Australia Part II
We checked into an underground backpackers’ hostel, most of the 2,600 inhabitants of the town preferring to live in dugout homes that are much cooler. The name of the town comes from an aboriginal language and is said to mean “White man’s hole in the ground.” The settlement of the area started in 1916 when the first opals were found, and people of 45 different nationalities, making up 60% of the population, have been lured here by the dream of making a fortune mining opals. The town, which has been described as the ugliest town in Oz (despite its hotchpotch assembly it’s so ugly that it must’ve been planned, with grey and green metal fences being predominant amongst the hillocks of sandstone and the dust), has developed into Australia’s main source of the precious stone, making the country the world’s leading producer accounting for 70% of the planet’s production.

Gary, who looked very much like an overweight Shaggy with his upper front teeth missing (Scooby Doo’s master and sidekick, not the neverwasbeen gravel-throated ragga star) moved to town also famous for being the location for Mad Max 3 in 1995 with exactly that in mind (making his fortune opal mining, not having 2 top twenty hits). I asked what was required to become an opal miner.
“Go to the doctor’s and get your head examined” he said before adding that he’d had to give up after 3 years and take up his current position working in a hotel to pay off his debts.

Mining here is only done on small plots with between one and a handful of miners working the claim. Gary explained that De Beers have pushed the value of the opal so low that, compared to diamonds, there is not enough profit in it to create the massive mines and security used to extract a girl’s best friend from the earth. One miner or digger can only hold a couple 100 metre by 100 metre claims at a time, and major corporations couldn’t get in if they wanted to. The landscape is littered with the debris of digging and failed diggers with mounds of excavated sandstone and rusting equipment and vehicles dotted around the place.

The dusty town is full of characters. Crocodile Dundee was based on Coober Pedy’s Crocodile Harry, but the real hunter beats Paul Hogan’s down-to-earth hero hands down. He is a Latvian baron who came to Australia at the end of World War 2 and started hunting on the north coast. His cave has may photos bearing testament to his prowess, a muscled and tanned Harry sporting nothing but a loincloth and spear standing over a pile of huge dead saurians. He came to Coober Pedy in the 70s hoping, like so many others, to find his fortune and, like so many others, he didn’t. In fact he put everything he had into his operation and ended up so broke that he couldn’t afford to move away. It was then that he started digging his own dugout house and collecting things.

The walls of his enormous cave, which was also used in Mad Max 3 as the chief villain’s lair, are festooned with ladies’ undies. The bedroom walls are covered in signatures of either adult virgins or Harry’s conquests, depending on whom you believe. The 80-something charmer would still appear to have a silver tongue as he showed us 2 g-strings that had arrived in the post from some Canadian visitors, one that was “hot and humid” according to the accompanying note.

Harry looks frail and old now, there isn’t much left of the bronzed Adonis in the photos learning how to hunt with a boomerang, but he has kept a fire burning in his eye that he ogled Sandrine with as he skittled into the shower. Maybe it was due to the pile of empty Cooper’s Sparkling Ale bottles that made a small mountain outside the front door.

In the Italian club at happy hour (there are also Serbian, Greek, Hungarian and Returned Servicemen’s clubs and a handful of pubs) was Jody, washing back the dust with a continuous supply of Cooper’s Pale Ale. Beards are big in Coober Pedy, and Jody’s was a big Bin Laden beard, inversely proportional to the amount of hair on his shaved pate that was peaking out from under his leather cowboy hat. He looked, as far as I could see, to be in his late 20s. As he was rolling a smoke with his thick, gnarled, grimy fingers, I asked him why he was drinking from a bottle and not the Cooper’s draught Pale Ale that was also available.
“’Cos summa them brewers put arsenic in the draught to make it brew quicker you see, so it tastes better in a bottle.”
Having been a brewer for 5 years I knew this to be complete bollocks, but a quick look at the large paring knife in Jody’s hat band and the size of the rest of him helped me refrain from correcting him although this meant that I now had to forego the draught and order a bottle myself. Despite appearances he was a very chatty and went on to explain in far more detail than I could comprehend, how opal prospecting works. The basics involve registering as a prospector for £15, buying 4 marker pegs, buying the right to work a claim for between 2 weeks and 2 years, marking it out, and getting stuck in. The bits about lines and strata and bugger knows what went over my head and I was struggling to keep up, the knife looking sharper every time a sneaked a peak.
“But it’s 95% luck anyway” he chucked in as I bought him a beer.
We got through a couple of rounds and Jody reckoned that a reasonable miner who put in the graft could do okay. He said that he’d brought in £20,000 in the last 6 months, starting at 7 and finishing at 4 in winter, doing 5 till midday in summer when the temperature gets up to the mid forties.
“The only danger in stopping early I that night shifters get tipped of by a gem purchasers that you’re onto a vein and they come and work it in the afternoon and the night” he said.
“What happens if they get caught?” I asked.
“If they’re lucky the Police catch them. If a miner catches them, well….there are lots of holes around here, and we all use explosive to dig underground. I know a bloke who’s sorted out 3 night shifters on his claim, the cops watched him shoot one. He’s normally in here on a Thursday, must have something on tonight.”
“So he’s out of prison already?”
“Never went in, mate. Cops were only there in case he missed.”
I suppose it’s one way of keeping crime down.
I enquired whether he’d had any problems on his claims.
“Naah, we open mine, above ground, see, across a 100 metre face so they’d never know where to start, it’d be pot luck. You should come down tomorrow and have a look and have a go at swinging the pick and playing with the gear.”
Result. We’d been down an old mine earlier in the day, but museum entrance fee didn’t cover playing with massive power tools and dynamite. We said we’d pop by on the way north, said our goodbyes, and went off to eat. After dinner I went to the Underground Hotel’s bar, that claims to be the only underground pub in the world, but I have strong doubts about this, and got talking to Michael.

Michael came from Austria on holiday with his girlfriend 15 years ago and was only supposed to stay one night. He met 2 Hungarians who, no doubt reminiscing back to the good old days of the Empire, offered to show him their mine the next day. When he emerged he was a partner with a third share. His less than impressed girlfriend changed her tune when, 3 days later, he came home with £2,000. Unfortunately for the Austro-Hungarian alliance, that was their only major find, and 6 month’s later Michael’s fraulein moved on.

Although Michael hasn’t lost much of his accent his English is very much “Strine”, Australian English, liberally smattered with “mate” and “fuckin”.
“I ayte all zem fuckin Ossey rules and rugby and football mate, why don’t zey just fucking gif zem all a fucking ball and zen zay stop fucking fighting for it? Eh, mate?”
It’s certainly a novel idea, but beggars the question as to why he’s chosen to live in a sport mad country.
“I don’t like fuckin’ cities, so zis place is perfect.”
“But what about a small coastal village?” I asked.
“Awww, I like all ze fuckin’ fishin’ anzat, but after a couple of weeks I miss zis fuckin’ place, mate. I don’t miss ze fuckin’ flies, but I miss ze heat and dust, and ziss iss home now.”
And 15 years of digging haven’t dampened his enthusiasm much.
“Ve all dream of finding dat one big pocket or a great vertical eam, the one to retire on, fuckin’ uzzers have, why not me mate? It could even happen tomorrow.”
It certainly wasn’t going to happen this evening, Mick’s slurring was, by now, more pronounced than Nena’s when she sang “in a werry werry super scurry” in 99 Red Balloons. Mick preferred to reminisce on how he joined the RSL (Returned Servicemen’s League).
“Youze godda haff a family member who wass in ze serfices and zey was so desperate here zat ven I said zat my dad was in fuckin’ SS, they said ‘fair enough mate’”.

The next morning we were off early, a bit too early for my fuzzy head, but not early enough to avoid the orifice invading flies that plague the outback. We decided not to take Jody up on his offer, just in case we were bitten by opal fever too. The dugout houses were interesting but not that interesting, and the junkyard charm of the town is probably short-lived.

Uluru, the iconic red mountain in the middle of Australia was another 850 kilometres from Coober Pedy. The aborigines have 2 stories explaining its creation, one of which cannot be told to non-aborigines. Pete, one of the Park Rangers, told us that in the dreamtime, the period of creation, two little boys started building a sandcastle and did not stop until the orange lump was built. The aborigines prefer that visitors do not find the rock as it is one of their most sacred sites and is against “Tjukunga”, aboriginal laws, religion, and customs. A long long time ago, two Mala, red wallaby hare men were carrying out a ritual when another tribe used powerful magic could create a devil dog to attack the Mala in order to stop their ceremony.

However, the local wishes are not respected by the average Aussie, who figures that he has the right to climb it, it being in Australia. I wonder if they go into mosques at prayer time with shoes on and with a tin of VB in their hand. Only the weather keeps the numbers down, either summit winds over 75 kilometres per hour, temperatures over 36°C, and rain the previous day closes the steep climb up the bear, round rock. Despite being closed as often as it is open, 43 people have died on the rock, 13 from falls and 30 from heart failure, and, according to the Park Rangers, plenty more have died of heart related problems after leaving the climb area, but do not therefore get put into the statistics. There are also a considerable number of nonfatal falls, but these go into the "injury" box, quadriplegics and cracked skulls being counted alongside sprained ankles and grazed knees.

Closing the walk completely is apparently a very sensitive issue, many consider that doing so would be giving into the local aborigines, feeling that land claims settlements have already given too much, whilst others are worried that tourist numbers would drop, despite having increased from two 250,000 in 1990 to 400,000 10 years later. A couple that we chatted with said that they wouldn't have come if they had known that they couldn't climb the rock (it was 38°C) though the Ranger that we spoke to was of the opinion that the Park would be better off without the patronage of this type of the visitor. Several of the accessible ancient rock art sites have been graffitied and footprints through the delicate and out of bounds bush are far too common, and, as there are no facilities on the top of the rock, people answer nature's call alfresco. I can't imagine an American tourist pulling her knickers round her ankles at the altar of the Sistine Chapel, or a Pole purging the python from the top of St Paul's Cathedral.

We avoided the would be desecrators, who had to content themselves with the 10 kilometre walk around the base accompanied by coachloads of OAPs, and drove 50 kilometres to Kata Tjuta, a group red sandstone conglomerate monoliths that are 200 metres higher than Uluru. As the sun drops the rock becomes brighter and brighter, the wind whistled through the valleys and gorges like thousands of ancestors whispering, becoming a burnished orange mountain arising out of the green outback. The sides are so steep that no one even thinks of flaunting the Tjukurpa to clamber over the sacred sites that are more stunning them Uluru.

