kruger, so the guilt trip must be working well. (Ditto.)

Guilt trips and townships aside, Cape Town is a very beautiful place. It’s all cloud-shrouded mountains and steep cliffs staggering down to the sea. Table Mountain rears over the city, pinning it to the waterline.

Next to Table Mountain is Lion’s Head, a tall, pointed mountain that (allegedly) looks like a crouching lion with a full mane if you see it from the right angle.

This isn't the right angle. But that's a nice cloud.

Instead of hiring a car, we had a tour guide named Carl to show us around town. This was both a boon and an annoyance. He took us to places that, on our own, we would either have missed or got lost trying to find. On the down side, he was an ex-pat German, so we were running on Germanic time. He also had a thing about control. He always had to be in it. I kept expecting him to click his heels and yell, “Raus! Raus! Schnell! Schnell!” to get us back in the car when we were dawdling. He packed in so many things in our four days that by the time we left, I was exhausted. He also drove like a madman. Indicators? Double no overtaking lines? They're for sissies! Then there was the small matter of him wearing a cravat to dinner one night. I didn’t think men still wore cravats, but Carl had one stashed in the car, I suppose for when he couldn’t change for dinner. We’d been hiking up rather steep steps in the heat all afternoon and we were looking a little wilted, so he managed to look far more dapper than we did. Carl one, Redcap and Bloke zero.

We got our guilt trip out of the way on the first day and then wandered about the waterfront. I was pleased to see a Zulu basket similar to one I bought in Polokwane in one of the sniffy shops for more than double the price I’d paid. (Bargain Zulu baskets are like free booze – they’re just sweeter.) After lunch, we did the sight-seeing thing, with Carl driving us up to Signal Hill to look out over the town and see a suburb where the houses were built below road level, into the cliffs.

In the early evening, we went sea kayaking. For some reason, Carl couldn’t pronounce “kayaking” and said “carjacking” instead. We thought he was joking when he said, “And this evening you are going carjacking.” Huh? Isn’t that illegal?

We both like kayaking and we’ve been out a few times at home. Garden Island, in Adelaide’s Port River, has a 10,000-year-old mangrove forest, a ships’ graveyard and a resident pod of dolphins that makes it a terrific spot for paddling. Yes, this is same the same loser who made whimpery please-don’t-drown-me noises in the mokoro on the delta. A sea kayak is much more stable than a mokoro and I’m in control, so oddly enough, the water phobia doesn’t take hold.

We struck out from the beach, paddling hard through the surf, until we were a few hundred metres off shore. The view of Table Bay from just above the waterline was incredible, especially as the sun went down and set fire to the peak of Lion’s Head.

Seals swam between us and our guide, flipping their tails at us. Something bobbed up about 30m away that could have been seal, dolphin or sunfish, but I only saw it out of the corner of my eye. Sunfish are bizarre creatures. They’re round and up to a metre across, but instead of swimming upright, they bask on their sides close to the surface with a single thick fin breaking the waterline. That fin looks like the dorsal fin of a shark or a dolphin and it scares six months’ growth out of some people. The guide told us that later in the year, they often get southern wright whales in the bay as well as the usual inhabitants. This, apparently, also scares the living whatsits out of less intrepid paddlers.

I don’t have any photos of the kayaking trip, I’m afraid. I took the camera with me, but didn’t bother to take it out of the waterproof bag on the prow. It just seemed too hard and my hands were salty anyway.

The next day, Wednesday, we were back on the water again, this time in False Bay off Simon’s Town, about 45 minutes from Cape Town. The boat was a bit bigger this time and we were hunting great whites. Big 'uns.

False Bay is the only place in the world where great whites do this:

I stole this photo from the Air Jaws people. Sorry.

At certain times of the year, they fly out of the water and snatch seals in mid-air. No-one knows exactly why they do it there and nowhere else, but they think it has something to do with the way the sea floor drops off sharply from Seal Island.

When we climbed into the boat, a misty sea fog was hanging over the mountains. False Bay was chill and ominous. They could have filmed The Shipping News there. The skipper was a tall, good-looking Afrikaaner with curly, dark hair. His first mate was handsome too, with skin the colour of milky coffee. His top four teeth had been knocked out, giving him a larrikin grin. They both wore knee-high rubber boots, but I couldn't quite work out why since there seemed to be no need to get wet.

The boat cut through choppy waves, heading for the island. We passed fishing boats, a naval base and a monochrome lighthouse on a rock in the sea. You wouldn’t have guessed, but Seal Island was pretty much covered in seals.

Oh, and a fair stack of seal shite, too.

