Fire in the hole!

Maun, Botswana
Nov. 21, 2008

Pardon me for the break in my storytelling from Maun, but I jumped at an invitation to go to the bush again. I’m back for a few days, then out again on Monday with Wilderness Safaris to volunteer with their nonprofit Children in the Wilderness program for the week.

I was back at the River Lodge last night for a dinner at which the worms-in-ceviche story remains the talker. But now there’s another singularly odd Botswana story in this week’s Ngami Times that has people talking. I met the hero of the tale early in my time in Maun and confirmed the newspaper’s account with one of his good friends last night. This one’s delicious.

According to the newspaper (and flourishes contributed by Gary’s friend): Gary le Roux, a builder, has been erecting a remote safari lodge in Nxai Pan, lately a very dry area of Botswana. A couple of weeks ago Gary awoke in his tent to a loud banging noise and looked out to see a bull elephant banging a metal cup on a metal table.

This was a very thirsty elephant.

The bull moved around to the shower tent and destroyed it to drink the water that was waiting in the bucket for Gary’s shower the next morning.

Gary was unnerved. He decided to unzip the tent (his girlfriend had told him never to run for it, but he was contemplating a dash). The bull caught wind of it and lumbered over to Gary’s tent, now with the flap unzipped. Gary moved to the back of the tent, to the metal container where he was keeping extra water. Guess what came along? The elephant’s trunk, winding its way through the tent toward him and the water container. Gary did the only thing he could think of besides running. He lit a cigarette “to restore my shattered nerves,” took a long draw and then blew smoke right into the elephant’s trunk.

“It snorted and retreated out of the tent and away from my camp, making its way to the staff camp where absolute chaos erupted as it smashed its way through their belongings,” he told The Ngami Times, which concluded the piece by noting that “Le Roux has decided not to give up smoking….”

So have many of the fellows I’ve met in Maun, where it is not a rare thing to see a sign on a door that says “Smoking encouraged.” Now, darn it, the okes will pull out Gary’s story anytime they need it to justify their habit. I can see them now taking a long draw on their Peter (Stuyvesant) Blues and saying, “But baby doll, smoking can SAVE lives.”

As the African worm turns

Maun, Botswana
Nov. 15, 2008
with a photo of the view of the Boro River, where I live, from Colin's boat and a photo of Tony the Tiler and Colin (he's holding on to the boat)

Whenever I return to Maun from the hinterlands, I wonder what crackerjack story I’m going to hear next. I’m never disappointed. Either my hair is left standing on end, or I’m doubled over laughing. This outback village is lousy with storytellers accustomed to chewing the fat around bush campfires. I could listen to them all day.
Colin is a safari company owner and jack of all trades who’s been here for years, and, though soft-spoken, is one of the jaw-boning champions. You’ll usually find him at the helm on his party-rental boat that cruises the Boro, a whiskey-drinking captain who named his boat Sir Osis of the River. He is beyond wry. Once he looked around at all the young married couples with babies at the River Lodge (Colin calls it the Liver Rot) and said they might look happy now, but just wait a few years and they’d end up divorced like his group of 40-somethings and older.

Divorce, sadly, in Maun is common, especially in the crazy month of October when temperatures soar past 120 degrees Fahrenheit and the hunters come home from safari season to find that some home-wrecker has hooked up with their sweeties. But from Colin’s standpoint everyone in Maun has always taken such bouts of misfortune in stride.
“You don’t lose your partner,” he said. “You just lose your turn.”
Hoo-boy, I told him. That is cynical.

I saw Colin yesterday at the pilots’ hangout, the Buck and Hunter (also known as the Duck and Ambush for a shooting outside the building a few years ago that amounted to guns going off with nobody hurt). I could tell by Colin’s smile this story was going to be good. He started off talking about a “cute Mexican” gal, an artist visiting Maun recently. He took a shine to her, tried to make some plans with her, which she accepted but then cancelled. He’d had enough of that, so he moved on. Somewhere along the way she phoned and invited him to a dinner party at which she would cook a traditional Mexican dinner at a local backpackers lodge where the young British royals like to hang out when they are in town. Colin said he was busy and declined.

Turns out that the people at the dinner, none of them British royals as far as I know, were treated to a Mexican dish that featured raw fish from the river. Colin didn’t know the name. The best I can figure was that the artist made ceviche using Okavango Delta bream. Now, I’m a sushi lover, but even I would run from a plate of raw river fish. I’ve heard the same story again today from another source: the number of people is somewhere between 6 and 8, including the artist, who, post-dinner, are battling horrific worms.

“You can see the worms move under the skin,” Colin said. They move up and all around and “can go to your brain!” To be rid of them, a doctor has to cut them out.

(Aieeeee! This was the kind of gross my boss in California would salivate over.)

Just like the movie “Alien!” I said to Colin.

And I added, “Great, one more thing to worry about in Africa.”

Nonplussed as usual, Colin looked on the bright side. “I feel like one of those guys,” he said, “who missed the plane that crashed.”

