Now, that I've finished my first Intrepid Trip (I now know why rock stars need rehab after they go on the road), I thought I'd sit back and recap some of the hilights. I did the teaser last time about Mr. Cheese-on-Toast and the Pink Tam, so thought I'd lead with that one.
The Beach Boys
On Lake Malawi, there are plenty of beach boys. They've named themselves with such monikers as "Donald Duck", "Destiny", "Mel Gibson", "Sugar Daddy" and "Big No No". Generally, when you leave your camp compound to go on a village tour, they attach themselves to you like barnacle guides, two to a tourist, coaxing you to buy batiks, hand-carved key chains, bao games, and maps. My two guys, hopping along like the devil and angel, one on each shoulder, were Gift (being that he was the first boy to arrive in a long line of girls) and Cheese-on-Toast (he claims his mama gave him that name). Cheese-on-Toast had a very cool tam, black with green and red stripes that I coveted. I asked if he had any for sale, but the ones for sale were 'same, same but different' and I wanted 'the one off his head', so I paid far too much for a wood-carved bao game and got it tossed in. The next day, at another camp on Lake Malawi I spotted another tam that I coveted on the head of a beach boy floating in Lake Malawi. I think they just look extra good on dreaded hair and cocoa skin; I never covet the tams I see in the shops! This one belonged to Mr. Bob. In retrospect, it looked awesome against his dark skin, but it kind of makes me look like an ice-cream cone. Still, I love it. Now, there's a special something, home-grown and medicinal in Malawi that they like to call "Malawi Wowi" and our boy was high-strung on. He would float implaccably in the lake and then spout random sayings like, "Fantastic. Mr. Bomb-bastic." or (my personal favorite) "Lover's Nest" a propos of nothing. I tried to get a conversation going, asking if he could trade me his tam for something, but he'd bust out with, "I hate you...no...I love you. No bilhazia here. Other side." Eventually, we wrangled a deal wherein I gave him a Canadian tee-shirt and doo rag for his hat. And 500 Kwacha. ("For yarn for the next one".) So, even stoned, he landed that deal. But there you go. I got my tam. The beach boys are also infamous for their illicit beach bonfires, 'offside, man, offside', which the security guards bemusedly tolerate. However, I left Shiundu snore-dozing off in their company one night, while I took a walk aways down the beach with the restaurant cook and Acacia girl and he later said, "What were you thinking, leaving me with the beach boys! I could have been robbed blind! Next time, wake me up!"
The Delta
I think the Okavanga Delta is one of my favorite places on the trip. You cruise into the delta in mokoros, these dug-out canoes (formerly made from hollowed-out trees, but these days made from plexi-glass), poled by river guides. They actually teach you how to pole them if you want. Let me tell you, it looks easy, poguing down the river like a New Orleanian in the bayou, but testing it is another story. Those things are wobbly as hell and you have to balance in them, standing up. My river guide, John, was coaching me: "Deep left! Close right!" but eventually I just had to go by instinct. I found this way of doing a bastardized J-stroke, sticking out my bum and asked John if I could just do it that way. He said absolutely not, but then later modified it to: "You know what? Somehow it works for you. Go with it." Then, I made him incorporate it into his poling on the way back. We poled through the Delta to a little enclave where we jumped out to go swimming, and then poled out further where the hippos cluster together like stepping stones, opening their huge maws in angry threat displays. You have to make a lot of noise to put them on high alert, as some of the guides have had the nasty experience of poling on top of a hippo and having their mokoro promptly split in two, rocketing them into the air. Hippos have been 'Disneyfied' as indolent, slothful, chubby cartoons, but in reality they are responsible for more tourist deaths than any other animal. They rival Usain Bolt on speed and their acceleration rate (they are standing up in the water, contrary to common belief) is fierce. One night, I was heading from my tent to the ablution blocks and I heard a hippo roar like that. That's your first warning. I couldn't tell if he was in the Delta or not, but I hightailed it like never before back to my tent. Shiundu's right. If it's a short call, pee outside the tent. The next morning, I was awoken by gunfire. It was a security guard firing a warning shot to an elephant who'd encroached the borders of the camp. Actually, a girl from one of the Acacia Overland trucks was showing me pictures of some elephants who'd trashed their campsite after draining the swimming pool of water and trying to get at the pipes where they could still smell water underneath. They subsequently trashed the restaurant and rondavel of the camp as well. You