How to Regain Your Perspective

Okay, not much of a cliffhanger from my last post, as I'm writing the answer the very next day. I'm obviously more of a soap opera than a quality drama.

Well, at first nothing much seemed to go wrong that evening. We had beautiful weather yet again, and our new crew, accompanied by Paul, Heetan and I, were having a great time. The booze was flowing and we were all getting to know one another, as well as enjoying the sights of the mighty Zambezi (sorry if I belabour this, but every single time we heard anyone from the compay that owned our campsite, Safari Par Excellence, describe the river, it was as "the mighty Zambezi"). Admittedly, we hadn't managed to steal most of the bowls of snacks the way we did the previous time, and there was looking likely to be a serious queue for dinner as we were on the larger of the company's two boats this time, in company of a good deal of other people, some of whom were less likely to be viewing the exercise as a booze cruise than us (if only because they were severely underaged!). I ended up getting the tail ends of dinner, as I stayed behind on deck to get as many piccies as possible of the sunset - the previous cruise, I had decided against taking my digital camera with me, and so had ended up with just a couple of pics on a disposable 35mm job, and I had resolved to remedy that this time.

Our issues for the evening started off fairly soon after I returned to the table, when Heetan got near to the end of his dinner and decided he wanted to have a food-fight with Paul. It started off fairly harmlessly with a couple of crusts of bread flying, but then escalated, and was obviously irritating the people sitting around us, plus creating mess for the crew to clean up. At this point, I made the mistake of suggesting to Heetan that it might be a good idea to stop. For my pains, I was informed that I was condescending and in danger of wrecking his holiday, and that he really wished he didn't have to hate me.

This was something of a surprise to me, as I had thought that Heetan and I got on okay. I promptly apologised to him for anything I might have done to upset him, and considered the matter closed. I was also distracted as, around this time, a quartet of elephants swam across our wake, on the way back from one of the islands to the mainland. For me, the spectacle of an elephant swimming is just that little bit unnerving, as it seems unnatural that something that big and heavy should be able to, but I guess if I can then there's no reason why an elephant shouldn't be able to, too!

Throughout this, I had also been attempting to get people going with the old Zambezi Surprises, but there was significantly less interest than on our original trip - I think the absence of Valdy at this point may have influenced proceedings. Hence, most of us were in a fairly reasonable state when we returned to shore. I say most of us because, in retrospect, I have to admit that I was relatively trolleyed - I had been hoovering up people's unwanted Surprises, and that left me just a little bit woozy. Hence, I reckon I probably didn't make the best of impressions on the remainder of our new crew when we got back to the truck - I was probably slurring slightly, rather owlish, and realised a couple of minutes after I got back that I hadn't got my camera. Five minutes of panic (and a trip back to the boat) later, it turned out one of the others had picked it up and brought it along, much to my relief (the same, unfortunately, did not turn out to be true for my fleece when I realised the next morning I had left it behind - oops...). I also didn't remember a single name of anybody I met that evening, which is most unlike me.

Still, all seemed to be going okay, as I rather idiotically got started on the first of several more beers while waiting for the others to finish up dinner and come over to join us at the bar. And it still seemed okay for the next half hour or so, until I turned around from the bar at the sound of my name to be confronted by Heetan, who promptly repeated his earlier allegations that I was wrecking his holiday, along with a few further choice riffs around the theme, this time in front of the entire bar. I apparently just sat there flabbergasted for a couple of minutes, before getting rather upset. As far as I was concerned, I had thought any disagreement we'd had closed on the boat, especially as I'd offered to try and make sure I didn't do anything else to upset him. I think eventually Jon and Brandon managed to calm me down and make sure I went off to bed without doing anything stupid (something for a which I'm not sure I ever thanked them properly - in case I didn't, I'd just like to say that I owe you guys!). I only found out a few days ago, after the trip had finished, that Heetan apparently gave something like a 5-minute monologue to Brandon's video-camera that evening about how unpleasant I was. So, not the best of endings to the evening.