Ancient aboriginal rock art here is very different to San rock art, most of it is monochrome and looks like it has been daubed on with a finger rather than painted on with a brush. Snakes are also a common feature in "Dreamtime" or creation stories. One of the most common ones at Uluru is about a fight between a price on and the venomous snake, their battle shaping part of the rock. Both peoples seem to auto destructor when mixed with booze too, alcoholism amongst town living aboriginals is rife and has led to tribal leaders declaring this part of the countryside as "dry". Most liquor stores comply and refuse to sell booze to Aborigines, or First Australians as they are also called.

The sites are well spread out across the outback and we didn't have enough time to visit the apparently beautiful Kings’ Canyon, the next stop being Australia's most central town, Alice Springs. We arrived before the end of the Alice Masters, a mini Australian Olympics for over 35 year olds, also known as the Friendly Games. For nine days Alice’s population of 25,000 swells to 35,000, as it is invaded by 40-somethings let off the lead away from their partner and kids. Bobby, a local barfly didn't have a very high opinion of them.
"They're a bloody pain in the arse, they drink all the beer and use up all the condoms."
We handed in our Mitsubishi mean machine, and had three days to wait until picking up a campervan for 40p a day on relocation deal to Darwin, 1500 k to the north. Just to pass the time, Alice not being a particularly interesting place, we looked at house prices but they were no cheaper than in the Sydney suburbs, due to a lack of available land despite a being in the middle of the desert. Alice has a busy programme of events in October. No sooner had the friendly games competitors finished their beer-up, bun-fight, bonk-fest, than CROC 2004 started. Unfortunately crocodile Harry was not going to be called out of retirement to wrestle again, CROC has nothing to do with scaly saurians being a three-day event to promote culture amongst "da yoof". From our roadside bedroom opposite the stadium the only music we could he was coming from the megabass sound system in some adolescent’s hotrod and teenage girl shouting “moy mate fancies yooo”. Alice may also be the capital of the Occa culture, most cars have coloured alloy wheels that are a different colour to the bodywork, obviously, the summit of good street cred’ being to have a rear spoiler matching the alloys.

As soon as we could pick up our camper van we were heading north. Since we'd been in the outback roadkill kangaroos had been frequent roadside decoration, but as we headed towards Elliott there were even more. Most of them fall foul of the road trains that continue driving at night, the roos sleeping in the shade of a tree during the day. Driving at night is a dangerous business in a car, an adult male kangaroo weighing over 150 kilos, and even following a road trains to clear a path for you is no guarantee of safety, the juggernaut trucks occasionally sending a freshly-splattered ‘roo sailing into the vehicle behind it. (And we all know how easily a Roo goes down, especially when there’s a big black man in the vicinity.)

Elliot is a traditional outback roadhouse, with a wooden bar and big ceiling fans slowly swinging round. Jody had suggested that we pay a visit there, in being one of his favourite pubs. We said hello to the boss on his behalf and they all seemed surprised that I hada had a quiet drink with him.
“Aww, good old Jody, big bastard eh, mate?” said one local dotingly.
“Mean hard fucker is Jody” said another, almost with a tear in his eye. A quick glance around the pub gave an idea as to why he was so revered here and why he liked it so much. The wall behind the bar had signs up naming customers that had been barred. 20 locals have been barred this year, 10 of them for life. In 15 years half the adult population of 600 could be refused patronage forever!! Abuse will see you barred for 4 to 6 months, refusing to leave three months, and threatening staff and fighting will see you permanently kicked out of the only pub within 100 kilometres. One woman was barred indefinitely for starting a riot, but Jody’s name wasn’t up there. Maybe he drives the 1400 k from the mining town to come up here for a bit of rough and tumble during his holidays.

The next morning we stopped for coffee in Daly Waters’ only pub, home to Australia's most remote traffic light that would also appear to be Australia's most ignored traffic light as it seemed to stay permanently on red. We went into the ramshackle pub, made of chunky stone walls and sheet metal roofing, to have a morning coffee. At 10 a.m. it was already a muggy 34°C outside, and maybe three less inside, and the locals were already on the beer. Most looked as if they had been weaned on it, unless high humidity gives you a big belly and splits the capillaries in your nose, of course. The heat is impressive and we had to stop off at a rock pool in Mataranka at lunchtime to have a dip. Even though the pool was thermal and the water at 34°C, it was still refreshing. By the time we arrived in Katherine in mid afternoon the thermometer was showing 42°C and it was also steamily humid. The only respite was in the air-conditioned shopping mall or in the water, so we went for another dip in some hot springs outside of town that flow over a one metre waterfall and into the main river. The springs were surprisingly quiet and we called down looking at the trees full of fruit bats that were chattering away.
"Ere mate, look at the tits on that Sheila."
"My bloody oath, they’re a right nice pair."
"Oh struth mate, look at the bloody joker she’s with."
"He’s another bloody tourist, mate, look at that roadkill leather bush hat."

At the Nitmiluk National Park campsite we finally got to see some living indigenous marsupials as in the evening hundreds of kangaroos hopped around looking to dinner. When we got up in the morning only a few remained, and the others got off to play chicken in the middle of the night on the highway? We had awoken to another stinker, the mercury had never dropped below 27°C during the night anyway, so we went for a canoe trip up the first and second gorges of the Katherine river. Apart from affording great views of the cliffs and sandy beaches where freshwater crocodiles (allegedly harmless) had lay their eggs, it also meant that we could have a dip whenever we felt hot. The water was beautifully clear, despite its depth and the dark crops making it look murky green and tasted good too.

After a morning of splashing about we hit the road north, as the camper van had to be in Darwin on the north coast the following day. An hour out of Katherine and hour from our destination of Litchfield NP, we drove into a storm even bigger than the Old Trafford Soupgate media frenzy. At 40 kilometres per hour, with the windscreen wipers going faster than referee Mike Riley pointing to the spot, we were even more blind that him. Cars in Australia don't come with fog lights, but we ploughed on slowly down the highway that looked more like a river in places. Lightning streaked out of the sky overhead and struck the ground around us. At one point there was a flash every two seconds, and several multiple bursts to one spot. It felt like we were driving through an artillery barrage, and the chances of being hit on the move being equal to being hit while stationary, we pushed on, hoping that we were driving through the storm rather than following it. Our luck was in, despite my irrational logic that we would suffer some heavenly retribution for not putting the previous night’s £7 camping fee in the box for late arrivals, and 30 minutes later we were through it and at the next campsite.

The storm lingered nearby, and as I listened to the Aussies win their first test series in India since 1969 the horizon glimmered with lightning strikes. Jason “Mulletman” Gillespie attempted to take 10 wickets for the first time in a match and the Indian tail were smashing the vaunted pie chuckers around the park when the broadcast was interrupted by a severe storm warning for the area just to the north. Shane Warne managed to not get hit for 6 for once and the last Indian was out, the storm left us alone, but left us wondering what state we’d find Darwin in after reading about the effects of cyclone Tracy on Christmas Eve 1974. Before Santa had time to pop down the chimneys, peak wind speeds were up to 280 kph and by the time the turkey should have been in the oven 50% to 60% of Darwin’s houses were either totally destroyed damaged beyond repair and only 400 survived relatively intact.

After a morning dip in the idyllic pool under Florence Falls, we went to have a look. Fortunately it was still all there, and the locals seemed very pleased to have had some unseasonal rain. Darwin was pleasantly surprising, being a green, clean town of 70,000 odd souls. We had access to the laundry in the backpackers’ hostel and Sandrine pulled off another stunner by mistaking the tumble dryer for the washing machine and loading it full of detergent and coins.

Darwin has an excellent history and art museum with a fine collection of aboriginal art. The stories depicted by the paintings gave an insight into Abo beliefs and culture, although some of the explanations were even more contrived and the worst examples of modern European art. You know, the primary colour geometric shape shit that a six-year old with a ruler could paint, where the red circle represents the warmth of the universality of life, the green upside down triangle the fertility of the womb, blahdi blahdi blah. Well the First Australian equivalent tells the story of a specific old lady who was the snake God "Oojamaflip" who crossed the river to meet her uncle and they caught a croc and…..all I can see is a load of random dots that would look nice on an apron aura bedspread. I think the real art is getting someone to shell out £600 for it. Fortunately this was not representative of the majority of the work on display, some of the traditional paintings on tree bark canvas with natural pigments, painted with brushes made entirely from wood, showed remarkable finesse. A trip into Kakadu NP to look at rock art highlighted a very complexity of aboriginal art; some looked like finger painting by acid freaks, whilst some of it would have made Picasso proud.

The natural history section also had a stuffed saltie, or saltwater crocodile (the nasty variety), called Sweetheart on display. Alive, he waited at 780 kilos and was nearly six metres long before his penchant for overturning dinghies in the harbour led to his downfall. The museum also explained that we wouldn’t be going for a swim. After 5000 kilometres across the outback, and with the mercury touching 38° C, we were ready for a dip in the sea. An exhibit explained that swimming is off limits between October and May as the Timor Sea is full of box jellyfish, apparently the most poisonous animal known to man. The squidgy transparent bastards have more than enough venom to kill a man a minutes. Diving is also restricted due to large tides varying in depth by up to 10 metres twice daily that stir the bottom-up into an impenetrable soup. SCUBA is only possible twice a month and hour visit coincided with a non-binding window, making a visit to one of the many World War II wrecks in the harbour impossible. Darwin bore the brunt of Australia's effort against the Japanese in the Pacific conflict and the bay is littered with aircraft and sunken shipping that are now the happy homes to lots of reef fish.

We left Darwin in another dollar-a-day rental, this time a new Hyundai Beemer wannabe with all the toys necessary to eat up the tarmac to Cairns, 3300 k away. To try and put the distances into context we looked on an interactive atlas. Paris to Moscow is around 3000 k, and Plymouth to Montreal is the equivalent of the 5000 k Melbourne to Darwin drive, London to Baghdad clocks up 4600 k. It sounds like a long way, but with the cruise control set at 150 kph and with very little traffic on the roads, 900 k a day is not a problem in Australia as long as you have a fair supply of CDs as there are no border controls to waste your time and test your nerves and the roads are straighter than anything the Romans ever built.

