There is little as lovely as an unexpected road trip – that is what I’ve discovered this last month of road tripping with Karina’s brother Krystian. How glorious the changing landscapes across Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia, how free to drive without knowing quite where you will end up, and every night or two, a new and splendid place to pitch a tent. I was supposed to be back in time for the Franschhoek Literary Festival, to take part in the BookSA discussion with Aryan Kaganof and Lauren Beukes, and I was all set to fly back from Lusaka, thus ending the trip, but oh, I was loathe to leave that country where the roads, though potholed in places, were flanked with fields of yellow wild flowers and women in beautiful printed skirts selling melons, and coming home to FLF would mean missing Botswana … At that point, I got some priceless advice via text message from one of the very finest fellows I know, he wrote: ‘I think such an opportunity is so rare and so precious it would be an insanity to cut it short prematurely. Undertakings like the FLF can be broken when the reason is good and this is a very good reason…The Okavango should be seen.’ Thank you for that, so right … and I took the advice, missed the literary festival, sunbathed instead on the banks of the great river and swam happy circles in the famous delta in a clearing between the reeds and lilies where the hippos pass at night. I drank tea made of the Okavango boiled on a raintree fire in Sam, the Mokoro man’s heavy black pot. We set up our tents under Ironwood trees, not far from that hippo pool, and when we were all zipped up for the night, and Sam had told us under no circumstances should we leave our tents, we fell asleep to the sounds of night birds, a hyena and hippos, and in the morning, on a sunrise walk we found hippo pawprints fifty metres from our camp.
Thank you Krystian (master of broken roads), thank you Karina, thank you Ben for telling me to ‘4get FLF, and enjoy Zambia’.
25 May, Happy Africa Day indeed.
This photo was taken at a chimpanzee refuge in the woodlands of Zambia, on the border of the DRC.