Brown shearwaters and gulls wheeled overhead. We circled the island, peering at the seals and waiting for the smell to hit us. The skipper pointed out the bodies of a couple of seal pups floating limply in the water. They had been washed off the rocks at high tide, he explained.

I didn’t think this boded well for our expedition, if there were perfectly good floating corpses that weren’t being eaten. After all, all we had was a fake seal made from what looked like carpet underlay to attract the big boys.

Hmm, not that convincing...

We pulled up and dropped anchor and the mate threw the fake seal overboard. A tuna head on a rope bobbed near the fake seal. I worked out why they were wearing the boots when the skipper dropped some chunks of fish into a large plastic tub, added seawater and jumped in. Instant chum. The mate sat on one of the engines, smoking through the gap in his teeth and tipping buckets of bloody water into the sea.

We waited, watching as fishing parties of seals set out from the island. They would leave in gangs of eight or 10, usually three groups at a time. They would zig-zag in and out of the water, diving under and leaping over each other, to throw off the sharks, A group of a few dozen seals bobbed in the water just off the island, plunging under the waves as they broke. They didn’t seem to be doing anything in particular, just playing. I mean, really, what if you were a seal who couldn't swim? I guess you'd be one of those sad, cracked little corpses that had washed off the rocks.

Anyway, I’m sure you can guess where this story is going. We sat there all morning, but nothing the least bit toothy-vicious leapt out of the water. We were there too early in the year, curse it. The sharks only breach between April and November, when there aren’t so many fish around and they become more interested in seal sushi. Ford knows why, when there's no wasabi and soy.

The longer we sat there, the more frustrated the skipper became. I don’t think he’d ever failed to produce sharks before. If they didn’t jump, at least they swam around the boat and looked vicious. As he chummed blood, I could hear him muttering, “Come on, sharky, give us a show!”

At one stage he got very excited and shouted, “Shark! SharksharksharkSHARK!” A pale mirage surfaced near the boat, but it was only a little one – not more than a couple of metres long – and it vanished under the keel a few seconds later.

We motored back into shore, grouchy and squinting from the glare off the water. We climbed off the boat and ate deplorable fish and chips at a waterfront restaurant with Carl and his partner and then drove back to Cape Town via another penguin colony at Boulders Beach. Much happier feet there.

Next stop after the happy penguins was the Cape of Good Hope. I had wanted to stand on the cape itself and do a bit of a "I'm the farking queen of the world" routine, but Carl had other ideas. The Cape is the southern-most point of Africa and it’s in its own national park. As we drove into the park, Bloke said, “Look - zebras!” Sure enough, two zebras were grazing near the road. Even though I practically plastered myself to the window, we didn’t stop.

And rather than going to the Cape itself, we went to Cape Point, a mountain that was topped by a lighthouse overlooking the Cape. It was rather warm and there were a lot of steps, but the view from the top was spectacular. A rainstorm was blowing in as we gave ourselves vertigo by leaning over to look down the cliffs. But I still would rather have walked down to the real Cape, damnit.

That's it. Cape of Good Hope. Schnell!

There was also a lot of graffiti on Cape Point. Generations of people have scratched, painted and written their names on the lighthouse, the rocks and the signpost that points to everywhere from Rio de Janeiro to the North Pole. I even caught some Japanese tourists with an indelible marker, adding to the damage. They just giggled when I gave them a look that would usually strip paint. I know Japanese giggle when they're uncomfortable, but to tell the truth, I don't give a rat's arse. (And if you don't have a rat's arse to give, e-mail me. I'll send you one. You never know when you might need one.) Perhaps they just don’t have Hard Stares in Japan.

The next morning (Thursday) we went to a wine region outside Cape Town called Stellenbosch. The old section of the town of Stellenbosch was very pretty, with whitewashed, thatch-roofed buildings dating back to the 1700s.

One of the shops we visited was called Oom Samie se Winkel, which I think translates as Oom Samie’s Shop. (A “drankwinkel” is a boozer, which is rather apt, I think. It sounds like it should be a word for drunk. I also like the Afrikaans word for hungover – “babalas”. Not quite onamatoepic, but it does sound like what it means.) Oom Samie’s had everything in it. It was half shop and half museum, so there was dried fish, dry wors and biltong jostling for space with Nazi election posters, mounted leopard skins and vintage clothes.

For some reason, South Africans call vineyards and wineries “wine farms”. It conjures up images of picking bottles of sauvignon blanc from trees, or digging merlot out of a nice wet clay soil. We visited Boschendal, a winery that Carl referred to as “a noble old wine farm”.