We’d been trying to counter the chocolate mud cake and cream breakfasts with tuna and cheese salad lunches. We noticed that the cheapest cheeses with just called "tasty cheese". It's essentially a Cheddar but Australia must have some regulatory body that stops producers calling it "Cheddar style", much the same way that Europe is afflicted with bored Brussels desk jockeys telling us whether we can call a ham from a pig raised around Parma, butchered in Palma, and cured in Palma, but sliced in a supermarket deli in Scunthorpe, "Parma Ham". Personally, I couldn’t give an EU regulation toss (from an illegal alien Brazilian transvestite behind a wheelie bin along the canal, as opposed to an EU regulation VIP toss which is administered by a barely legal, heavily made up, abducted Albanian in the back of the EU commission for Workers Rights limousine) where the stuff was sliced. Does this make the ex-Parma Ham Scunthorpe Ham? No. It just makes it plain old ham, along with the budget muck that contains 30% water and enough lines of cellulite to have been sliced off (insert fat B grade celebrity name) ‘s arse. Just that it tastes 10 times better and costs 5 times as much. Instead of wasting their time and our money on this they could be clamping down on far more misleading names for comestible products, such as the "hot dog". Imagine the thousands, nay millions, of camcorder toting Oriental visitors who have ordered one and, instead of receiving a bit of spicy chow bow-wow, end up with tepid mechanically removed chicken meat in an artificial casing and last week's winning lottery draw in E-number additives.
The Lonely Planet guidebook describes Mount Isa as a town of striking beauty. I think the reviewer has a strikingly warped mind. The approaches to the town, abrupt red ridges covered in green spinifex, made a pleasant change from the rest of the flat outback, but the town itself is, at first glance, an eyesore due to the mine that is its main raison d'etre, being the third largest silver mine and one of the 10 largest copper mines in the world. After a short drive around the town however, you realise that this place would win Ugliest town of the year in Uglyland. It's not just because you can see the 270-metre stack from the lead smelter (that is also mined here in great quantity) from everywhere in town, but because the town must have been laid out by a glue sniffing drunkard born to a lead-mining inbred mother. Maybe it is so that you can see the place of his conception from every angle. And maybe there is a reason why concrete or would prefab seem to be the only authorised home building materials. It was like walking around a 1960s army barracks. Coupled with the 46°C heat, I was expecting one of the cast of "It ain't half hot Mum" to start barking orders. The heat was making us a bit delirious and at 11 p.m. it was still 34° C. The old night manager started to look like the radio operator with his little round glasses and sweaty hair. It was time to move on and head for the coast.

The outback certainly has a rugged charm, but after 18 days it was wearing thinner than an Olsen twin. Some people live out here forever on the stations or farms. The Royal Flying Doctor Service is well-known for providing assistance to people in far away locations but the Mount Isa School Of The Air is an equally meritorious organisation, providing lessons over the air for 230 students in a catchment area the size of France. The little yokels get an education in the usual range of subjects through coursework that is sent to them and lessons that, until last week, were carried out on HF radio. We took part in one of the first lessons to be carried out over the phone on conference call, and the pseudo headmaster said that he couldn't wait for everyone to be on the Internet with WebCam. I say pseudo head because he just overseas administration and logistics, and a bit of staff punctuality really. It's not like he can catch anyone smoking behind the bike sheds or vandalising the bogs. What chance does he have being accused of lingering looks at boys’ scrotum or handing out detentions for dirty shoes?

Just before dark the ‘roos started coming out of were ever they sleep during the day and hanging around under the trees near the side of the road in 20s and 30s.
“Good kip mate.”
“Yeah, you?”
“Yeah, wotcha doin tanite?”
“Aww, bitta chicken ya know mate, you?”
“Yeah, reckon oi’ll get meself splattered if oi caaan.”
“Sweet as.”
“Yeah sweet mate.”

Why, with about two roads covering an area 30 times the size of Switzerland, do they love to try and cross them? Sure, there are 90 million of them in the country but the amount of roadkill here would make a redneck slather. On some stretches there was a corpse every 50 metres. There was even a dead wombat, a rare ocelot (a feral cat) and a rare honey possum, a small marsupial that, despite getting all of its nutritional requirements from pollen and nectar has a sperm bigger than the blue whale. It has a pair of nuts so big that if ours were proportionally the same size they'd be as big as a four kg bag of spuds. Fortunately this one had died of a blow to the head and not a flattened scrotum.

900 kilometres, 10°C, and 30 years away is Townsville, a town of 150,000 inhabitants on the Pacific Ocean. Much less known that smaller Cairns, Townsville has plenty of attractive old buildings, with artistic modern street lighting and a busy nightlife. We had left the outback and, despite clocking up over 6000 kilometres in it, hadn't met any traditional aborigines. Less than 2% of Australians claim aboriginal roots, around 400,000 people in total, but many only have one aboriginal grandparent. (And there’s nowt wrong with that – my grandad was well and I'm proud to cheer on the Welsh XV even when they're on another hiding to nothing.) Those that have 100% aboriginal blood seem to be, in the most part, either of the wino/welfare sponger variety, or living in traditional areas. Having seen what blues has done to some of their kin, and the overtly racist policies pursued in Australia and until 1970, I'm not surprised that the traditionalists stay far away. Museums and rock art sites were only real insight into the aboriginal customs and beliefs.

From 1918 to 1970 the Australian government forcibly removed almost 100,000 aboriginal kids, nearly all of whom were under the age of five, from their families. They were relocated hundreds of miles away in either institutions or with white foster parents, and told that their parents had died. Education was kept to a minimum, as was food, though hard work was plentiful and sexual or physical abuse common. This "Stolen Generation", as it has become known is still waiting for official apology.

On the way up to Townsville we drove past the Big Brolga, a brolga being a type of stork and the emblem of Townsville and Queensland. It was yet another of Australia's "Big Things" that would be passed on our travels. In Melbourne we had seen the Big Abalone, a 4m x 3m oyster, in Kingston the massive Big Lobster, a behemoth at 17 metres high and 50 metres in length, the Big Which in Coober Pedy, Adelaide’s Big Scotsman, a Big Cornish Miner, the Big Barramundi in Katherine, the Big Boxing Croc, the Big Think Buffalo and the Big Stockwhip in the Top End, and recently the Big Cassowary in Mission Beach.

Australia's passion for Big Things started in 1964 when the first one, the Big Banana, was built in Coff’s Harbour, NSW. There are now over 120 Big Things around Australia including the Big Mower, three bananas, three apples, a mango, two oranges, two pineapples and a fruit bowl to put them in no doubt. There's even a Giant Worm to throw in. Churchill, Victoria, has a 32-metre high cigar, although it looks more like a handle of a fly swatter. Victoria’s Myrtleford has a 24.5-metre cigarette, and for armchair athletes there are three big wine bottles, a big wine cask, a big beer can, a big stubby and a big rum bottle.

In his introductory essay to David Clark's "Big Things" Dr Stephen Stockwell, a senior lecturer in communications at Griffith University, when comparing Aussie Big Things to earlier US counterparts whose sole purpose was to attract punters says:
"In Australia, Big Things have always had higher purposes. They celebrate notions of regional and identity, often with anaesthetic sensibility."
I think he'd had a couple of tokes on Nimbin’s Big Joint in NSW.
As we moved up the coast to Cairns we passed the 10 metre high Big Marlin, and a 14 metre reinforced concrete Captain Cook, whose outstretched right hand has temporarily held a yo-yo, a beer can, and a reefer.

The North Queensland coast made a wonderful changed to the flat outback. The mountains were covered in tropical greenery, with sugarcane aplenty. The palm trees and banana plantations alongside the white sand beaches and the blue sea had us dreaming of Fiji already. However, house prices and box jellyfish mean that Northern Queen flat was crossed off the “Possibles” list.

As we pootled the last stretch to Cairns, the kangaroo remained disappeared, only to be replaced by antechinus. These oddly-named nocturnal rat-size creatures seemed to be partial to a bit of lemmingesque tyre hunting too. They certainly have an odd lifestyle and it may be their lack of stable relationships that does they head in. Males only have an 11th month lifespan. After spending the first 10 eating and growing, their last month is taken over by procreation. Their testicles swell and they become so preoccupied by shagging that they forget to eat and literally bonk themselves to death.


- posted by Sid @ 11/16/2004 03:15:00 PM
© 2004 Christopher Bartlett. All Rights Reserved

 
Australia part I
We landed at a surprising cool Sydney; at over 4 million inhabitants the biggest city in the home of marsupials, Neighbours, fair dinkum Occas, Abos, didgeridoo and Rolf Harris. The Occas, salt of the earth Aussies who drive a “Ute” (originally a utility vehicle of the flat bed car variety, now a gas-guzzling sleek 2-seater sports vehicle with room for fishing rods, chairs, and 12 crate of beer) are quick to call their Antipodean neighbours sheepshaggers, but Australia is also home to 156 million baa-baas, more than 3 times the ovine population of New Zealand.

Janet, my elder sister and Sydney suburb resident, got the barbie going and cracked open the stubbies (beers) and we settled in to the back room. The following day I went to the park with my two nephews, Jimmy 12, and Charlie 6, to have a game of cricket. They were okay at slogging, but I wanted to try and teach them how the game should be played. We set up a short wicket so that the boys could get some runs and they had a fair go, but they couldn’t quite beat me despite my bowling underarm only. I think it was my 24 off one ball broke their spirit. It only seemed fair to the boys that we have the same length wicket, so two strides and a good reach, a quick transfer of the plastic bat to the other hand, a stride and a reach would see another 2 added to my total. After a lusty blow down the ground I made the most of the boys arguing about whose turn it was to go and fetch it and scampered up and down, putting runs up faster than Shane Warne downing pies at a pie warehouse closing down sale. I declared a couple of overs later on 200 and something, it seemed like a safe total and I could always come off my long run up if necessary. After all, learning to lose graciously is all part of growing up, and I like to think that I was contributing to their education. In the end I didn’t need to give them any West Indian chin music, the match coming to an end when Charlie started to get grumpy at his brother bat-hogging. We went home for some nerve soothing ice cream and a celebratory beer, no victory over the Aussies is too cheap, even over half-English Aussies.

That night another great Aussie sporting event took place, the Australian Rules Football Grand Final. Aussie Rules is a mixture of rugby and Gaelic football, though having “rules” in the name seems to be a bit of a misnomer. I had watched a bit on Channel 4 as a kid, so had a fair idea of what was going on in the oval; it’s not quite the 36-man free-for-all for men who like to wear hot pants that it appears to be at first glance. Kneeing and punching seem perfectly acceptable, the ball is passed by being punched out of the hand, kicked and caught cleanly for a mark, or the player can run with the ball as long as he bounces it every 15 metres. Punting the ball through the centre posts gets a goal worth 6 points, whilst sticking it through a centre and outer post scores a 1 point “behind” for your team.