Against this background, the fact that I slept in the next morning, and did not join the new crew on their trip down to see the Falls (as we'd done a couple of days earlier) was fairly understandable. It was also remarkably stupid, as I neglected to get my camera off the truck before it departed, and I was lined up for a helicopter flight over the falls that morning. Luckily, Jon came to my rescue again at this point, lending me his own digital camera so that I could at least take some photos from the flight. The flight itself was extraordinary - I'd never been in a helicopter before, and this one went zooming along through the gorges at low level for a while, before popping up and flying around the falls - I had thought they looked spectacular from ground level, but only now realised just how small a section of them I had seen, and how incredible they were. It was an expensive little excursion, but an eye-opening one. However, my eyes (and any minor sense of injustice I might still be feeling about the previous night) were to get a rude awakening when I returned to camp.

I had left for my flight at 10:00am, which corresponds to 9:00am in the UK, and returned about an hour later. And this was Thursday 7th July, 2005. When I got back and went to give Jon his camera back, he mentioned that he had seen on the BBC News site that there had been some kind of an accident or power failure on the Tube, and we both remarked how typical this was the day after London had been awarded the Olympic games for 2012. I then went downstairs and noticed the TV behind the bar, tuned to Sky news. And the words "multiple explosions", "possible terrorist attack" and "London" plastered across the bottom of the screen. For me, this was a case of seeing something I had dreaded but halfways expected for the last few years, softened by the fact that none of my family were in the capital (although there were still a couple of my friends I was worried for, who luckily turned out to be okay). For some of the others, it was altogether more personal, and there were a lot of worried people heating up the phone-lines back to the UK, trying to work out what was going on. All the rest of us could do was watch, and hope that they got the right reply in the end.

Unsurprisingly, our lunchtime departure that day was delayed, and the drive down to the border (the Zambezi river crossing into Botswana) passed in a fairly sober mood, as people exchanged what little they knew of what was happening. After all the anticipation I'd had of what the atmosphere would be like on the truck with our new passengers aboard, this was not at all what I'd expected. By that evening, when we knew that nobody had got the bad news they feared, and the body counts were coming in (unpleasantly high, but could have been so much worse), things started to perk up a little more and get back to a little more like normality. It was to be a recurrent background theme for the rest of the trip, though, whenever we got near a TV - we would always be confronted with the latest news of the bombings and the aftermath. I have to admit that a selfish part of me was just really glad that I wasn't in London any more.

Anyways, my time is coming to an end again here, and I think I've probably depressed people enough for this posting. I will pick up the story in Kasane, Botswana, with our adventures in Chobe National Park, the next time write. Until then, I hope that you are all well.

Take care and have fun,

Pat

Make new friends, but keep the old...

Howzit, Bru!

Yes, I've settled down in front of another internet terminal, so it's time for a fresh instalment of "What I Did This Time On My Holidays...", picking up again from Livingstone/Vic Falls, as I encountered some of my new travelling companions (and finally saw the Falls themselves).

The morning brought a wake-up at what seemed a comparatively civilised hour of 7:30am. Now if ever I were to worry that overlanding might be a bad influence on me, that would have to be it. 7:30am is NOT a civilised hour to awaken and face the day. 9:30 is just about acceptable. Just about. Anyways, enough belly-aching, those of us who had not chosen to cross over into Zim headed off down to the National Park entrance on the Zambian side, where we went for a delightful walk through the forests on the section of peninsula (and a small island) facing the Zambian section of the falls. Now, I've been to Niagara, and the falls there are pretty impressive (well, the horseshoe ones on the Canadian side anyway), but Vic Falls blows them away. These are the world's biggest, and I would bet most impressive, waterfalls. Something like 1.8km across, with often over 500,000 litres flowing over them per second!

Still, after an hour or two wandering along taking photos (for which I took the opportunity to hire a waterproof kagoul which might just as well have been one of our bell-tents with a hole in the top to make a poncho!) it was time to move on - we all trekked through the border point, and down to the bridge marking the actual border with Zimbabwe. At this point, I have to 'fess up that I did actually make it into Zimbabwean territory, but only on the bridge (and I didn't bloody pay for it!). And why did I do this? Well, in one of his more amusingly crazy moments, Heetan had decided he was going to do the bungee off the bridge.

Now, I am not a fan of the idea of bungee at any time, so I was quite content to let him take as much pleasure as possible from jumping off a 114m bridge with an elastic band around his legs - I just wanted to watch, along with the rest of the truck crew that morning. Given that Heetan's voice can stray into disturbingly high registers when he just gets moderately excited, I was intrigued what the reaction might be. The answer, surprisingly, was remarkably little. In fact, I've rarely seen someone looking quite so nervous - Jon took a brilliant photo capturing this, with Heetan having his head in his hands. When it came to the final jump, the jump masters had to pry his hands off the poles and near enough push him out! And when he came back up on the cable, he was almost totally silent, but his eyes were as wide as dinner-plates. Even after he walked to the end of the bridge and came back up, he was surprisingly quiet and still very wide-eyed.