Blue mountains towered over the old whitewashed buildings and there were stretches of blue hydrangeas interspersed with fields of grapes. The tasting area, the Taphuis, was a cluster of white cast iron tables and chairs under oak trees. For R15 a head, a waiter would line up five quarter glasses of wine of your choice. The good ones were very, very good and the others were, well...

On our last day, we were supposed to take the cable car up to Table Mountain. Most of the week had been windy, but now the wind had died down, it was perfect weather for cable car-ing. Things didn’t look good from half-way up the road to the cable car station, though. There were cars parked a long way down. As a tour guide, Carl could use reserved parking at the top, but when we finally got there, it was to see a crocodile of hot, red, sweaty, grumpy, frustrated-looking tourists standing in the sun. There must have been at least a couple of hundred of them. We weren’t particularly keen to join them, especially when a carpark attendant told Carl that the wait would be at least an hour and a half. Both ways.

After some gentle prodding, we talked Carl into abandoning his plans and taking us to Kalk Bay instead. It's a gorgeous little seaside town with a small fishing fleet, arty shops and fantastic restaurants. One bar in particular would have been great in the evening: it had a Cuban theme and looked like it had a brilliant atmosphere. We walked up and down the esplanade, had a lazy lunch of kudu steak and Cajun yellowtail and wandered about the fish market, the breakwater and the wharfs.

The whole place had a distinctly Mediterranean feel. Everything was bright: the fishing boats were painted in reds, blues and greens. Tiny alleyways burst with colour. Men lounged around the bases of the lighthouses and children perched on the edges of the wharf, dangling skinny legs and fishing lines.

A couple of seals swam near the fish market wharf, waiting for the filleters to toss fish scraps to them.

The shops were full of the must eclectic collection of stuff I've ever seen. Vintage china jostled for space with crumbling books and carvings with curtains made from plastic bottle caps. And then there was this 1950s train sign:

That evening, Oom Jaco’s brother and sister-in-law, Boesman and Madeleine, took us out for pizza at a friend’s restaurant. Like Felicity and Anton, we had never met before, but they made it their business to show us the best of Cape Town hospitality. Boesman looked and sounded a little like Jaco and had the same wonderful, generous nature and wicked grin. He packed the boot of his car with beer, ice and red and white wine from the Swartland region where he and his family lived. I expressed some doubt that we’d need all of it, but I don’t think there was much of it left by the end of the evening. Actually, I think I was the chief offender...

White wine is often served with ice in South Africa because otherwise it just doesn’t stay cold enough. It makes it rather pleasant, actually, and tragically easy to drink. Red wine drinkers may want to close their ears and sing a little tune for a minute, but quite a lot of people also drink their red wine with ice because room temperature is lukewarm. I don’t like the taste of red, so I can’t see how adding ice could make it any worse.

The restaurant where we ate was run by an ex-pat Italian named Donato. It was only open on Tuesdays and Fridays and only to friends and friends of friends. I suspect it used to be his garage, but it had been fitted out with a bar and a big wood-fired oven. There were communal tables and dozens of baseball caps hanging from the ceiling. You could have anything you wanted so long as you happened to feel like the best pizza in the world. I’ve never had anything like it. No, Audrey, not even at Scoozi. It had chilli and hard-boiled egg and two types of sausage and mushroom and capsicum and tomato and olives and the base was thin and light and crisp. It was the best pizza in the world and I’m probably never going to get another one. Sob.

We left Africa the next day, with me nursing a hangover and garlic breath that could have felled an ox at 40 paces. Ah, the price for a really good night.

When Bloke first asked me if I wanted to go to South Africa, I said, “Oh God. I’d rather set my hair on fire.” I had always imagined a dry, open country full of bitey things, deprivation, misery and crime. Don’t I feel silly now? It was the most incredible place I’ve ever been and I’m already trying to work out how to get back again.

So, here endeth the final instalment of the African adventure. Back to my ordinary, dull old life. Damn it.

Land of the delta greens

Well, the adventure is over. We got home last night after 27 hours of driving, flying and composting in airports. My underwear, however, is still happily circling the world because South African Airlines lost my suitcase. In fact, most of my clothes, clean and dirty, are still tootling about. I really hope they find it, because my favourite pair of 'laccy boots is in that bag. Last time they lost Bloke's bag, it went to Tokyo, so who knows where the hell it is.

Mr Furpants was ecstatic to see us. To my surprise, I've only been bitten once and he spent most of the night trying to sneak up onto my pillow instead of curling into the crook of my knee as usual. Big Sister had busted him out of gaol on Sunday morning, so he was waiting for us when we got home. There was a lot of miaowing and purring. Poor little guy. I suppose the biting will start tomorrow.