Aussie Rules is the most watched sport in the country, despite the majority of the teams in the championship coming from around Melbourne. Sydney and Brisbane are the homes of Rugby League, whilst the Union players come almost entirely from Sydney, or Polynesia when they can pinch them before the Kiwis do. The 2004 final was the first to be held without a team from Victoria being present, the favourites, Port Adelaide Power, overcoming last year’s winners from Brisbane, despite being labelled as chokers by some sections of the press in the pre-match hype. In the greatest moment in sporting diplomacy since the Australian cricket captain Mark Waugh said what everyone else thought when he called his Indian counterpart, Saurav Ganguly, a prick, in an interview just after the final whistle the winning captain was asked how it felt.
“I dunno mate, it’s a bit unreal. I probably shouldn’t say this mate, but to anyone who doubted us, they can stick it up their arse!”
Professional sportsmen in Australia would appear to need even more coaching in communications than English Premier League prima donnas. A week later the rugby league season came to its climax with their Grand Final in Sydney. The winning captain’s post-match on field interview went:
“It’s unbelievable, mate, I can’t believe it, mate, it’s unbelievable.”
The more they get paid, the dumber they seem. At least fast bowler Jason Gillespie used his mullet-covered bonce when asked to comment on what was one of the worst test match wickets of all time in the third test in Mumbai, India, where 20 wickets fell on the 3rd day of 5.
“You know I can’t comment, mate, but I just spoke to a mate of mine and he said he thought it was an absolute shocker, but like I said mate, I can’t comment….” And then he chortled into his shaggy beard before the mike was turned off.

As well as having a wide range of mullets still in fashion (having two of your top cricketers sporting mullets of varying disgrace – Glenn McGrath is having a bit of a go too – can’t help stamp out this vile “hairstyle”), the Aussies have an enormous choice of baked beans. Now I thought that the might fartleberry was a British invention, but, just like cricket, the Aussies have made it better. Heinz isn’t far off having 57 varieties of the student’s staple diet here. As well as the usual health conscious crap like no salt, low salt and flab fighters, they have chunky tomato, which can come with bacon bits or garlic and onion, BBQ, Ham sauce, cheese, and cheese and ham. Woolworth’s supermarkets (no link to the shite high street shop of my youth that was absolutely the last place you’d go for anything) also stock a great range of fresh cakes, which may go some way to explaining why Aussies nippers are quickly closing the gap on British kids in the flab stakes. We adopted the chocolate mud cake and thick cream as our staple breakfast and afternoon snack.

After a couple of weeks of knocking around the Sydney ‘burbs, it was time to move on. Despite the temptation of being close to my sister’s roast dinners, possibly the finest in Australia, this really was the place for us to settle down. Although 50 kilometres out of the city, Ingleburn is still part of the city, and takes an hour-long train ride to reach the bright lights of the harbour and downtown Sydney. The cities 4 million inhabitants stretch out another 10 k to the southwest in single story houses, most of which are prefab concrete slabs on top of small brick stilts clad in fetching wood look-a-like plastic. The cheapest that we could see within our budget only had two bedrooms, and was in Ingleburn itself. Now, Ingleburn isn’t a bad place, it’s no more unattractive than the rest of the ‘burbs, it’s clean and tidy, but is just a collection of streets around a mall and a station with a business park here and there that spread out until they hit the next ‘burb an its collection of shops, offices, and streets. There is no nightlife and no local pubs, you either drink at home or get on the train for an hour to the city centre. This would be like Reading not having any pubs, and the all the residents getting on the slow train to London for a few jars.
We hopped on a plane, having got the ticket as part of our round the world package, and went to spent a few days in Melbourne with a mate that I’d made in France playing cricket. Bryce and I used to knock over old codgers who came over to play friendly matches against our club in the Loire valley. We had planned an on-pitch comeback revival, but Bryce is turning into an old codger himself now and can’t sling ‘em down anymore. It’s a shame as his best ball, in his opinion, was the one that broke our wicket keepers nose. It’s hard to believe that he’s a research scientist; his hobbies being woodwork, homebrewing, and unsuccessfully requesting blow-jobs from his wife over dinner.

We went for a bike ride to hip St Kilda Beach and rode around Melbourne central on its old 1920’s tram. Melbourne has more charm than Sydney, its Gothic-style churches and neo-classical public buildings and iron-decorated terraced houses giving it a more homey feel than it’s more modern looking rival in New South Wales. We had a look at Melbourne’s ‘burbs, each one reminding me of another ARF team from my adolescence. Unfortunately even the distant suburbs of Hawthorn, Geelong, Collingwood, Carlton, and Essendon were all out of our budget. If we’d have wanted to become St Kilda fans we’d have had to shell out £300,000, triple our budget! Despite being the home of Aussie Rules, Melbourne is also the self-proclaimed culture capital of the country. Large numbers of southern European immigrants followed by waves of Asian migration have revolutionized the city's cuisine, style, and atmosphere, and Melbourne has become an important city of multi-cultural Australia with the highest concentration in the country of Australia's Italian population and significant numbers of Lebanese, Vietnamese, Greek, Chinese, and Irish immigrants.

Much to Sandrine’s delight, most of the weekend was spent tasting and brewing beer, and, of course, talking about cricket. I was keen to go to the theatre, but time was pressing on and the Great Ocean Road followed by the outback were waiting for us.

We signed up on the Qantas Frequent Flyer program and got a discount on our rental, and the £300 fee for leaving the car in Alice Springs, right in the middle of the country, was waived. As an extra bonus they upgraded us from a class B car to a class E V6 Mitsubishi wannabe. The Great Ocean Road took us along the coast, around the bays and over its headlands, twisting through Eucalypt and Pine forests, alongside the cobalt and turquoise blue of the Southern Ocean. We stopped along the way to look at the 12 apostles, a series of sandstone stacks sticking up out of the sea. We were accompanied by several hundred other disciples who were also after the picture postcard holiday snap.

The night was spent in prison though it had nothing to do with the Magna’s V6 turbo and my heavy foot. Since closure in the mid 1990s Mount Gambier’s gaol has been turned into accommodation for backpackers, and a self-guided tour before bedtime gave a little too much information for light sleepers. The gaol started of with a fairly relaxed regime; at the beginning of the 20th century prisoners could nip over the low wall to buy a few beers in town. Later on however, it became a maximum-security gaol, housing up to 30 detainees, 3 of whom were hanged and buried in the exercise yard. We went to bed with the door locked.

We were up and away early, and motored through more pleasant coastal scenery, stopping to test the water at the town of Kingston, which claims to be the home of Australian lobster fishing, with a 15 metre high and 17 metre long fibreglass lobster standing at the entrance to the town. Unfortunately the water temperature was as low as the house prices still over budget, so we sped up to Adelaide, once considered a city of churches. In today’s climate of waning mainstream spirituality, the city is also known as the city of pubs, but we were too tired to check out more than 2 and had another big drive ahead.

500k out of Adelaide went past Woomera, once a base used to launch top-secret British experimental rockets, and more recently home to the controversial Woomera Detention Centre. When an asylum seeker comes to Australia they present their case to an immigration officer. If their story is deemed too weak, they can appeal. Whilst waiting to overturn a decision they are put into “mandatory detention” in places like Woomera.

There are currently around 1300 refugees, including 139 children, who have been locked up without committing a crime and have no idea when they will be released. Hundreds of them have been held for over 12 months, and those that cannot be returned to their homeland due to a lack of diplomatic arrangements have been held for up to 4 years. Under international conventions everyone has the right to seek asylum in any place that they can reach, there is absolutely nothing illegal about this, especially when considering that the most recent arrivals are mainly from Afghanistan and Iraq, two countries where Australian troops have subsequently participated in the fighting. It’s not as if the country was awash with boat people, arriving in Australia is extremely hazardous given its distance from the world’s trouble spots and its geography. Whilst Africa has over 5 million refugees, Asia 8 million, the greatest number of informal asylum seekers reaching Australia in any one year was 4100 in 2001.

After another 360k through the outback we hit the Opal capital of the world, Coober Pedy. The drive was surprisingly easy given that the roads are pretty straight and apart from the 50 metre long road trains, lorries pulling up to 5 trailers, there is little traffic and no speed traps. With the cruise control set at a reasonable speed it only took 6 hours of driving. Getting out of the air-con luxury of the car on one of her frequent pipi stops, Sandrine looked like she’d walked into a wall. 300 k out of Adelaide the heat felt stifling, and our picnic lunch was taken inside the car.
We could have also taken the train to Alice rather than driving. The Ghan, a service from Adelaide to Darwin, took one hundred years to complete. It’s construction started in 1877 in the south though, rather unfortunately, in the wrong place. The track went right across an undetected floodplain which would fill and simply wash the tracks away. To compound this, the foundations were flimsy, the sleepers to light, the grading too steep, and it meandered hopelessly. Top speed was 30 kph and in the beginning travellers went part of the way on broad gauge, then onto narrow, and the last 600 k to Alice were completed by camel train, the Afghani camel drivers being the source of the train’s name. The line to Alice was finally completed in 1929, 52 years after work started. Heavy rainfall would strand the train in the outback requiring supplies to be parachuted in. Even British Rail would find it hard to beat the Ghan’s record of coming in 10 days late. In 1982 the old Ghan and its full complement on 140 passengers made its last 50-hour run to Darwin, as a new standard gauge track had been laid over a more appropriate route, carrying twice as many passengers to Darwin in 20 hours. But with tickets at £160 each from Melbourne to Alice Springs, it worked out cheaper to rent and drive at our pace, seeing the sights along the way.

- posted by Sid @ 11/12/2004 10:32:00 PM
© 2004 Christopher Bartlett. All Rights Reserved

 
Namibia Part III and the return to South Africa
Sorry about the delay, I've had lots of translating to do, this one's a biggy........