don't mess with elephants. In the evening, we poled the mokoros into the Delta to watch the sunset. Rhonda was with us on that leg of the trip and she's a raw foodist (vegetarian for the purposes of the trip) who found some kind of plant floating in the Delta. She asked if it was okay to eat, and I'm not fully sure she got the okay on that in retrospect, but started munching it right out of the water, and brought back a handful as a side salad for us at dinner that night. Rhonda was notorious for collecting up bits and pieces of nature. During one of the many pit stops on the truck for a bush pee (you know, you start the trip all high-maintenance with pocket tissue and hand sanatizer, brushing your teeth with bottled water, applying Deet like it's holy water, and by the end of the trip it all goes "Lord of the Flies"); anyway, Rhonda scampered back onto the truck after her "short call" never so happy as to have discovered some elephant dung by the side of the road. Back in Swakopmund (the German town where we never saw any people. Ever.), Rhonda and I had visited a healer on one of the village tours, who was extolling the virtues of elephant dung as a homeopathic medicinal cure-all. Because elephants are such picky-eaters (unlike baboons) pretty much everything that goes through them is pure and natural. Thus, their dung is pure and natural also, but having gone through the digestive process, has now been 'treated' in the natural lab that is their stomachs. So elephant dung is like gold. As such, Rhonda picked it up and housed it in a plastic baggy in a locker for the rest of the trip, spawning such jokes as, "Make sure you take all your shit with you when you leave, Rhonda. How are you gonna get that shit on the plane? Don't forget your shit!" Ah, it never gets dull. I learned a lot of cool endeavors from Rhonda, like walking down a path with my eyes closed and being completely aware of my body in space and trusting its movement, or walking without ever looking down at my feet. (We do that a lot, subconsciously.) One thing that made me chuckle though was in Livingstone when I was itching to go for a run. We'd been warned by Shiundu not to go for any walks or runs outside of the campsite as it was notorious for elephant tramplings and bandits. In fact, one girl from the Acacia truck attempted this, and was promptly robbed by two machete'd bandits. When she didn't cough up the goods right away, but instead decided to defend herself (she was a former Army cadet) they sliced her open until her intestines popped out (urban exaggeration, maybe but she ended up in hospital and as Shiundu likes to finish off his horror stories to us, "That was the end of her trip." It always makes me laugh because I picture Harold Van Buuren, the coloured judge on 'So You Think You Can Dance South Africa' saying in his Afrikaaners accent to the dancers who don't make it: "This is the end of your journey."
Anyway, suffice it to say I had no intentions of jogging at that camp. But then Rhonda, who is very spiritual and surrounded by orbs and guardian angels that the rest of us lack, piped in with, "Why don't you just take a little walk about 500 metres, where the village paths branch off?"
I said, "But what about the wild elephants and bandits?"
She responded with: "Just surround yourself with a white light. That's what I did."
All jokes aside though, I think Rhonda must have telecast me with a white light when I saw that lion, so it didn't eat me! And I so miss the way she turned her tent into the massage tent and gave everyone massages with all these creams and lotions she'd bought. She had us on a timed list, all the clients, crew and Okavanga Delta guides!
Muzungus
'Muzungu' is a Swahili word for white person, and it really makes me laugh when we're on a village tour or something and people call out 'muzungu' really excitedly. It's like they're on a game drive and we're the elusive leopards. One day in Marangu (or Karatu?), one of these little villages, there was a little boy about two years old, toddling through the mountains in striped pygama bottoms with saucer-wide eyes, and in his loud little voice, he clamoured "MUZUNGU! MUZUNGU! Mami, Mami, (tugging insistently on his mom's arm), MUZUNGU!!!" Sometimes the little kids tell us, "Give me my money." One day, back in Spitzkoppe, one of the girls was giving a sob story to Bernhard about how she needs money because her dad is an alcoholic and beats her. Ursula was cautioning him against falling for that violin sonata. When we returned to the camp and were tipping James, our guide [for those of you from the Intrepid trip reading this: I know I call everybody 'James' when I can't remember their name, but he really was called James] he made the connection and laughed, "Yeah, that was my daughter." Some kids were calling out something to us in Swahili on one of these walks and when I asked our guide what it meant, he said, "Oh, they want your empty water bottles. Then they fill them up with water and pretend they're tourists."