The Poo-Boot Tour of Africa was a resounding success. I added Cape buffalo, hippo, warthog and some more unidentified antelope to the already rather busy tread of my hiking boots and I put my hand in monkey shit. A gecko made a habit of crapping on my bed every night in Kasane and I forgot to mention that the baby boa constrictor at Palm Haven shat on me. So, quite a craptastic tally, really.

When I left off last time, we were still in Kasane, about to fly out to the Okavango Delta. We left on Thursday, the 15th. The only problem with this was the small plane factor. I have no problem with airliners, but anything smaller gives me the heebies. It's like grabbing a bogong moth in each hand and jumping off a cliff. The pilot turned out to be a nice Kiwi lad with the rather disconcerting habit of taxiing with his door open. At least he shut it before he took off. All the passengers commented on his excellent landing but I'm not nearly that fussy. As far as I'm concerned, any small plane landing that you walk away from is an excellent landing.

From the air, the delta looks like the stretched skin of a giant tree snake. It's cut through with rivers and dotted with waterholes. The excellent landing was made on a grassy airstrip in the middle of what appeared to be a rolling plain, but was actually an island.

We were staying at Xugana (pronounced Kugahna) Island Lodge and one of the staff, Keesie, was waiting to collect us. Keesie is a nickname from his school days. As a San Bushman, his real name is all clicks of the tongue of which most people just aren't capable. His San name translates as One Alone because almost all of his family had died before he was born.

I was expecting the ubiquitous safari car to take us to the lodge, but instead Keesie led us to a little alumnium power boat tied up to the bank. He kicked over the engine and we took off along channels that were bordered on both sides with a raft of tall papyrus that leaned in to slap you in the face in the narrow spots and waterlilies that ranged from creamy white to a pure blue.

The water was a mirror for the sky. Pretty as it was, I always get that Heart of Darkness feeling when I travel on close tropical waterways.

The lodge sits on the edge of a wide lagoon. As we pulled in to the little dock, we could see several people waiting for us and waving. This seems to be a bit of a trademark at Xugana. The only way to get anywhere is by water and every time you leave or come back, there are at least two people to greet or farewell you with a wave and a smile.

Weaver bird nests hanging from a palm
near the Xugana main deck

Another Xugana trademark is the lodge lawnmower - a hippo named Cassidy. What, you expected them to have a ride-on Victor? Come on - this is Botswana! Cassidy comes crashing of the water after dark to graze, so no-one is allowed to walk around alone at night. One of the staff walks with you, armed with a torch and a pen-sized siren. I'm not sure how much use either of those things would be against 3000kg of hippo, but we didn't have to find out. Cassidy is usually heard and not seen. We were told that he spent some time banging around behind our cottage on the first night, but we were out to it and didn't hear a thing. (Did I mention I could probably sleep through a tornado?)

Our cottage overlooked the lagoon. It was made from a mix of reeds, wood and concrete and had the tradtional thatched roof with no ceiling. There was no glass in the windows or sliding door, which were open to the night air apart from some sturdy fly mesh. Twin beds were pushed together under a gauzy mosquito net and a slow-turning ceiling fan. Even the bathroom overlooked the lagoon (does that make it a loo with a view?), with half the shower wall taken up with a window. A verandah set with weathered wood and leather directors' chairs looked onto the papyrus and when darkness fell, tiny bats zoomed near the light, snatching insects from the warm air.

The view from our verandah

Once we'd settled in, three of the guides took a group of us out in mokoros, which are long, thin gondola-like canoes that have poles rather than paddles. I'd seen some tourism pictures of whiteys swanning around in mokoros paddled by tall black men in loin cloths, but happily our guides were wearing the usual khaki uniform that most Botswanan lodge staff seem to wear.

The mokoros themselves were another matter entirely. They felt horribly unstable and rocked every time the pole hit the water bottom. I spent the first 20 minutes making pathetic little whimpering noises and clutching the sides every time the boat rocked. (Water is my phobia, remember.) Once I'd got over the fear of going head first into the channel and guilt at having someone else paddling while I sat there like a bump on a bloody log, it was actually quite pleasant. I settled into my best Lady of Shallot impression. Not that easy to achieve in grotty jeans and hiking boots, but I did my best. Well, I trailed my hand in the water occasionally, anyway.

It was close to sunset when we got back in the powerboat to return to the lodge. The guide, Kitso, had packed an esky for us to have a sundowner drink on the water. He pulled up in a lagoon and we sat and sipped white wine and G and Ts while the sky and the river turned to fire.