After a brief scare at the border post on the way back, when we temporarily lost Valdy (he'd apparently legged it through because he'd actually forgotten to bring his passport that morning...!), it was back to the campsite, and cleaning up the tents etc ahead of our first consignment of new passengers joining on. It was quite amusing to sit through the pre-Departure meeting a second time, this time knowing what was going on (though, embarrassingly, I ended up correcting Paul on the route at one point, which brought back memories of my 6th-Form History classes), and to meet our new complement.

Having lost Barry and Jeff (en route back to Canada), Glenn (off back to Australia) and Mark, Laura, Ian and Emma (all heading down to Jo'burg), we were due for an infusion of new blood. This took the form that day of Brandon and Matt (2 American lads, celebrating their last burst of freedom before entering the hell that is the American world of work - how can anyone get by on 10 days' paid holiday a year??), Scott and Jen (Aussie couple on their way home from London) and Kath and Yohan (another Aussie couple on a few weeks' break from back home). We were told we would also be getting 10 more passengers who had come up from Jo'burg and were joining our little jaunt down to the Cape, but that they were off on their booze cruise that night and would have their meeting the next day.

Given the state of the previous two nights' booze cruises (including our own), it would have been amusing to have met the guys off there, but duty intervened, in the form of the cooking roster. Yes, I was up for chef duty and, joy of joys, it was Chilli Night. This was great fun all the way through to the point where I ended up scrubbing all the pans (I prefer my family's arrangement, where the cook doesn't have to clean!). Anyways, by the time we had finished clearing up it was half eight or so, and much of the festivities from the booze cruise had more or less collapsed. I adjourned to the bar and had a few drinks with our crew and Helen, the guide of the upcoming Livi-Jo'burg trip, who was rare in Acacia terms for being not African at all, but Welsh. She'd lived out in Aus and SA for a while, though, and you've rarely heard as weird a combo as what happens when the Welsh, Aussie and Saffir accents get mixed up.

The next day was one of the occasional quiet ones, at least to start with. Went into town, in an attempt to get some shopping done (okay, to hunt for Size 11 sandals...) and go to the post office. For it was getting on quite rapidly for my dear Mum's birthday, and half of her present, acquired in Kenya, was still travelling across Africa with me, as was assorted other junk of various grades. Sadly, I had reckoned without the joys of African bureaucracy. After a diversion to a stationery store to get a padded envelope (for Mum's pressie and a CD of photos), I had a frustrating exchange with a guy in the PO who informed me my other parcel could not simply be stuffed in a tube (as his colleague had told me earlier), but needed to be wrapped up by me. So I had to go and get wrapping material and prepare that other package. When I returned, shortly after midday, it was to be informed by his more helpful colleague that the irritating sod had gone on lunch-break and would not be back until at least 2. Oh, and he's the only guy in the Livi post office who can handle parcels. I was quite pleased that I didn't actually scream at anyone at this point. However, given that I wanted to head back to the campsite with Paul, Kath and Yohan in a cab, I had to abort my attempted postal errand. And I hadn't found any suitable sandals either. Still, my mood was pretty positive heading back towards the camp, as I had signed up to do the booze cruise again that evening, in the company of my new friends from the previous day, and I would then get the chance to meet the other new crew afterwards. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, that's going to have to be a story for another time, as my time has run out on this computer. (Gosh, my very first cliffhanger - how will my devoted readership cope...?)

Zambezi Surprises

G'day again. Time to continue my bursts of activity on the log front, and start to cover my activities in the lovely country of Zambia.

Our first stop in Zambia was the town of Chipata, just 20km or so over the border. Or rather, it was a campsite outside Chipata, in common with the usual overlander syndrome. It was a fairly quiet night there, though, with people still recovering from Kande and was notable principally for (a) being able to camp on grass again for the first time in a while, rather than sand or mud and (b) having another truck parked next to us, whose guide's birthday it was, so they were making a cake. I ended up chatting with some of the latter group in the bar - slightly different environment on their truck. Their guide was called their "courier" and they'd all been given nicknames (e.g. the lad I was getting this info off was an Aussie called Christian, but they all called him Dik-Dik - for those unfamiliar with the animal, it's one of Africa's smallest antelopes).