After another day in Etosha it was time to leave the animals behind and go and visit a cheetah sanctuary on our way to Kaokoland, in the northwest corner of the country. The “Save the Cheetah” Cheetah farm does exactly what it says on the packet. Tollie used to run his farm in the traditional way, breeding livestock for sale. He also had the traditional problems of predators having a go at his livelihood. Like most farmers, he considered the cheetahs as pests, and set traps for them. One day they managed to catch one but, not having the heart to kill it, they built a pen for it and fed it. Word got around, and another local farmer asked him if he could catch a cat that was taking his livestock, and word got around and Tollie started building up a collection. “So I thought ‘If you can’t beat them, join them’”. He farms very little now, and has built up a business out of the cheetah-based tourism.
Mario, Tollie’s 31 year-old son, greeted us at the gate flanked by 2 guard cheetahs. They had been orphaned just after birth and hand-reared, and looked far more effective than a Doberman or a Rottweiler. Mario directed us past the lodge to our campsite next to the swimming pool and told us to be ready at four to pet the guard cheetahs and feed the wild ones.
Despite them living with the family and weighing less than the semi-tame/semi-wild lions that we’d walked with in Zimbabwe, the pet cheetahs made us more nervous than the lions did. Maybe it was because we weren’t armed with a twig, maybe because a cheetah’s claws are always out and are a constant reminder that they’d only be one winner in a fight….whatever, they were certainly impressive to be close too, and apart from bring attracted to Sandrine’s flip-flops, were perfectly well behaved, once we’d removed our sunglasses. (The cheetahs see them as big threatening eyes and like to have a go at them.)
We hopped onto the back of a bakkie with a dustbin full of zebra meat and drove to the male enclosure. As soon as we’d entered the 4 km² pen, the first cheetah turned up for his tea. As we drove around slowly more came out and trotted along parallel to the pick-up, conditioned by the daily dinner run. When they were congregated somewhere near the middle and had finished posing for the camera Mario parked, sauntered round to the back, and began lobbing steaks around. Although there was one for everyone, there was a bit of competition to get the first feed, but nothing that a couple of left hooks from the dominant male couldn’t sort out. Then the cats showed their athleticism by leaping off the ground to catch the up and under and sprint of into the bush in a burst of speed and a puff of dust that made Jason Robinson look like me playing rugby. 0 to 110 kph in 4 seconds is impressive in a sports car, exhilarating on a motorbike, but seeing a fluffy puddy tat with his cute tear stain from the corner of his eye to the corner of his mouth take off almost as fast as Michael Schumacher is incredible.

The Namibian government treats the cheetahs as pests as advises farmers to shoot them on sight. Officially “Save the cheetah” have 19 of the beautiful beasts on the property, and are not allowed to save anymore, and have been told to make sure that they do not breed. The Ministry of Agriculture suggested sterilising them, but apparently this would take away their will to live, so the males and females are kept in separate enclosures. I thought that with a world population of 7500, of which 2500 are in Namibia, that is constantly decreasing due to weaker gene pools, lack of prey, most of the country being fenced, and farmers being encouraged to kill, that National parks would have been more than happy to take them in. In the whole of Etosha, 3 hours up the road, there are only 55, and the Kruger Park has only 200. The Wildlife and Conservation Department apparently feel that it is too much hassle to take any in, and whilst foreign parks are willing to pay to have them, the pontiffs in the Namibian government have forbidden the export of live wild animals (although trophy heads and skins are fine, of course.)

After a night out under the stars, we headed towards Epupa Falls on the Kunene river, that separates Namibia from Angola, in the remote area called Kaokoland. After 350 K of northerly travel on decent gravel roads, and a fruitless stop for meat (that should be a meatless stop then – Sandrine wasn’t too keen on the goat on display) in the regional capital of Opuwo, a dusty ramshackle place of 2,000 souls, we came to a fork indicating Epupa Falls to the right, going past the “Good Road Shop” and “Good Road Bar”. 2 k later we were down to 30 kph and were wondering what the bad road must have been like.
Kaokoland is a wilderness in what is one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world. The inhabitants are the Himba people, a Herero tribe that sought refuge in this remote corner in the early 19th century. The women still wear traditional dress of a goatskin skirt and cover themselves from head to foot in a red cream made from butter, fat, and ochre earth that protects their skin from the sun. Their bare breasts droop down their chest and ribs and shine like the reflection of the setting sun on a muddy lake and their hair is modelled with the paste into an array of fashions, like Morph meats J-P Gaultier. Bits of leather and fur are added, with married women having one style and single women sporting others. Young boys have a cloth-covered single plait, like a Mohican tail, across their heads, which is split into two when they are considered old enough to marry.
The 70k track, that alternates between stones that looked like they want to slash your tyres and rutted sand modelled into corrugated sheeting across the line of advance that judders and shakes the car like a washing machine on spin cycle, winds through the hills and crosses numerous dried out stream and river beds. Despite no signs of water, the hillsides and valleys are full of small, almost leafless trees, like someone had planted thousands of dead branches in the ground. Sandrine was feeling paradoxical and said that the openness of the flat areas was suffocating and that she could drown in the dryness. I suppose that if you can be deafened by silence, then why not? The little foliage they had was red and yellow and green and brown, all on the same tree, like they didn’t know which season it was. Eventually, and none too soon, we rounded yet another bend in the red, orange, yellow, and white landscape to be met by an oasis of green Makalani palms bordering the Kunene river.
The campsite was 50 metres upstream from the top of the L-shaped Falls, that stretch out over 600 odd metres. We hadn’t been out of the air-conditioned car since Opuwo, and 200 k further north it was palpably hotter and muggier. White Namibians and South Africans wandered around in swimsuits and the locals that owned modern clothing did their washing in the rock pools at the top of the falls.
Outside the campsite, on one of the craft stalls, we met Venomambo, a 25-year-old Himba in a basketball singlet and jeans. He offered as his services as a tour guide to go and see his village. We were a bit surprised by his attire, as most of the Himba that we had seen previously were in traditional dress, but he reassured us that he was a real Himba by showing us his gap-toothed grin. At around 12 or 13 years of age, when a Himba is considered ready to become an adult, their bottom four front teeth are removed with a stone and the wound dressed with hot meat to cauterise it. As we looked more closely we noticed that the same orthodontics were applied to the girls.
We negotiated a fee with Venomambo, which means "many people talking", for his services and went to the little general store to buy some gifts for the head of the village. More than suitably equipped with 5 kilos of maize meal, a big bag of sugar, a packet of tea, a 1 kilo bar of soap, a large bag of boiled sweets, and some snuff that Sandrine had bought for herself but unsurprisingly didn’t like, we drove to the village.

The village was on a small plateau, 7k from the river, surrounded by hills on three sides and a larger mountain, known as the Eland’s breastbone, a bit further weight to the west. There was a central cattle kraal with a series of sacred fire places around it, and 20 odd main huts spread around the fire place. The huts were bullet-shape, or vibrator tip-shape, depending on whether you’re a lover or a fighter, about 6 feet high in the centre and made from branches bound together with leather strips covered in a thick coating of mud. Some deluxe versions also had a sort of front porch entrance area, but that wasn't really enough room to hang your jacket and store your football boots, let alone a set of golf clubs and a mountain bike.

The village chief was away looking after cattle, so his wife officiated in his absence. We stood back while Venomambo asked permission for us to visit and presented our gifts. The snuff and boiled sweets seemed particularly welcome and that we were bidden to join them around the fire by a collection of gappy grins. By the way the boiled sweets disappeared the adolescent tooth removal ceremony looked like a pre-emptive measure against tooth decay. The ladies of the village were busy making jewellery, cradling toddlers, and since our arrival, sucking on boiled sweets like they were Hugh Grant’s todger.

We were taken to see one of the huts, occupied by a young woman who reckoned that she was about 16, who was with her 2-month old son. Venomambo explained that for six months after giving birth she wasn't allowed to leave the hut, meals were brought to her, and that her husband was not allowed to sleep with her either. He could come to visit to see his wife and offspring but had to sleep elsewhere, which was generally out with the goats or cattle, or with a casual girlfriend in a village near to where the animals were at pasture. Before getting his extra-marital relief he would describe his prospective partner to his wife who would give her approval or tell him to find someone else more suitable. When asked about the risks of HIV and siring a large, illegitimate family, Venomambo said that the Himba were condom-wise and these problems were not common……
We wandered across the village past the men’s sacred fire and a pile of cow skeletons that were the remains of the last village feast from 9 months previously when the preceding village chief passed away. People came from far away and 20 cows were braaied up, and the bones would stay scattered around in memory of a great feast until the next wedding or funeral. The horned heads were stacked up on his grave outside the village to help carry him to the place where spirits go. The central area of the village was a mixture of hard, dry mud and hard, dry animal dung, which meant that there were a fair few flies about. One of the ladies had a seriously red and weeping eye, it looked like fairly advanced conjunctivitis (it makes my eyes water thinking about it now) so we got her to wash her hands and applied some anti-bacterial ointment. (I don’t know whether conjunctivitis is bacterial, but I used the stuff when I had an eye infection and it works a treat). The relief appeared to be almost instantaneous and we left her a few more shots for later on, and some water with which to wash her hands. Venomambo said that the nearest doctor’s clinic was 2 hours drive away back towards Opuwo, where the Good Road meets the real gravel road and that it was difficult to get a lift there.
There is really nothing much in Epupa apart from 2 campsites, a luxury lodge, 2 shops, the 4-stall craft market, a small collection of houses, and the falls. The nearest is primary school is also near the Good Road Shop, and Venomambo had to go to Opuwo for his secondary education.
In the evening I got out the football from Mozambique and we had a pickup game with the locals, who have their own team and pitch, but no one to play against. Sandrine bought herself a quarter cow horn of Himba Body Shop red skin cream, and was beset upon by 5 little girls who wanted to play with her fine blonde hair. She agreed to let them braid it in exchange for food (the remains of our maize meal –about 3 kilos - as the store was shut) but when they were ¾ of the way through and I got the meal out 3 of the girls said that they wanted sweeties instead, whilst the 2 who were doing most of the braiding still preferred meal. We didn’t have any sweeties, and thought that meal would be more useful, but 3 sisters either had a tooth sweeter than their tummies were hungry, or had plenty of meal at home. To avert a dispute I got out the laptop and set up an impromptu slide show, which caused an even bigger scrum until one of the old ladies brought some kind of order to the seating that was more effective than my attempts at gentle persuasion (my ex-students would not have recognised me, and it goes to show that a hearty bellow and a veiled threat of violence is still by far the most effective method of classroom control). When given the choice of seeing African animals or France, they all wanted to see the animals, I don’t suppose that they have any idea of what or where France is. They shouted out the names of the animals that they knew, and practiced pronouncing the names of the ones that they didn’t. I also had a few shots of Opuwo, and these are the ones that caused the most comment as most of the kids had only heard about this big city called Opuwo. The photos of the falls got a good cheer too, especially the “action” shots of the footy. (Generally a shot of someone’s back, a load of dust, and a flurry of limbs).