The Big Five and other Animals of Note
During the course of our overlanding, we've been to Etosha National Park in Namibia, Chobe National Park in Botswana and the Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania. We've seen so many, many incredible things. I can't count the number of animals I've seen (at one point I purchased a book of all the animals in Etosha and was checking them off, but the book has changed hands so many times, I've lost track of it.) However, some of the highlights were seeing all the animals clustered around the night watering hole in Etosha. It's amazing to see the watering hole floodlit as a silent auditorium for all the different herds and flocks of animals clustered to drink together. That said, there is an inherent hierarchy and some of the Alpha animals on the foodchains will cause the minions to scatter in a hurry, but at one point we saw wildebeest, springbok, giraffes, warthogs and zebras all harmoniously drinking together.
Chobe was amazing in that we did an evening river cruise (I think I was on a 'sober day' that day, but the River Guide encouraged us to drink to our heart's content to see twice as many animals as everyone else.) and at one point saw seventeen crocodiles glistening along the river bank (well, Shiundu did. I spotted seven, and maybe three of those were actually logs). We also saw a myriad of elephants, and a scene I'll never forget: A mama elephant giving her baby a mud bath. Because of the time of evening, the mud shimmered and sparkled and the elephants looked gracefully playful, splashing shining mud on one another, like they were dancing.
The Serengeti was incredible. Mainly by the toilets of our campsite! I remember on the game drive I did in South Africa two years ago, I didn't see a single cat! On this safari, we saw leopards, cheetahs and lions! Leopards and cheetahs are completely elusive so that was a thrill I didn't expect to have. When we saw the cheetahs, they were placidly bookending a rock, one posture mirroring the other. The first time we saw a leopard, we only saw it's tail and bum, queuing down the tree, but the second sighting was full flegded. I'm reading "The Rainbow Diaries" and it talks of a guide who, after the game drive, propped his back and gun against a tree to have a smoke and was subsequently attacked by a leopard hidden in the tree (as Shiundu says: "Never trust the bush!"). The clients panicked, hopped in the vehicle and drove it back to camp. By the time the rangers returned the leopard had devoured the guide's shoulder and back. Oh, we also saw a zebra carcass, haunting in the fact that it was skeletal aside from its nappy mane and one fully intact striped leg. We saw two hyenas splitting a kill. They tore the flank in half and each ran off with their share in their maws.
For me, the most exciting thing (I hadn't seen my campfire lion yet) was creeping our vehicle up close to an entire family of lions, recoiled under a shady tree. The two cubs were snuggling and Mom and Dad were just reclining nearby. Also, we saw two lions mate! During the season, they mate once every 20 minutes, but we actually had to wait 35 minutes. We were laughing a moment later though, because the whole process took exactly 3 seconds. A few minutes later, the male lion tried to mount the female again, and she swatted him away. No wonder. Poor girl.
In Livingstone, I got to actually interact with the animals. I rode an elephant, went on a walk with lion cubs, where we got to watch them tumble and bumble with each other close up, and could pet them, and rode a horse, bareback into the ocean and swam with it. That was a surreal experience. It makes me laugh because every time I go horsebackriding in Africa, it's a bit of a mindspin. I say I'm 'Intermediate' because I've ridden about twenty times in my life, but there are people in our group sometimes who have never ridden at all. Then the guides say things like, "Who wants to canter? Okay?" Meanwhile these riders have no idea what that even is, and even I need a refresher on how to trot and can barely canter. There are of course, no instructions, just "Let the horse know who's boss" and it's English riding style here anyway, which mixes me up. There we were in the water, and one of the girls who was quite new to horseback riding and had been traumatically capsized by one as a youngster, was riding bareback up a steep dune on one of the horses and was falling right off the side. It was comical, yet alarming. Anyway, she righted herself in the end and we had a good chuckle up at the bar. TIA. Still, the experience of riding bareback in water at sunset is like nothing else. You really have no way of getting purchase on the horse (that I know of, or have been instructed.) It's a bit like riding a giant caterpillar.