The next day was another of our very long drives, heading west across Zambia to the capital, Lusaka. We passed over the Luangwa river, having lunch just the other side, and pressed on along steadily improving roads (the "joke" here is that some foreign government fronted up the money for the highway from Lusaka to the border, but it hasn't been redeveloped all the way as some of the money went AWOL...). Arrival in Lusaka was something of a shock, as we encountered shopping malls. Honest-to-God, western-style shopping malls. After the little markets and occasional dodgy shops, interspersed with very rare big supermarkets of the trip so far, this had some people reeling. Leonie almost had a fit at the possibility there might be a McDonalds...! My interest in this was confined primarily to the possibility I might be able to get some sandals at last (I'd been hunting for some for the last couple of weeks) - alas, my big feet continued to frustrate me, as nowhere had any bigger than a size 10. Damnation.

Anyways, we continued on to our campsite, just out the other side of town, where it was another pretty quiet night (aided somewhat by the fact that the power cut off from the bar on the site around 7pm, and wasn't back on for another couple of hours), ahead of another early morning departure. This was proving to be even more of a whistle-stop traverse of Zambia than I had actually expected. Another fairly uneventful morning on the road followed, as we headed down through southern Zambia to the unprepossessing town of Livingstone, yet another place named for the omni-present missionary and explorer and the Zambian base for exploring Mosi-Oa-Tunya, better known to most of the anglophone world as Victoria Falls.

Livingstone is a strange place - despite its location next to one of the most amazing sights in the world, it remains to a large extent still a backwater African town. The collapse into a very unpleasant hole of Zimbabwe, and the consequent loss of appeal of the town of Victoria Falls, just the other side of the border, to much of the travelling community (whether due to scruples, nervousness or whatever else, the tourist market for travelling into Zim has collapsed recently) has started to gee things up a bit in Livi, but it still has a ways to go. In the course of my 4 nights in Livi, I have to admit that I was never once tempted to cross the border. I refuse to give any money to the Mugabe government, whether in visas or to any of the many state-owned enterprises in the country, especially given that Zim takes the frequent African practice of charging Brits more for visas than anyone else to another level (something like 65 USD for Brits vs 25 for most nationalities, and free for the Kiwis). Some of the others on the truck (notably the Kiwis) thought that this was penalising the Zim people (by not going there and supporting their businesses) for the actions of their leader, but I was not willing to give him more money to use to knock down people's houses and murder opposition supporters.

Anyway, enough of the sermon. Our first (half-)day in Livi we had a few things to sort out. First of these was getting tour T-shirts printed. This is pretty much a must, but was complicated in our case by the fact that we had several groups of people doing different lengths of tour. In the end, there were 4 different designs from our truck (later to be joined by another for those who joined us after coming up from Jo'burg and yet another for those joining us afresh), all featuring some variety of map on the back showing our respective travels. Next, we had to sit through the videos covering the activities that were available to us whilst in Livi (white-water rafting, elephant rides, helicopter flights, river-boarding, micro-lighting, rhino safaris, etc etc), so that we could start to make up our minds what to do with the next few days. Finally, we had to go on our booze cruise.

Although officially marketed in some quarters as a "sunset cruise on the mighty Zambezi", it is generally acknowledged, even by the operators, what the intent of these little voyages is (at least as far as overlanders are concerned). You get to drift along the Zambezi river, looking out for wildlife, enjoying snacks and a barbeque dinner and drinking as much as you feel you can handle from an open bar. So, we saw more hippos, and some elephants down to drink at the water's edge, plus a few antelope of various sorts. And we consumed pleasant bar snacks with our drinks of choice (in my case, large G&Ts). And we encountered the "Zambezi Surprise", a violent orange-coloured concoction provided in a small beaker, and intended to be downed like a shooter. And we had our BBQ dinner. And we saw Ian try to tie his girlfriend Emma to a pole. And we experienced a beautiful sunset. And we rocked back to shore, and headed into the bar. And saw Ian try to throw Leonie in the pool. And end up in there himself. As did Mark, for reasons I was never able to ascertain. And saw Jon fall over whilst chatting to this Afrikaner lass, taking her down with him. And saw Heetan throw an ash-tray at Ian. And got threatened with eviction from the bar if we did anything else. And so on. And so on.