After spending the following afternoon kayaking on the Kunene and accidently going overboard through the last rapids so I could touch Angolan soil, we set off back through Kaokoland. We went past more Himba boys herding goats and cattle, running alongside the car saying “Sweetie, sweetie, mister, sweetie!” Others would asked for t-shirts and others sugar. The 700 k drive took us through the Zebra, Giraffe, and Etorocha mountains, and over the Joubert Pass and into Damaraland. The pass has a 1 in 4 gradient making it inaccessible to caravans despite being tarmacced on both sides. At the top we stuck the truck in neutral and rolled down, getting up to 140 kph before the tarmac started to run out and the hairpin bend at the bottom loomed up.
Damaraland was full of more stunning scenery and the Uniab valley wound through chocolate coloured mountains sprinkled with wispy lemon cream icing (we drove through there in the late afternoon so I was a bit peckish) and pulled in at Palmwag Oasis Lodge and Campsite. We went for a sunset walk across around the oasis and saw some kudu grazing on the grass and milk bushes that grow out of the red rock-strewn ground. The resident desert elephant paid the campsite a visit after sunset, and as we drove off the following morning we saw oryx, springbok and even black rhino having breakfast.
We spent a night at the Brandberg Mountains and paid a visit to the White Lady San rock art site, saw the rock engravings at Twyfelfontein (some of which are an estimated 20,000 years old), and then drove across the desert to the Skeleton Coast and suffered the stink of hundreds of thousands of seals and the accumulated odours of decades of fish-diet piss at the Cape Cross seal colony. The landscapes were more varied than I have adjectives to describe, and even Sandrine was lost for a Blondism, but it was surprisingly cold when we got out to see the sea for the first time in 39 days or 6,000 kilometres. I’d been to the seal colony six years previously and knew what to expect, but Sandrine looked like she was going to bark on the spot, and only stayed outside for 5 minutes before the appeal of fresh air overcame the desire to watch the boisterous but smelly mammals flop and wallow and squawk on the beach, or dive and gambol and play in the 14°C surf of the Benguela current. They were surprising noisy too; they made even more noise than Old Trafford when Shrek or Donkey (sorry, Wayne or Ruud) trip over their bootlaces in the box and the ref dares to not give a penalty.

Our destination was Swakopmund, the largest coastal town in the country, and as unlike Africa as it’s possible to imagine. There was no hustle or bustle, the streets were empty on Saturday afternoon as most shops shut at 1 p.m., and, car park security guards aside, there were very few blacks around. Given the cost of housing there, it was a situation comparable to South Africa, with housing be to expensive, plus cold weather in the winter. It was like being in a European resort in the autumn, or in Skegness if the Germans had won the First World War. But there was a cinema and shoe shops for window shopping so Sandrine was happy, but we were keen to get back to the “real Africa”.
We got back on the tourist trail and down and across the Namib Desert to the world’s tallest sand dunes at Sossusvlei, stopping off to see a 2,000-year-old 2-leafed plant called the Welwitschia Mirabilis that is unique to the Namib. After more great landscapes we came to the stunning dunes, and spent the day surrounded by the orange mounds of sand frequently used in TV commercials and added a few more little tourist stickers to the flank of dune 51, allegedly the most photographed due in the world. We set of for Mareintal some 300 K away, but the hard graft that we’d been making the bakkie do for the previous months finally took its toll as the engine overheated and blew the piston rings 60 K out. We eventually trundled in to town and the following morning, after the required amount of chin scratching and sucking in of air over the teeth, Frikkie the Isuzu mechanic told us that it would take 3 weeks to overhaul the engine due to parts coming from South Africa, and bits being sent off for calibration and so forth and would cost at least £2,300, so we decided to call up a transport company that came through from Cape Town every week and have the old girl trailered back with us in the lorry driver’s cab. Mariental is a tin pot stop off for truckers on their way from South Africa to Windhoek, the Namibian capital, and during the 5 day wait for our lift we had time to inseminate, incubate, and hatch (there were lots of chickens around) an insurance scam that would see us get rid off the car and make a small profit by getting the car stolen in Cape Town without having the repairs done.

At a roadside craft stall met a sculptor called Lovemore Charlie, Charlie being his surname, who was unaware of the mirth that his moniker could provoke. The combination of a verb with a quantifier and a noun gives endless possibilities to our future offspring’s’ nomenclature. Sandrine thought that it could be used as an affirmation to correct alleged paternal defects, with Drinkless Ale being her first idea. I replied with Eatless Fibre and Washbetter Dishes, and we both thought that Spendless Earnmore Money would please my father and Watchless Telly would correct any problems inherited from her dad. The Olympics would have passed by without our knowing it had her mother not emailed us to give us an update on family matters in France:
“Euro 2004 had just finished, but before your father had time to get out of the sofa, the Olympics started. I fear that he has literally become part of the furniture.”

After an 18-hour drive only broken by a stop at the border, we pulled up in CT, paid Drives his £250 fee, and gave Ronnie and Vanessa (the newlyweds from Mozambique) a call. Thinking that we might get a free dinner out of it, but just happy to see them, we went out for a beer that night, and ended up spending the next 17 nights in their spare room. Sandrine painted the doors and cupboards, and I helped Ronnie run a few errands, but most of the time we chilled and visited Cape Town. Ronnie works in the film and advertising production industry and it was the quiet season so he had plenty of spare time. We were invited to his Swiss-immigrant parents’ house for an official wedding celebration dinner with Vanessa’s slightly batty mum who likes a drop or two and her anorexic younger sister. Ronnie’s mother-in-law, who never goes to church, expected me to say grace as I was in my dog collar and she hadn’t really caught on to the, shall we say, light-heartedness of my religious conviction, and was a bit taken aback when I complied by ordering
“Eating irons at the ready
Preee-ssssent yaffle spanners
Attack!!!”
The previous evening Ronnie had taken us down the Swiss club for some bloke’s leaving do and I’d had the opportunity to explain to the Webers (Ronnie’s parents) how I became a Reverend and that although their son’s marriage would have been official in the US, I wasn’t to au fait on Mozambique matrimony statutes but it was the symbolism and the commitment that mattered and they should nip down to the CT registry office to dot the I’s and cross the T’s.
So the Webers weren’t too surprised by my ministrations, and we all dug in, apart from Vanessa’s sister of course, who politely pushed the food around her plate whilst keeping on her overcoat. Even Mrs Sixsmith (V’s ma) got over it after a couple of slugs of Han’s best red.
At the weekend our hosts took us up to the Weber family holiday home at Langebaan, an hour up the east coast. Ronnie and I found that we shared a love of decent beer, dark rum, and talking bollocks into the middle of the night. I introduced him to Mullet, and I think I made another convert, though he wasn’t too keen on the 3M cocktail. He was also as honest as they come, and slowly but surely his honesty wore off on us and we bottled out of doing something reasonably illegal for the first time in our lives (speeding and recreational drugs do not count). The car was stored in a garage, awaiting repair at a later date. We figured that we are unlikely to find anywhere better than South Africa to buy a house, given the combination of low prices, great weather, excellent diving, cricket, rugby, pies, volunteer organisations needing help, the wild animals, places to visit, high holiday rental potential, and proximity to our families. Other places will no doubt have some or most of these, but not all of them, and most certainly not the animals that really flicked our switch. If we get a surprise and find that somewhere else is even better, then we’ll get the car fixed, have a month’s holiday in South Africa, and then sell it and move to wherever our paradise is.

- posted by Sid @ 10/26/2004 05:19:00 AM
© 2004 Christopher Bartlett. All Rights Reserved