At one point, in the first part of the trip, we had five people (in the second leg, just three, and in the third leg, six), but when we had five people, Shiundu jokingly assigned us each an animal from the Big Five: Bernhard was the Buffalo because he's like the head of the Bachelor Herd, being the only male, and knows how to bulldoze to get a deal. We nicknamed Bernhard 'Let's Make a Deal Man' because wherever we were, Bernhard could make the best deal, even where there was no negotiating welcomed. Free wifi in the rurals? He could find it. They offer free upgrades at some of the camps, and Ursula was craving one after a lot of camping on rocks, but Bernhard wasn't seeing the deal in that. I still had my tent up at that point (I had to save the upgrades for later. Like now, I've been at this luxury hotel 3 days. Must. Find. Backpackers.) Bernhard said, "Why isn't Jenn falling for this upgrade stuff?" Still, he managed to get the upgrade, get a deal, AND get a cooler installed in there with cold beers! I need him here in Nairobi. This guy tried to sell me "skim milk" the other day when it clearly said "thick and creamy whole milk" on the side. And he wouldn't let it go. Ursula was the lion because she's strong and regal and like the den mother looking after us and protecting us, keeping us in line. Rhonda was the elephant because she collects all the elephant dung! and can walk among the wild elephants, unharmed. Sandra was the leopard, cool and elusive but swift like the leopard with incisively witting comments. Then I was the Rhino because apparently I'm independent and like to do my own thing (the girls on this leg of the trip were teasing me because I'm always the last one to finish eating, the last one to get the final picture on the walk or practise Swahili, the last one off the booze cruise (because Ross and I decided to swim back to shore, while the others sailed it. I blame the Konyagi) but I mix well with the other animals.
The other theme phrase from the trip (in addition to TIA) has been "Go Down". On the first (second, and third) legs of the trip, the crew (Shiundu, Henry and Lelei) had us all watch this movie on their i-phone called "Mr. Bones". It's a South African flick, and one of the missives from Mr. Bones is the warning 'Go Down' which he shouts right before imminent danger. But no one ever listens. Hence the phrase, "Why must you bleed before you listen!?" When you think about it, this phrase can be applied to any situation. The nut hailstorm onto the pool: Go Down! Armed robbers entering the campsite: Go Down! The thatch collapsing under fire, and men still up on the roof with water buckets: Go Down! (BTW, since that fire, I've seen far too many ablution blocks with petrol tanks hooked up to the thatch roof for hot showers.) In additon to the "Go Down" litany, Henry also comes up with his own Henry-phrases. He's notorious for saying "Tomorrow never dies. That's why there are seven days in a week, Monday up to Sunday." Henry always has a smile on his face, even when he's muttering "Bloody Mzee" or telling us to chop smaller. One day he was stressed out by the clients' food demands and he said, "Somedays you tries your best, but at the end of the day, it's all shit." But he was still smiling. He has tutored me now on the breakfast shift and I have graduated from pancake, french toast and fried eggs 101. He's such a chill, easy guy but after one particularly gruelling day in the Delta we were chatting in the bar hammocks and he chatted about two hours straight. Later, when I went up to the bar to settle my tab, and saw all the tick marks next to Henry's name, I knew why! Cooking for so many different people from different cultures and backgrounds has got to be a huge challenge. Also, Lelei, our driver, quit smoking this trip. I think he's on Day 30 or something of not lighting up. Also a huge challenge in this line of work.
Nightime is pretty tame in Africa, when darkness hits most people go to bed, but we've had a few good nights beach dancing, midnight swimming, playing Trivial Pursuit, telling campfire stories and songs and watching Californication on Shiundu's laptop. In Chitimba, the owner rescued two fallen owls and they bopped their heads 360 degrees to the music.
Now that our 45 day Overlanding is over, I'm flying solo in Nairobi, on a bit of a low. Let me tell you, there are conmen everywhere. If I hear "Where you from? Canada? Vancouver or Toronto?" one more time I might scream. At one point on Day One, I had a bit of a soft spot for one poor guy and bought him some rice for his family. Then, in the store, he said, "Also, you buy me some cooking oil." I said, "Hey, you're lucky you're getting the rice!" Now, my soft spots are all gone. I am off to the beach to chill-ax. Tonight. Night Bus.
Jenn
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