I thought the delta would be absolutely crammed with birds, but there weren't as many as I had expected. The most memorable birdy inhabitant was the red-eyed dove, mainly because it drove us spare with its damned cooing. It looked like any ordinary old dove, but it never shut up. The locals claim it's saying, "Red eyes, drink too much. Red eyes, drink too much," but it just sounded like "poo-coo, coo-coo-coo, poo-coo, coo-coo-coo" to me. If it had been pretty, I might have forgiven it, but it just didn't have the looks to carry its obnoxious personality.

Every damned bird in Botswana seems to be "saying" something. The Chobe guides reckon the turtle dove's call is saying somehing different depending on the day of the week. On weekdays, it's saying, "Work harder, work harder", but on weekends, it says, "Drink lager, drink lager". The weekend turtle dove is my kind of bird. During the week, it can get together with the whiny bloody red-eyed dove and its hangover and bugger off. Maybe they can go halves on an economy-sized box of Beroccas or something.

At dawn the next morning, Kitso took us out again. We went out by boat as usual and were whisking along the channels, enjoying the cool of the morning when we hit something big under the water. It was the ultimate "oh shit" moment. The boat reared into the air and while it was airborne, everyone looked at each other with white showing all around their irises, waiting for it to roll and throw us all out. Instead, we hit the water again with a judder and a bang and someone said, "What the fuck was that?"

We thought we'd hit a log, but Kitso looked over his shoulder and said, "Hippo." I thought he was joking and looked back. Sure enough, there was an extremely pissed off-looking hippo standing in some aquatic grass. It was big, too - about 3m long and not exactly thin.

Sorry it's a bit blurry. That's it in the red oval.
I'm a useless photographer under pressure.

It must have been submerged in the middle of the channel. Luckily, it didn't seem to be damaged or to associate us with the cause of its newly-acquired headache, so it just lumbered off, looking a bit dazed and confused. Kitso had stopped and backed up for a closer look, but he took off once it submerged again. Bloke started making jokes about never having been closer to a hippo. Fair call, too - I'm not sure how thick the bottom of a boat is, but I wouldn't think it would be more than a few milimetres. That's close enough for this little black duck.

We made it to nearby Palm Island without hitting anything else. We were going out on foot to look for game. There was Bloke, me and an Indian guy named Ranjit, with Kitso walking point and a tracker as the rearguard. Seeing the animals in Chobe was amazing, but being in a safari car makes you feel too safe, even when there are elephants within a few metres. Walking along animal tracks through elbow-high grass and knowing that there could be a lion two feet from you or a cobra crossing your path at any moment is something else entirely. It made me feel like a old-style adventurer. We didn't see nearly as many animals as we did in Chobe, but it was exhilarating just to be on the ground.

Follow the hippo shuffle marks...

Kitso and the tracker were following the trail of a herd of Cape buffalo. (Yes, "trail" equals "increasingly fresh crap".) Hunters say that with a buffalo, you have one shot. If you don't kill it, that shot will be your last. They're powerful, they're fast and they have massive horns. One of Richard's friends had buffalo on his property and was trying to move a cow. The pen was made from tree trunks as thick as a goal post, but she got a bit antsy and locked her horns around one of the logs and twisted. It snapped it like a toothpick.

As we walked, the trail got fresher. Naturally, I stepped in quite a lot of that "trail". As you would expect from me. I also stepped in a fair slab of hippo poop simply because there was no way to walk around it. We knew were close when we passed an area of flattened grass where the herd had spent the previous night.

Kitso told us that where there are buffalo, there will be lions as well, waiting in the shade.

Finally, we saw the herd, grazing on the other side of a waterhole. There was also a herd of red lechwe, a type of antelope now only found on the delta. They used to be in Chobe as well, but Keesie said the Namibians ate them all. No-one seems to like Namibians - they seem to be like the Albanians in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.

Just like impala, but not.

Four big male buffalos appeared in the trees a few hundred metres from us. They were watching us carefully, guarding their cows. We crept closer, keeping an eye on them. Ranjit and I were giving our cameras a good workout. We probably got within about 100m of the males, but Kitso decided it was time to move when the bulls started to give us the eye. They followed us a little way, crossing the waterhole, but lost interest fairly quickly.

We kept walking, but didn't see anything more than a lone warthog running across the path. We walked about 10km all up and I would have loved to have gone out again in the evening despite the heat. The evening group saw elephants and a giraffe, the lucky sods, but no buffalo.