 
Namibia Part II
We went to Etosha National Park the next morning, hoping to see the uncaged version one last time, Etosha being our last park in Africa. We saw plenty of zebra, springbok, elephant, giraffe, kudu, and oryx, another type of antelope specific to Namibia and the dry Kalahari in Botswana. The oryx can survive in extreme conditions, not actually needing to drink water to survive, the moisture in the plants that it eats sufficing. The cats remained elusive, but the sun was out in full force and after feeling it reverberate off the enormous salt pan that is the central feature of the park, we decided to hit the poolside bar at Okaukuejo, one of the Park’s three rest camps. Okaukuejo is the westernmost of the three, but has the best waterhole in that can be viewed 24 hours a day and is generally teeming with wildlife. In the late afternoon herds of elephant splash around in the water and at night time black rhino and lion come out to drink, making it the best place to see game in the park.
We spent the following morning there, and again saw everything but cats without having to trundle round the park in dust and heat. There is plenty of shade, the bar and shops are not far away, and if it’s quiet you can pull out a book or go to the pool. The only drawback is that the scenery doesn’t change and the area around the drinking spot is somewhat reminiscent of a bombed countryside with uprooted trees and trees stripped bare by elephants being the main feature. At midday the number of viewers dwindled, partly because the animals are scarcer, preferring to find a bit of shade to keep out of the blazing sun, and partly because the South African rugby team was taking on Australia in the Tri-Nations Series decider. I decided to go and see if a springbok could eat a wallaby.
At the bar I got talking to Dawie (“Darvey”), and Jacques, 2 South African doctors in their late twenties, and Duan, a dentist. The three of them looked like a typical South African front row from the 1970s with plenty of beef and beer gut. They were quietly confident following the Springboks’ progress over recent matches under new management, but were a little on edge. I pointed out that I had wanted to England to beat France in the World Cup semi-final, France to beat England in the Six Nations decider, and the last time the Springbok XV won the Tri-Nations in 1998 I watched the game in Namibia, and as I was going to watch this afternoon, it was a shoo-in. My luck continued and the Boks did the business, doubtless motivated by my new mates screaming at the TV. The medics were so pleased that they invited us to a traditional South African potjie (“poiykee”) that evening.
I turned up with the Mullet that, to my surprise, they had already heard of and had adopted as their favourite brand of rum. 20 seconds into the first glass, Dawie and Jacques got their pipes out and we were bonding instantly. Unfortunately they weren’t Arsenal fans, but as the potjie, a sort of beef and vegetable stew cooked in a special 3-legged potjie pot also know as the Mandela Microwave, was cooking slowly over the fire Dawie told me that he had lived in north London for 6 months working in a hospital.
In South Africa he received a salary of £18,000 per annum, but could get far more working abroad. At the end of their holiday in Namibia he and his wife were flying to Canada to check out a job that he had been offered in Alberta, with an annual pay package totalling £120,000. He didn’t want to leave the country he loves, but the financial rewards were too tempting to turn down he said, adding that many of his colleagues have been faced with the same quandary, most of whom who have opted to take the cash abroad. On top of the extra money there was also the added bonus of the type of work and the hours involved. All of his work time, generally 17 hours per day, is spent on emergency surgery, mainly gunshot and knife wounds, but also car smashes and rape victims. When he had it easy in a maternity ward he performed 50 caesarean sections in a month. Elective surgery rarely happens in a government hospital and although the stress created by such conditions is hard to really imagine, Dawie’s accounts of certain cases brought the frown and worry lines back to his face, in spite of a fair few Mullets.
Jacques said that a US survey from 2001 estimated that, due to the ravages of AIDS, in 2011 there would be more whites than non-whites in South Africa, despite the whites only making up 1/9th of the current population. A recent article in the International Telegraph spoke of testing amongst 1000 soldiers in the South African Defence Force showing that 800 of the sample group were HIV positive. Dawie used to work in Kwazulu-Natal and said that he wouldn’t be surprised if the figures carried over to the civilian population of that region. This is a far higher percentage than the ones that we had heard before, and the doctors had an explanation.
“There is an enormous stigma in having a relative pass away in an HIV-related death” said Este, Duan’s wife, who is an ER nurse.
“When someone dies their relatives beg us not to tick the box on the death certificate linking the death to HIV,” added Dawie “so the database used to compile statistics is flawed.”
“In other cases it’s because the insurance companies sometimes have clauses where they are exonerated from paying out life assurance if the deceased dies from AIDS” Jacques pointed out “but its very difficult to know if the family are concerned about being cast out of village society or whether it’s to get the insurance to cough up”.The scams don’t stop there either. From time to time they have examined ladies coming in claiming that their husband or boyfriend has raped them. Upon examination they find that sex was no doubt consensual, but that the supposed perpetrator has already turned himself in, hoping to get put away so that he can have a four concrete walls and free meals which is more than he has in his village. According to the founder members of the Stan Mallet Appreciation Society, some poorly misguided people deliberately contract HIV to receive a £25 a month government grant designed to improve the quality of suffers’ nutrition, saying they prefer to live a short life with a full belly than a long one with little food.
After midnight we wandered over to the waterhole to have a nightcap and watch the elephants. A few other guests were occupying some of the benches, contemplating the clear starlit sky in the chilly night, enjoying the silence broken only by the tusked ones chomping on the few remaining bushes. And then broken by Jacques who, in the words of Aussie folk-singing hero Rodney Rude, “let a bluuddy ripper go” that rent the night apart like a bed sheet being torn in two. Jacques me mate the master farter – it was pure class.

- posted by Sid @ 9/20/2004 09:13:00 AM
© 2004 Christopher Bartlett. All Rights Reserved

 
Into Namibia
That evening our camp neighbours, a 4-bakkie group of large and loud South Africans invited us to join them for a few Saturday night drinks. Sat around a large pile of burning tree trunks that we’d seen them drag back with a 4WD earlier in the day, we found out that they were from Umtentweni, a small town south of Durban that we had stayed at and liked. John lived next door to Umtenweni’s best watering hole, and ironically, whilst he had been on holiday in France, I had been making room for beer against his fence. When we told them of our house-hunting expedition and that, so far, their neck of the woods was top of the charts, Nic and Christa insisted that we must come and stay with them if we decide to settle on that stretch of the coast. Earlier on we’d spoken about holiday acquaintances and false offers of hospitality, of the type where the bloke who’s revealed his most intimate secrets to you over several holiday piss- ups fobs you off with some crap excuse as to how he’d love for you to come and visit next weekend but it’s his grandmother’s colostomy bag is playing up and he won’t be able to have you over. Their offer seemed entirely genuine and was the best example of the excellent welcome we’d received from South Africans.
Once we’d dropped mother off at Maun airport for her marathon trip back to Florida, we stocked up on essentials in the Discount Pula Bottle Store, where genuine Bells whisky and Pastis 51 costs less 30% than it does in France, we headed back round the delta and up the panhandle towards Namibia. On one of the shelves I spied a brand of rum that had to be bought. It’s name smacked of reverse psychology marketing, like “Death” cigarettes, where the idea is to have the naffest name possible to catch the punter’s eye, but closer inspection of the back label explained that the founder of the South African company gave his name, Mullet, to his product.
Despite not quite living up to claims of being blended from the finest Caribbean rums, it was eminently more drinkable than Zimbabwean Admiralty, and just as good as all the more expensive South African brands. As I sampled Stan Mullet’s produce on the banks of the delta after a pub-style Sunday roast dinner on a Wednesday evening, Charlie and Phil, our hosts at the campsite and old hands in Botswana, regaled us with stories. Charlie used to be the volunteer groundsman at Maun rugby club, a bare dirt pitch with a breezeblock hut. He used to mark out the lines on the rock hard dustbowl with the only white substance available in abundance, maize meal. Whilst being effective given the conditions, it would attract a herd of local donkeys who would make the white lines disappear faster than Robbie Fowler and Lawrence Dallaglio combined.
The camp is sometimes used by younger members of the royal family and the British special forces, though not at the same time apparently. The best story did not involve 2 brothers smoking dagga dagga and getting smashed as any teenager should be able to do free from having their every puff photographed by lurking paparazzi, but rather an impromptu stopover by some heavily armed men in motorised canoes.
The bar overlooks the main stream at this point of the panhandle, and one afternoon, as Charlie and Phil were serving a truck of Spanish overlanders with 3 coffees and 14 straws, a group of 10 Rambo look-a-likes passed by, did a u-turn, and stormed the bar in search of liquid lifesaver. After a coded order over the radio another group turned up on desert buggies bristling with anti-tank missiles and grenade launchers and set about emptying the fridge on her Majesty’s Secret Service. Needless to say that the Spaniards soon retreated to bed and the bar’s takings went ballistic. Since then the regiment use this their accommodation when on training courses in the area and Phil can claim to have the best protected bar in Southern Africa.
The next morning we sailed through Namibian customs and immigration in a matter of minutes and drove 700 k to the edge of Etosha National Park, the largest game park in southern Africa, 5/6ths of the size of Belgium. We stopped off on route to visit the Ombili Foundation where 400 of southern Africa’s 30,000 remaining San people live. In return for one member of the 120-odd families working in the community fields each morning, the children attend the foundation’s school and the family supplied with 3 meals per day.
The foundation was set up in 1994 with the aim of helping the San come to terms with modern living and to help them to help themselves. According to an EU survey of ethnic groups in southern Africa, the San are some 50 years behind the second last tribe, Namibia’s Himba.
The San are widely recognised as being the first inhabitants of southern Africa, and once inhabited an area from the Natal coast up to the Angolan border. Over the last 2 centuries these slight, nomadic, hunter-gathers and renowned trackers have been pushed further and further north into Botswana and Namibia, at one point in the early 20th century being, themselves, regarded as fair game for hunting. Added to their being widely considered as a sub-species by other African tribes (“You Bushman” is considered the worst form of insult in Namibia), the routes that they traditionally followed with the seasons is now on privately-owned farmland and the abundant game that they used for food and clothing is far rarer. If they cannot be brought into the 21st century their impending demise as a people is guaranteed.
It is a sad that their traditional way of life is no longer suitable to modern times, yet this did not stop the state-of-the-art digital photography and feature-length movie making equipment-laden family on our visit bemoan in the same breath the current 90% illiteracy rate amongst adults of 30 and the fact that the kids could no longer make poison tipped arrows and track a kudu for 2 days. My ancestors were no doubt proficient foragers and obviously great hunters with amazing stamina, but I don’t think I’d have fitted in on the Reading pub scene in a bearskin loincloth on a Friday night (though some inhabitants still maintain a more than passing resemblance, in behaviour at least, to Neanderthal man). The teenage son of our fellow visitors was astounded that we weren’t flying around Namibia in a privately chartered light-aircraft, yet seemed to resent that his San compères were getting an education that would allow the brightest of the bunch to be able to spell “pampered git” and would no longer wear bones through their noses so he could take pictures of them on his £1000 digital reflex.

Our hosts were a German Namibian couple who ran a lodge, campsite and farm on the same premises. Gurt told us that whilst farming cattle and passing tourists brought in a fair income, his biggest money spinner was eland hunting, with German customers willing to shell out 2000 Euros to bag a trophy.

Whilst technically an antelope, the eland is more of a large cow with straight horns. And if shooting a wild cow doesn’t really seem much like hunting, it is even less so when you consider that Gurt breeds them on his farm and they just stand around in groups 30 yards from the house. Gurt defended his new money-spinner by claiming that he only lets his brave punters shoot old or sick eland, and that he gets far more money giving them the head stuffed and mounted, and can give the meat to locals. Besides, he informed us that they were only antelope and elsewhere businessmen in Gucci safari dress fly in to indulge in what is known as “canned hunting” of lion or cheetah where the skilful city-slicker gets to poke his gun through a wire fence and pop the king of the jungle from 20 yards.