The scary thing is, it was only about 6:30 when we got back off the cruise. Most of the antics were over by 7:30 or 8:00, as people just crashed out. Yet I was still sitting at the bar, beer in hand, engaged in something approaching reasonable conversation, at nearly 11pm. And, after I went to bed, Jon apparently ended up on all manner of adventures after going drinking in Livingstone town (we were, you guessed it, a few kms out of town at a campsite), which I won't elaborate on now for fear of landing him in trouble with the Zambian authorities. It was just one of those nights.

And the next morning we got up and went rafting. I was glad that I'd at least had something like 7 or 8 hours sleep, which had gotten much of the alcohol out of my system. Jon had had about an hour, and spent most of breakfast (at which point he was still pretty merry) trying to work out what he had actually done the previous night, often quite loudly and to the obvious fascination (and occasional horror) of those joining us on the rafting trip and sitting nearby. Amazingly, everybody who was due to raft, other than Paul, our guide, made it up and about, and got kitted up and through the safety briefing before loading onto 4WD trucks to be driven out to the gorge. Here, above rapid 10 (they're numbered from just below the falls themselves, heading downstream - 1-10 were considered unraftable at this time of year), we encountered one of the main reasons for signing the usual indemnity waiver, and one of the more dangerous parts of the whole day: the walk down.

If ever I were to need an example to ram home that I was in Africa, and in a different environment, then, strangely, that descent was one of them. You see, the Zambezi at this point runs through a pretty steep gorge, and there's no lifts or cable cars or anything like that to get you down. There's a walkway, constructed largely of branches assembled into a rudimentary staircase, with little or nothing in the way of hand-railings, sometimes descending through crazy gradients, and with the odd broken branch just to show how solid all the construction really is. There is no way, in a million years, that this would ever pass any kind of health & safety check at home, or in Aus or NZ or wherever, but here it's just regarded as normal. The lack of any hoist or lift also means that the rafts have to be transported up and down this trail, which they are, astonishingly, by teams of local porters who near-enough run up and down them. Utterly crazy, but it works.

In terms of our rafting crews, I was in with Barry and a group of other random people unconnected with the truck, having decided to forsake the boat in which the majority of our group would travel. This was largely because most of them were convinced that the raison d'etre of rafting was to flip as many times as possible, to the point where Heetan (whilst inebriated the previous night) had bought their prospective rafting guide drinks to ensure that he made them flip. It was in this environment that our boats approached Rapid 11, the Overland Truck Eater. Now, somebody out there in the world of rafting is guilty of gross plagiarism, as I encountered a rapid called the Bus Eater on the Ottawa river in Canada a few years back (I say "encountered", I was in a raft that accidentally went into it side-on and had a fairly spectacular wipe-out...). Anyways, our intrepid crew, guided by the irrepressible Vinnie, made it safely through, despite a brief close-call. The rest of our group, who were later to be christened the "Zambezi Swimming Team" in the rafting video, went straight in.

At this point, I think it's fair to say, a few of them reconsidered their earlier "tipping is good" philosophy, as they dumped straight into a whirlpool. It was not merely Heetan (for whom the phrase was something of a stock-in-trade) who claimed afterwards that "I thought I was going to die!". Whirlpools can drag you down for a while, despite the serious positive bouyancy of the life-jacket, and several people reported seeing the raft drifting further away above them as they sank into the depths. Luckily, everyone made it out okay, but you can safely say that I was very glad not to be in that boat!!

Amusingly, they then managed to tip straight into the next rapid as well, this time apparently accidentally, but managed to stay upright from that point on. It's safe to say that by that point, Jon had managed to sober up... Despite the occasional attempt by Vinnie (including one point where we went "tubing" through the rapids, which involved all of us piling in the back of the raft so it went through with the bow up like a speedboat) we stayed upright for the whole day, only ever losing one or two people over the sides. And the day was great fun, with several very intense sections. The only less pleasant part was the climb back out of the gorge after our final rapid. At that point, I was convinced I was going to die! But we made it safe back to camp, where many of the guys understandably decided to have a quiet night. I stayed out for a few more bevvies, chatting with Valdy and a couple of lasses who'd just come back off their own booze cruise (very amusing), before crashing and heading to bed myself.

And I think that will have to do for now, as I'm suffering internet fatigue again. Hope you are all well! Take care and have fun,

Pat