Despite the morning's close enounter, we hadn't had enough of hippos yet, so Kitso took us to the Hippo Pool in the evening. It was about an hour away by boat and true to its name, was full of hippos. We must have seen four of five dozen of them and I got some great photos. The noise they make sounds a deep, satanic laugh and it echoes across the water. Mostly, all you'll see of them is their ears and eyes and once they peg you, it's all front and centre.

Oi, ooyoulookinat?

Occasionally one will yawn and you can see how they kill. They have huge, pointed teeth way back in their mouths. Kitso got us quite close so some of the groups, so I got some great photos. As soon as one disappeared under the water and we saw the wake coming our way, he'd gun the engine.

Pretty big mouth, eh?

Everyone in Africa loves to tell you that hippos kill more people in Africa than any other animal. I'd have thought that mozzies would have done for more people through malaria, but I suppose insects aren't as sexy as 3000kg beasties. One of the Chobe guides told us a story about being in a boat that accidentally got between a female hippo and her calf. She knocked it over and it rolled two-and-a-half-times.

We skimmed back to camp in the twilight, stopping for another sundowner. The insects had come out in force and we had to keep our mouths shut while the boat was moving to avoid our tongues being crumbed with gnats and midges.

Evenings at Xugana are beautiful. The lodge has an under-cover bar and dining room, with al fresco dining and lounging areas overlooking the lagoon. A fire is lit every night in the middle of the lounge area, giving a bit of a Survivor feeling, though no-one gets voted off this island. Invisible insects hum and sing in the warm dark and hippo laughs echo across the still water.

Any staff who aren't on duty get into their civvies to share dinner and drinks with the guests, which was really nice. At the Chobe Safari Lodge, there was a clear distinction and the staff weren't even allowed to come to the dining room for breakfast until 10, when the guests were presumably off chasing animals or lolling in the shade somewhere.

The second night we were there, it was a full house. A thunder storm forced us under cover, but it was a fun night. There were a couple of Poms, a Minnesotan couple, some Germans, a few Saffies and a pair of Yankee gay boys, who were hilarious. The younger one was a dead ringer for Mr Slave from South Park (minus the leathers, of course - such things aren't ideal in the tropics). Wine and bullshit flowed freely all evening.

We left the next morning, which was Saturday. The plane that arrived to take us back to Kasane was even smaller than the first, if possible, and the pilot was a surly prick. The inside looked as though it was held together with duct tape, which didn't really inspire confidence. Surly prick or not, he managed to get us there in once piece. Low requirements, low requirements.

Back in Kasane, we collected the car and hit the road again, Jack. We had 1200km to drive in two and a half days: Kasane to Francistown, Francistown to Polokwane (Pietersburg) and Polokwane to Johannesburg to catch a plane to Cape Town. The trip back was relatively uneventful. The same watery mirage lead the way down the road. We had several more close enounters with hawks and eagles, taking the number of raptors nearly hit to six. One landed directly in front of the car, causing Bloke to swerve alarmingly, but the others were either swooping across the road or pulling strips off sun-dried roadkill.

We crossed our legs as we passed the Dead Goat Motel.

On Sunday, we had to stop in Makhado to collect some biltong to take to our hosts in Cape Town. It turned out that Oom Jaco was in Alldays, though, so he had left the package with Richard.

Returning to Palm Haven was like coming home after our long road trip. We rattled down the red driveway, past the sign warning that trespassers would be eaten and were buzzed through the electric gate. Richard greeted us with hugs and Angela and Bloke's workmates were sitting in the shade of the stoop while the girls swam in the pool. Jorgi had pride of place in the middle of the table, curled up on a stack of beach towels and all four dogs were lolling on the floor.

I love Palm Haven. The company is second to none, the bar is always open and there's always a game of pool to be had. We meant only to stay for a little while, but we were still sitting there when twilight fell and I was sorry to have to leave.

And can you blame me?

Here endeth the third instalment. I'll finish up with Cape Town and some random stuff in the next couple of days.

On the road again

You should probably get a cup of tea and a biscuit. This could take a while. I probably won’t have internet access again until Cape Town.

I’m writing this sitting on the verandah of a thatch-roofed rondavel overlooking the Chobe River in Botswana. From here, I can see Namibia. There are two dust-coloured monkeys sitting on the verandah steps, watching me type. There’s another sniffing my drying boots and more of them galloping about the grass, fighting and rough-housing. I can’t see the family of mongooses that lives on the lodge grounds, but they must be nearby because I can hear them cooing and purring to each other.

Two things have happened in the past few days that I would never have suspected. I drank a whole stubbie of beer and I’ve learned to shoot. Who’da thunk it, eh?

