safari

cara, andrew and i rose before the sun on tuesday to head to the border and meet our tour group.  we arrived and stood around awkwardly in the middle of three hundred and twenty semi-trailers waiting to cross the river into botswana. someone recognised our confusion and we were soon asked if we were “hunt x 3”. (hunt is andrew’s surname and was apparently our booking reference). it took us a moment to realise that we were, in fact, hunt x 3, and once that was established that is what we were called for the remainder of the tour. hunt x 3 were whisked across the river to botswana where we enjoyed a three-hour cruise up the chobe river. a beautiful start to our three-day safari.

'hunt x 3' cruising

just when i thought i couldn’t get any more relaxed i was seated in a restaurant for our post-cruise, pre-game-drive lunch. i swiftly ended my month-long flirtation with vegetarianism by ingesting nine different varieties of meat.... life was good. it was time to see some animals.

we were introduced to our six tour companions and our driver/guide. i’m going to call our driver/guide barry white because his voice was three octaves lower than any human voice i’ve ever heard before. our tour buddies came in the form of three pairs.

1. an oldish french couple... the slowest photographers in the history of the universe, armed with the biggest camera i’ve ever seen in my life. i’m going to call them the french twist.

2. a pair of danish friends who were addicted to tanning. i’m going to call them burnt apple danish and burnt peach danish.

3. a middle aged italian woman and what we think was her much younger african lover. they don’t get names because they just confused us and we didn’t really know how to talk to them.

we were off.

we had a wonderful game drive and found all the things you’d expect to find in an african jungle. the french twist got pretty annoying, pointing their bazooka-sized camera at anything that had eyes and then waiting a full ten minutes before taking their picture. barry white was starting to lose his cool a little with them and sometimes just drove away and pretended not to hear the twist yelling out. burnt apple and peach danish just smiled at everything. it was a bit disconcerting at first seeing their sparkling white teeth constantly on display with the back-drop of their overly tanned faces, but they had normal sized cameras and took their photos quickly so we became friends.

barry white quickly developed a habit of shooshing us all... incessantly. i’m not known for my quiet nature so i was on the receiving end of more shooses than anyone else in the jeep. he told us that we were scaring all the animals away, but i’m pretty sure the rocket-launcher sized camera in the hands of the french twist was what was scaring the animals away. it seemed the ‘be quiet’ rule did not apply to barry white himself though. he’d talk and carry on as much as he liked. sometimes the sound of his basey-baritone voice would cause a zebra to throw their underwear at him, but mostly he just yabbered on about migration patterns and coloured breasted this, that and the other, with the occasional “shoosh hunt x 3” thrown in for good measure. we didn’t love barry.

this guy!!

we were camping in the middle of chobe national park for two nights. before we went to sleep we were told that it probably wasn’t a good idea to get out of our tents to use the ‘bathroom’. if we felt we had to get out we were instructed to shine our light out our tent door so we could see the eyes of the predators shining back at us. no shining eyes meant we could probably dash to ‘the pit’ and relieve ourselves. shining eyes meant we would probably get eaten so we should zip back up and cross our legs for the night.

i prepared for the night by having a single mouthful of wine after 1pm.

at 2am that wine was ready to leave my bladder. i was alone and from what i could hear the cast of the lion king were clearly having a reunion dinner out the back of my tent. i was busting and needed to make a plan quickly. i’m not proud of what happened next, but here it is...

i can officially add ‘weeing in a ziplock bag’ to the list of things i’ve done once that i never need to do again. or if i’m being completely honest i’ll add it to the list of things i’ve done three times that i never need to do again. it’s done. let’s not speak of it ever.

barry white, the twist, the burnt danishes, the nameless lovers and hunt x 3 enjoyed two more days of game drives and river cruising. there were shooses galore as hunt x 3 found it increasingly difficult not to make fun of barry white and the bazooka-wielding french twist. there were lions, zebras, hippos, elephants, giraffes, mongoose (fun fact: the collective noun for mongoose is ‘a business’. so formal), jackals, pythons, crocs, 15 000 species of birds, dung beetles, impala, kudu, buffalo, and the moment i had come for... warthogs. it was beyond wonderful and i feel pretty lucky to live just up the road.

this guy at our campsite took camo to a whole new level

i hope your week has been equally full of discovery, awe and thankfulness. happy easter everyone!