- posted by Sid @ 8/28/2004 06:33:00 PM
© 2004 Christopher Bartlett. All Rights Reserved

 
Okovango Delta and Nxai Pan
Close to Tsodilo, at least in Southern African terms, is the ‘Panhandle’ of the Okavango Delta. The Okavango river runs into Botswana at its northern border and starts spreading out southeast down the panhandle until it fills the rest of the frying pan shape, petering out in Maun to the south and Moremi to the east. Several camps have been set up where the water is at its widest where the handle meets the pan.
We turned of the main road and headed east over a couple of sand “bridges” to Nguma Island camp, an isthmus 13 k down a sandy track. In the rainy season the bridges are washed out, and only the camps four-tonne truck or light aircraft can get in. Our camp site was 10 times the size of any we’d had before, and was equipped with a large table, a fire pit and a huge stack of wood, our own toilet and shower, and a waist high barbeque that had been lit for us. An enormous water monitor, a lizard, the size of a small croc waddled past, its belly full with a recently devoured rodent. We set up, cooked up, and settled down to tune in to the noises around us. A frog chorus heralded sunset, hippos chomped the papyrus, and in the distance elephants trumpeted and lions mewed.
Early the next morning we boarded a small speedboat with Mike, a Humbukushu, and Colin, a Bayei, and motored through the main channel to an island out towards the middle of the delta to board 2 mokoros, a dugout canoe made from a sausage tree. Once on the mokoros our guides poled us through the papyrus beds and hippo grass. As we silently made our way around they’d point out antelope, red lechwe and the rare sitatunga, grazing on islands. Fish eagles squawked and swooped down from the treetops to plunge into the water for a late breakfast. The papyrus and hippo grass alternated with lakes filled with lilies and lily pads. In most places the water was no more than between 50 centimetres and a metre deep, and was sometimes only just deep enough for the shallow draught of the canoe to pass through. At least if we capsized we weren’t going to drown, and the lack of depth meant that there were no crocs around.
After a couple of hours we landed on an island, pitched our tents and had lunch. We whiled away the early afternoon under the shade of the trees watching the vervet monkeys going about their business overhead. A quick inspection of the island showed some large elephant footprints but Mike was to point out that they were very old. When the heat was more bearable we poled over to a larger island, alighted, and set of in search of game. There was plenty of spoor, including some from lions, but no game to be seen. There is game out in the delta, but they have so many islands to choose from it is more common to not see any than it is to get lucky. Mike occupied us with his knowledge of indigenous trees and bushes, much to Sandrine’s seed-collecting pleasure. Added to her previous finds, she now has over 30 different tree seeds to send back to her green-fingered father.
Our mild disappointment was soon forgotten when we poled out into an open area covered in lilies to watch the most amazing sunset. In fact we watched two as the perfectly still and clear delta water reflected the pink and orange orb and shed its glow all around. Sandrine had forgotten her water bottle and had requested mine when Mike pulled a lily bud, complete with a metre long stem, out of the water, removed the bud, and started sucking on it. He invited us to copy him, and we were soon sucking in cool, clear water through natural filters. Even Mum, who up until now had refused to drink tap water, was sucking like a gold-digger keen to impress on a first-date.
Night fell quickly and we got the fire going on the island. During conversation we told Mike and Colin about European and oriental superstitions, which they both found extremely amusing, asking what would happen if you walked under 13 ladders. I found at that Mike was only 6 days younger than me, and told him that that made him a bull in the western world and a rat in China. Like most people with an ounce of sense he found this hard to fathom. We hit the sack early and spent a night undisturbed by dogs, overlanders, and malfunctioning cockerels.
The following morning we were up for dawn and off to another island. Red lechwe grazed around massive baobabs and Sandrine exhorted us to knock some of the fruit down for her. Colin and Mike threw sticks and stones enthusiastically, but lacked the hours of break time practice of stick fights in the woods at school to compete. In one over from the Acacia end I picked off three tail enders and we sucked on the tart chalky fruit on the way back to the pavilion thankful that the owner of the size 6 lion prints hadn’t put in an appearance.
When we got back to Nguma Island we were told of a path that follows the edge of the delta from the camp, where we might see elephant, hippo, and other game. Off we set, initially with no thoughts of the lions that we had heard on the first night here. Then I heard something in the bushes 50 metres to our front. We would have to walk right alongside the same bushes if we wanted to follow the bend in the edge of the swamp. I stopped and we listened: nothing.
Mum and Sandrine cannot spend more than 15 seconds together without speaking and broke the silence with some pointless chit chat. “Shhhusssshhhhhhhhh” I sussshhhhhhhhed
“I can’t hear anything. What are you listening for?”
“To make sure that I can’t here anything.”
I couldn’t, but armed myself with a piece of elephant dung, bullshit no doubt, and we moved forward. The girls were straight back into a conversation about bugger knows what, but it had nothing to do with Africa, animals, or man-eating lions licking their lips in anticipation. To be fair, this thought had only vaguely crossed my mind. Most lions won’t attack a human unless they or their offspring feel threatened, they have eaten a bloke before, or they are old males that are too weak to chase proper game. I was also feeling fortified by my experience with the lions in Zimbabwe, and Macho-me and Mother-me were locked in conversation in my head.
“They were used to human presence and were only playing” said the mother in me.
“They were still half-wild as the one-armed owner proves, and anyway, the technique and principals are the same” came the reply “If one does come out I’ll rush it and lob this bit of dung at it, it’ll be totally thrown, and the dung won’t hurt it so it’ll bugger off”.
“Whhhhyyyyy can’t we just go back?”
“Imagine how great it would be to see a lion, or a pride of lions, on foot.”
“That’s what I’m doing, and that’s why I want to go back. Noooooowwww.” Mother-me warbled.
“Come on you poof, the girls haven’t even heard it, they’d think that you’re a nonce if we turned back now”.
So on we went. Right up close to the tree line. We couldn’t see more than a metre into the bushes as we walked along the right of it, with open grassland and then swamp to our right. Round a corner the path lead us away from the tree line. Phew. And into some tall clumps of elephant grass that were large enough for a rhino to hide behind, though fortunately there were none around here.
“This is getting silly, even the girls have stopped talking”
“Just a bit further”
I looked at my watch.
“The bar will be closing soon,” said Macho-me
We turned and had got past the bushes in the tree line when we heard a deep growl. There was no mistaking that its owner was a lion. We stopped and looked around. Nothing in sight. The grass was short here and it was empty. I wiggled my throwing shoulder to keep it limber. All was quiet. We walked on, with me spending as much time looking backwards as forwards, occupying my mind by wondering whether elephant dung would swing in the late evening air. The dung was quite old; would I get reverse swing? When we got back to the bar we’d actually seen sod all, but it had been one of the most exciting game experiences we’d had.
Two days later at Nxai Pan, 150 k to the south of Maun, the lions did put in a prolonged appearance. Other tourists had heard that lions were often present at the only waterhole in the 4000 km² Nxai Pan National Park and they turned out to be better informed than a tabloid reporting on the latest Paddy Viera transfer dealings. We arrived at 1130 and the lions were just finishing off a spot of Springbok. Once full they lazed in the sun, only getting up to find keep the other springbok around the waterhole on their hooves.
Groups of the cute little buggers would approach the waterhole from over the grassy veld and then stop 100 yards from the hole, put off by the presence of lions awaiting table service. The herd leader would cautiously edge forward alone, checking out the reactions of the felines. First up it would appear to be a very one-sided contest, but a springbok can muster up 88 kph over a sustained burst and, like impala, can put in an astounding 3-metre high, 11-metre long jump. Slowly but surely, they passed through what looks like a perfect trap with lions forming the three points of a triangle. We sat in anticipation of seeing our first kill. The lions remained motionless, either lying on their front, or sunbathing on their side. Cunning, we thought; act like your not interested. The herd edged towards the water, looking understandably nervous. So nervous in fact, that when they reached the water’s edge, they wouldn’t drink. Then one of them bent his head towards the muddy pool and a lion moved. But rather than adopt the stalking position that any house cat takes up when going after a bit of rolled up tin foil prey, it just slowly sauntered towards the boks, making them scamper away, as it to say “Are you looking at my pint?.” It’s not as if the boks need to drink and by depriving them the lions make them weaker; springbok get enough moisture from grass to survive for long periods without drinking. Then again, I could survive without a pint, but after prolonged abstinence I would be willing to go into a dodgy pub to get a draught or two.
A while later three elephants did turn up for a pint, and lined up at the bar, sucking up big trunkfuls and then downing them in unison, like three mates celebrating a win on the zebras. By mid-afternoon the pride of 7 lions and 3 cubs were drowsy that they even let some passing giraffe in for a quick drink. The lions were by now lying on their backs, paws up and legs akimbo, only arousing themselves out of slumber temporarily when a massive male turned up and his offspring decided to show off in front of dad by indulging in a bout of wrestling and giving him a friendly nip. We left them at sundown, as they watched yet another herd of antelope wander around the waterhole.
At 7 the next morning they were still there, contentedly moving on the impala and zebra in a restrained and unhurried manner, much like a doorman giving it “Sorry mate, no trainers” to an astrology student, knowing that no-one in their right mind would argue. The lions shifted from place to place around the waterhole, occasionally looking like they were going to go for a snack, but most of the time to show their authority. There were a couple of half-hearted chases, but the antelope escaped on both occasions. Our guide to African mammals informed us that lion chase small prey such as springbok and impala individually, sharing their kill with the pride, and only hunt larger animals like zebra, buffalo, wildebeest, giraffe, and larger antelope together. They are only active 2 or 3 hours every 24, and don’t seem to be in any great rush when they are moving. In mid afternoon an enormous storm arrived, the air smelt heavily of rain and the antelope wandered off. The sky behind the waterhole turned dark grey, a 20-second peal of thunder rolled from west to east across and lightning flashed and stabbed into the ground on the horizon. As the heavens opened and the rain poured down, the lions sat stoically. Set against this backdrop, a solitary bull elephant strode majestically to the water, his skin light grey under the bright sunlight streaming through the clouds from the northwest. The unseasonal downpour only lasted 5 minutes and as soon as it was over the cats got up, shook themselves off, and started ambling towards us. The rain seemed to wake them up, as the cubs started a three-way wrestling bout, and then the females rolled onto their backs to let the cubs pounce on them. They kept this up as they made their way past the bakkie and through the grass to the south. They continued arsing around, much to the pleasure of the 3 other vehicles watching, and we crawled along the road parallel to track t the pride was on. After 10 minutes of lazy pursuit, it dawned on us that because the waterhole was lion-free, maybe some cheetah would appear, so we went back. The impala and springbok were back in quantity but, alas, no cheetah were in view. I got out and went to the fridge in the boot and got out a beer and a cider. I opened a packet of cigarettes, sparked one up, and took my time. The lions demeanour was rubbing off on me, and after all day sitting in the car, I was in rush to get back in. A puff of wind blew a credit card receipt off the dashboard and onto the ground behind me. I bent down and half-turned to pick it up and got a surprise so big that I can’t find a simile for it – it wasn’t a receipt for a surprise present, oh no - 2 metres away, coming round the corner of the car, was a lioness that was making her way back to the hole. My desire to be up close to a fully wild lion on foot had come true. The lion stopped, looked up at me with surprise and did a little half-jump away. I did a big jump back into the car. I have since made a mental note that next time I harbour unspoken desires to get close to dangerous mammals, I will specify that close means close enough to be able to exaggerate the closeness in the pub after, but not actually within pouncing distance. (Unlike my unspoken desire to get close to enormous mammaries, where close means definitely within pouncing distance.)

- posted by Sid @ 8/28/2004 06:33:00 PM
© 2004 Christopher Bartlett. All Rights Reserved