Richard gave me a shooting lesson with his .22 rifle on our last day at Palm Haven. To everyone’s utter amazement, I wasn’t lousy at it. He must be the world’s best rifle coach if he managed to have a klutz like me shooting pebbles off the fenceposts in half an hour. The beer was Zimbabwean Zambezi Lager, drunk while cruising down the Zambezi River. If I can do beer and guns, that must make me an honorary bloke.

Oh, and I’ve also started saying "ja". That was inevitable, I suppose. I’m so suggestible.

We left Palm Haven early Saturday morning after a farewell braai (barbecue) on Friday night that lasted into the wee hours. Richard and Angela had set up the yard with tables and oil lamps and invited some of their friends and people Bloke works with at the base. An extremely pleasant and tiddly time was had by all – South Africans know how to entertain and they certainly know how to drink.

We hit the road just after seven (after going to bed at 3.30) and drove to Mapungubwe National Park, which has borders with Botswana and Zimbabwe.

The weather was shrivellingly hot on the other side of the mountains. It had been pleasant at Palm Haven, and in the early hours, even chilly. By afternoon, it had reached 39 C. It gets that hot in Adelaide, but I’m not usually stupid enough to go tramping around in the open.

Mapungubwe is not a game park, though it does have animals. It’s mainly known for its scenery and the ruins of an ancient civilization on top of a long, flat mountain with the same name as the park. It is all red dirt, red rocks and contorted, silvery trees. Dotted about the park are huge baobabs.

The Limpopo River flows through the park and yes, there are fever trees. They have odd, nobbly bark in a hallucinatory pale yellow. There is even a sign bearing the Kipling quote at the gate to a walk leading to a hide overlooking the river.

(That's a fever tree on the right.)

The water was looking suitably grey-green and greasy the day we were there, but the Limpopo wasn’t looking too great. When it isn't in flood, it flows mostly underground, but that leaves it looking like a wide sand flat with sludgy pools at the edges. Bright birds flew between the tree branches, a crocodile lazed in the shallows and in the distance, baboons picked their way to a small island of greenery. Four skittish waterbuck cantered past on the riverbed.

Our bed that night was in Alldays, a rough-and-tumble northern town that seemed to be made up largely of hunting lodges, game farms, taxidermists and "game capture" services (which I presume remove Large Bitey Things from places where they aren’t wanted). It seems that with a few exceptions, if a cashed up hunter has the right permits, he can shoot just about anything with feet.

The owner of the hunting lodge where we stayed was a noted leopard hunter in his day. His bar was still lined with photos of grinning hunters sitting with their catches and the front fence was hung with the skulls and horns of various antelope. But like Richard, he gave up killing. He decided he had killed enough.

The barman told off-colour jokes and poured shooters that he called Bitches, made of stroh rum and something red that smelled of aniseed. When the two were mixed, they smelled like a particularly revolting cough syrup. From the look on Bloke’s face when he knocked his back, a Bitch tastes pretty bad.

We crossed the Limpopo into Botswana on Sunday morning, arriving in Francistown in the afternoon with a monsoon on our heels. The next day, we drove 480km to Kasane, a town on the Chobe River.

We chased a watery silver mirage up the heat-hazed highway. Tawny grass lined the road on both sides. Bloke was driving and he spent most of his time dodging herds of goats and potholes that were deep enough to hide a goat.

And speaking of goats, if you’re driving to Kasane, don’t make a pit stop at the Shell station in Nata. There were people at the service station section and a sign boasted about a motel and restaurant out the back. A second sign pointed to public toilets. We picked our way through a post-apocalyptic yard full of weeds. A sign said the pool was free for guests, but 10 pula for everyone else, but the only water was some evil-looking sludge in the bottom.

Bloke said, "Oh. I think I can smell the toilets." He gave me a sideways look, because I’m notoriously fussy about loos and have been known to refuse to have anything to do with the Asian squat variety, especially if they’re awash.

But it wasn’t the toilets he could smell. It was the puddle of dead goat in front of the men’s room door. It was still identifiable as a goat, but much flatter and surrounded by a circle of fur. It looked like it had died where it fell and just melted there. I looked at the door to the ladies and found it was crusted shut with cobwebs. We elected to hold on and left with the smell of decomp clinging to our nose hairs.

Luckily there was a nice clean servo across the road. It was a pay toilet, but hey. I’ll pay for no dead goats. Bloke said he thought the place might have been cursed, which explained why it had been abandoned and no-one had removed the corpse. Bad juju.

Botswana must have a hell of a lot of donkeys. All along the highway, there were donkeys grazing by the road, donkeys pulling carts. It’s just donkey heaven.

