In the arid Savannah landscape of central Botswana, there is a bush camp run by a South African many named Ben. Ben is an animated story teller, an immaculate host and, as it turns out, a bit of a drinker. This is the story of how I came to be riding in the back of his pickup truck, lost in the middle of Nowhere Botswana and holding an elephant tusk at three in the morning.
The Elephant Sands campsite is little more than a sandy lot beside a watering hole in the middle of endless scrub brush. Elephants frequent the watering hole to drink and play. I easily whiled away an afternoon just watching the elephants cooling themselves in the water; I'm really quite enamoured by the elephants, I'm not sure I want to return to a country where there is no possibility of seeing them on a daily basis. As I sat and watched the elephants, Ben was busy telling bush stories to an enraptured group of my travel companions. It wasn't long before he was offering to take us into the bush for the night for our own "bush experience". He guaranteed he would show us something that none of us had ever seen before. How could I possibly say no to an offer like that?
Eight of us decided to go. As the heat of the afternoon finally began to wain, we packed our things into the land cruiser and set off. The sensations of that afternoon were really quite tantalizing; the feeling of the sun scorching my face and the Acacia thorns whipping my arms as we careen off-road through the bush; the choking smell of diesel overtaking the musty smell of elephant manure; the sound of the truck gears grinding; the feeling of dirt sticking to my sweaty skin. We drank cider as we drove, and watched for giraffes, elephants and lions off in the bushes. I felt like I was in a Hemingway story; I loved every minute of it.
We finally arrived at another watering hole where Ben announced we would camp for the night. The watering hole was not large but it was picturesque, being crowned on the West side by a towering skeleton of an Acacia tree. The sun was setting and while I fiddled with my camera for that perfect shot, Ben and Jamu (the local guide) lit a bonfire and cooked dinner. We ate steak and pap (like ugali) and stew. We drank red wine out of plastic cups and talked about the heard of elephants we had seen nearby (with a brand new baby, maybe a week old Ben thought, and an elegant and frightening matriarch). Everything was perfect.
The stars came out and I was shown the Southern Cross. Being from the Northern hemisphere I feel somewhat lost when I look up at the stars here and don't recognize anything - but the Southern Cross finds South like the Big Dipper finds North and I felt reassured. As we finished off the wine Ben announced that we should all pile into the truck again and he would take us to find his guaranteed novel experience.
We drove for almost an hour, it was clear we were lost. But just as we were all starting to give up hope that would would actually find this mystery thing, the engine stopped and Ben hopped out, instructing us to follow. The smell of the diesel was suddenly taken over by something stronger - what was that? And then we saw it... the massive skull of an elephant peering at us from the bushes. And this is what Ben had guaranteed we would have never seen before - a dead elephant. He was right, it was definitely a first for me.
The elephant, it turns out, was an old bull who had fallen into a sink hole and died, probably about three months ago. Ben needed to go out and recover the tusks and give them to the Botswana wildlife service so they can be registered in the ivory registry. In about six months they will be auctioned off to an international market - anyone can buy them, but this way they get a certificate saying the ivory wasn't poached but collected after a natural death. So Jamu went about tying a rope around the tusk and lifting up the flap of decaying flesh covering the tusk (which produced a smell more retched than anything I have ever smelled in my life). Then we pulled. It took a great amount of force but eventually it slid off, quite easily actually.
The tusk was beautiful and smooth and amazingly heavy - about 40 kilos Ben said. I just liked holding it, even though the end still smelled like a dead elephant. We were trying to remove the second one, which was proving much more difficult, when we heard rustling in the buses and a low sort of rumbling. It was about five meters away, Ben wasn't sure if it was elephants or hyenas or lions but we decided we didn't really want to meet any of those, so we scrambled back into the truck and set on our way. Ben assured us he knew the way home.
He didn't. We left the elephant about eleven at night... we found camp (not the camp we had set up but the actual camp) at ten past four in the morning. It was a long night needless to say. It was all the longer as we realized Ben had a bottle of whisky in the front with him - as he got more and more lost he also got more and more drunk. Every so often Ben and Jamu would jump out of the truck and race of into the bushes and point at the stars and speak angerly in Setswan. And although we never saw them, we heard lions roaring in the bushes; whether it was true or our imaginations, they always seemed to be getting closer.
I can't say being lost in the bushes for hours in the middle of the night is an experience for everyone. Certainly most of the people with me were not really suited for it... but I loved it. It was cold and frustrating and I was tired and thirsty, but it really was one of the most real experiences I've had. It was an adventure, and there were lions... how much more Chronicles of Narnia could I get.
No comments:
Post a Comment