Bad Games, A Big Hole and The Last Border

Hello once more. Well, it's a bit late, but this entry will hopefully get us to the Namibia/SA border. Hopefully...

So, when last I had to be pried away from the machine, it was dinner time of our second evening in Sesriem. Which was potje time again, only this time, it was oryx potje. Mmmmm. That said, there's something bizarre from knowing that what you're having for dinner now is one of the things that you were happily photographing only a day or two earlier. I guess it's not usually an issue with pigs, cows or hens, but applies more when you decide that antelope or zebra or ostrich is the way forward (as indeed each of them is!). And then, post-potje, it was time to head off to the bar once more. Although the bar at Sesriem has to be one of the smallest and most pitiable attempts we saw in many a campsite.

Which actually makes it all the more surprising, then, that this turned into one of those occasional nights of drinking games when everything gets just a little bit silly. We had Brandon and Matt, our American buddies, teaching people how to play "Whales' Tails", a game involving a mythical inquisition by the Prince of Wales into who has slept with his wife (just DON'T ASK) that requires extraordinary powers of concentration, so is best done early in the evening (it also really screws over people who aren't that quick to work out things with numbers). Then we played that old standby, the Name Game, involving shouting out celebrities' names in turn as you go round the circle, which tends to mess up people who don't have a good memory (it punishes repitition and hesitation). Then Jo got us playing Whizz-Bang-Bounce, some variant of which is familiar to many people, and which tends to make life hard for those who've already got drunk in the previous games. And then that old classic, Bunnies, was wheeled out, which just confused absolutely everybody. At which point, some bright spark suggested the most evil incarnation of drinking games known to western civilisation: I Have Never...

Now, for those lucky souls not familiar with "I Have Never" (which also goes by the names Never Ever and Never Have I Ever), I shall summarise it as follows: going round the circle (most lethal drinking games involve a circle), everyone takes a turn to say "I Have Never Done X", where X can be pretty much anything. Often, at the start of games, X can be something harmless like "Done a bungee jump" or "Skydived" or "Been to 3 different continents". But, people playing drinking games being what they are, the tone very quickly descends to the gutter, down through the sewers and onwards, and you frequently end up finding out things about the people you're playing with that you would never have guessed (and often that you wish you'd never found out at all...). For this reason, it works quite well with backpackers whom you've only just met and are unlikely to spend much time with in the future, and is an exceptionally bad idea with good friends or family members!

The usual rules can also include the imposition of a "Circle of Trust" between those playing the game, such that nothing found out in the course of play can be passed on to anyone else. This is essential in the (obviously purely hypothetical) situation where you have one half of a couple playing the game while their other half is fast asleep elsewhere, and will be seeing other people involved the next morning... In any case, due both to this and to my occasional attempts to remain close to some standard of public decency, I won't be divulging any of the knowledge brought forth from the game, but I figured I might as well give a little background on it, as it pops up once or twice more in the course of my travels .

Anyways, after the late bout of I Have Never around the campfire (and an impromptu decision by the lads in the group to graffiti the desert...), it was a slightly owlish group who surfaced in the morning for our trip out of Sesriem, and further south through Namibia. This was another of those occasions where we just didn't really do much during the day, although for once we actually got where we going on time, so there were no issues with getting into the camp, finding our allocated spot etc. Some unkind souls remarked to Paul that they'd almost forgotten how to put up their tents during the daylight. Still, after setting camp it was time to hop back on the truck for a quick trip out to the rim of the Fish River Canyon, which is, Namibian tourist authorities reliably inform me, the 2nd Biggest Canyon in the World (after the Grand Canyon). Don't know on exactly what basis they do this, but I can reliably inform you that it is one bloody enormous hole in the ground. And we actually reached it in time to get photos of the sun setting, even more improbably.

After that, it was back to the campsite for dinner and the usual drink or two (although for once there was no campsite bar to help out proceedings, so we were entirely dependent upon our own supplies, and upon the Valdy Bar, an esky stocked with alcohol by our esteemed driver and sold on to us as the most convenient repository of cold liquor). That evening was enlivened somewhat by another broadcast of Leonie's DVD of her getting savaged by a lion cub in Vic Falls, by the seemingly dozens of copies being made of a CD of African music that Paul and Valdy had repeatedly used to greet the morning on the truck, and by the attempts of Scott, aided by myself and Paul, to finally fix the damned stereo on the truck (which was now happily playing in the back of the truck again, but not in the front, leading to our being plagued by horrible music at horrible volumes while Paul and Valdy listened to something else on a personal stereo in the cab...). Eventually, after much mucking about with electrical gubbins and me having climbed on the roof of the cab, we got all of it working apart from one speaker, which seemed a pretty decent effort given that a bloody "professional" electrician hadn't been able to get it working!

There was an effort to get another drinking game going, one involving each person in turn adding one word to the sentence underway, but it didn't really get going that much, and the night turned into a pretty quiet one. The next morning we were up and away again, on our way out of Namibia. It was actually a pretty late start, as we didn't have too much ground to cover to the Orange River border crossing point. What we did manage along the way, though, was one of those occasional unadvertised breaks, and this one was a doozie: some hot springs, at a little place called Ai-Ais. Now, the last time I'd been in anything similar was when I was over in Hungary last year, but this was vaguely similar: hot pools of various temperatures, some indoors, some outdoors, though the ones in Budapest didn't have a set of fountains that went off occasionally, and worked as a very effective back massage for those standing underneath them! They also didn't see their outside pool hijacked by a bunch of overlanders with a rugby ball (in defiance of the "No ball games" signs liberally plastered around), leading to much fun, amidst shrieking, splashing and generally scandalising the other (mostly German) holiday-makers there.

Soon enough, though, it was time to hit the road again, and head for the border, where it was another hassle-free crossing (you know, there I'd been, pre-trip, imagining all kinds of nightmares at African border crossings, and it was mostly so easy it was booooring!) and there we were, in our final country on White Nile, the good old Republic of South Africa.

And that's where this latest instalment will tail off, as the details of our final truly silly night on the truck will have to wait. Until then, dear reader, fare thee well!

Pat