I also got my first sight of an elephant on the road to Kasane. Bloke pulled up near where a big, bull elephant with a broken tusk was standing by a tree. He was huge. He got a bit grumpy, though, and started waving his trunk and flapping his ears, so we decided discretion was the better part of valour and drove on.

We arrived at Kasane’s Chobe Safari Lodge at lunchtime. It’s amazingly beautiful. There are signs on the trees near our rondavel that read, "Beware of the crocodiles" and "Beware of the hippos". Both of them have been known to come up onto the river banks at night. There are also signs asking that we don’t feed the monkeys, but it doesn’t matter whether you feed them or not. They just help themselves from the dinner table. One leapt onto the breakfast table this morning and snatched a banana from a plate, then retreated to a tree to eat it. If a monkey can gloat, then this one was gloating. It was almost as if he were saying, "There, I licked it! It’s mine! Nyaa!"

On our first afternoon at the safari lodge, we went on a cruise on the Chobe River. I don’t think we’d gone more than 50m before we saw an elephant on the bank, and that was just the start.

We saw lots of these:

A couple of these:

(It's a kudu bull.)

A couple of these:

A few of these:

And a shiny, red arseload of these:

The Chobe is a very pretty river. Trees grow down to the banks and there are fields of aquatic grasses that the elephants love. If the Limpopo is grey etc., the Chobe is more the colour of stewed tea. We cruised down the low channel, which on the Botswanan side. In the middle is a grassy island that belongs to Botswana and on the other side of the island is a deeper channel and then Namibia.

It was actually rather funny, watching all the tour boats loaded down with whiteys, all ugly shorts and sunburn, beer bottle in one hand and camera in the other. Yay for tourists, eh? The boats race each other to get to the animals. The guides have hawk eyes and can spot a little kingfisher from 75m away, but they also follow each other. If one boat pulls up to the bank, the others will follow to see what they're looking at.

After the cruise, Bloke took me to a ripping little bar on the riverbank called the Sedudu Bar. We drank vodka and guava juice in tall glasses that clinked with ice and watched the sun set. As the sun went down, masses of dragonflies came out and their hovering bodies were black against the fiery sky.

Yesterday, we went into Zimbabwe to visit Victoria Falls. I can’t find a word good enough for these falls. I’ve already thrown aside astounding and spectacular and wondrous. The spray is visible as soon as you pull into town. It looks like low cloud, or from a distance, smoke.
The falls are fed by the Zambezi, which is in flood at the moment and still rising. The water is swarming over the falls, thousands and thousands of litres every second, bringing with it tons of sediment from upstream.

Bloke warned me that we would get wet and we certainly did. We were soaked to the knickers by the time we finished the walk. The spray ranges from a fine, wind-blown mist to soaking rain. The vegetation around the falls is sub-tropical rainforest, just from the constant spray from the falls. We hired raincoats, but soon shed them because it was too hot. I ended up tucking them over my camera bag, trying to keep that dry.

Some people will go to any lengths to stay dry. We saw some rather sweaty-looking Poms in yellow macs and sou’westers. I think I’d rather be drenched in spray than in my own sweat, thanks very much. Besides, my jeans needed washing.

After the falls, we bought a few souvenirs and a cup of coffee that cost $6500 Zimbabwean dollars (US$3) and went on a Zambezi cruise. Cruises have dropped off along with the tourists, since Zimbabwe isn’t the best place to visit at the moment. Thanks for that, President Mugabe. No wonder your people are all praying for your death – not only is there no sugar and bread costs $1000 Zim dollars a loaf, but you've destroyed a thriving tourist market. We did manage to get a boat, though, and had a two hour cruise on the river. The surface was like glass, with palm trees on the banks and hippos in the shallows.

This morning we got up at the crack of dawn to go on a game drive through Chobe National Park. There were animals everywhere: elephants, puku, wart hogs, impala, hippos, crocodiles and all sorts of birds. We even saw a giraffe, which was rather exciting. Tomorrow, we fly to the Okavango Delta.

I have to say, though, there’s a lotta shit in Africa. And if I keep going the way I am now, I’m on target to leave a size eight-and-a-half boot print in a bit of everything. So far I’ve stepped in elephant, baboon, goat, donkey, cow, unidentified antelope and a couple of other things that I can’t name. There have been quite a number of near misses and there’s probably other crap that I’ve stepped in without knowing it. We’ve also driven through a fair bit of it, because in between potholes on the road to Kasane was a hell of a lot of elephant crap. I'm sure the tally will rise, because if there’s one thing you can count on me doing, it’s stepping in poop.

It's elephant. Of course.

Here endeth the second instalment.