No reality show could beat this: Maun Life

Maun, Botswana
September 18, 2008
(with photos of a Maun sunset on an August boat cruise on the Boro River and of Audrey, who didn’t seem to mind Maun’s reputation when she visited from Texas last month. The boat driver is James Howard, a motorcross fanatic British fellow who can’t get enough of Maun.)

While Kelly swims the pristine waters of the Indian Ocean at Zanzibar, I am in hot, dusty Maun back into the swing of my volunteer work.

I am looking on the bright side of having left a tropical paradise a week ago.

Maun is an outpost from days gone by, quirky as can be, teeming with legends about “characters.” And the thing is, some of the characters are still alive and walking past the same goats and donkeys as I do most days.

I haven’t seen him myself, but my friends at Karibu Safari say you can pitch up (a South African term for show up) at the bar at the Okavango River Lodge and see the guy without the arm. A lion ate it. The former national beauty queen from South Africa might be there at the same time. She’s missing a good part of her calf, thanks to a hippo attack.

Last night a gristled, bearded man at River Lodge was sitting at the table where my friends were. Kirk, one of Karibu’s owners, told me that the guy has two master’s degrees and a Ph.D. from universities in Germany. He came to Maun and never left, making his living by running a marketing campaign for a safari company. It turns out that a woman I met a few months ago in Savute, a graceful slip of a gal who drives a huge truck and trailer filled with camping equipment for her husband’s private safari company, is a former French horn player in the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Her husband used to be the guide for Lloyd Wilmot, who set up the tented camp 30 years ago that eventually became Savute Safari Lodge. Lloyd is one of the many children of Bobby Wilmot, famed crocodile hunter who died in 1968 after a black mamba bit him in the face. (Lloyd’s sister was attacked by a crocodile that left teeth marks in her boat but not a scratch on her.)

Lloyd is still around somewhere in these parts, and he is known to be fearless. I saw it myself: He cut a hole in the wall of his Savute house beside his bed. He’d put food on a ledge there for the lions; from his bed he could turn his head to the right and see the lions inches away and take their photos.

Friday night I was at the Bridge at Backpackers, the place Prince Harry and Chelsea frequent, when friends pointed out an older bush pilot at the bar. Everyone thinks that’s Lord Lucan, they said, telling me: Go ahead; Google him. Which I haven’t done yet. They said years ago a wealthy British man who meant to kill his wife but killed the nanny instead disappeared before he was brought to justice. Within a few weeks a wealthy British man, very mysterious, pitched up in Maun, to stay. The locals looked at the photos, and they are convinced it is the same guy. And that doesn’t even touch on the CIA stories I’ve heard here, but those are for campfires back in the U.S.

If you go to www.jacanaent.com, you can see a truly grab-bag of a Web site. The businessman in town who sells tasers and Leathermen and sandals and embroidered safari wear for the lodges’ staff and my can of “Gettem” quick defence spray has compiled photos and the history of Maun, for all the world’s viewers.

He writes of Maun, population 94,698 in the 2001 census: “This magnet for rural people eager to find work has been described in many different ways, from being ‘a place too far from civilization,’ tsetse fly infested (in its early days but now eradicated) rumbustious, the last frontier and ‘a dreadful hole,’ to the far more delightful and appropriate, the ‘Place of the Reeds.’’’

You can see I fell short of selecting Tuscany for my sabbatical year. But I can guarantee you that in Tuscany there are no classified ads in the local newspaper proclaiming the need for herdgirls and -- should any of my embattled journalism friends need a career change -- crocodile skinners.

I like the word “rumbustious” to describe Maun. It fits the can-do attitude so prevalent here, the best example of which I found on the front page of The Ngami Times on Friday. “LEATHERMAN SAVES PILOTS: Four hour drama in the air.” A female pilot and her husband had been flying a Cessna 210 to Jao Camp in the Okavango Delta to deliver supplies when the right wheel locked. For four hours, they did everything they could think of to free the wheels, including dumping freight and making three dives from high in the sky to see if they could get the wheels to work. Nothing helped, despite all sorts of instructions from all sorts of people on the radio.

How appropriate that in Maun finally came the magic words from one of the flight company’s’ ground crew: “Do you have a Leatherman?”

When the man in the air said yes, he was instructed to cut a hole in the seat above the undercarriage and then into the floor of the plane. The guy told the newspaper he used the Leatherman “like a tin opener,” and reached through the hole in the floor to free the wheels.

“I was more concerned about saving the lives of my wife and myself than losing a hand,” he told the newspaper.

David and Cathy Kays took out a quarter-page ad in the newspaper thanking every last soul who helped them land the plane, including “To the people of Maun, friends and family for being behind us in spirit and prayers while we circled overhead and for their loud cheering when we made a safe landing.”

They wrapped up their ad with a tribute to Maun, “a very special place with a community spirit that is rare to find. It is thanks to the above that we were able to come out of a nasty predicament. You all gave us the strength to be calm and practical.”

In Botswana, that part about being “practical” means they had been instructed with those all-important, ubiquitous words, “Make a plan.” They did, with flying colors. And now they will be among Maun’s legends, not as quirky characters, but as the latest names on the roster of can-do Africans. Makes me proud to roam around this rumbustious place of reeds and heat the likes of which could melt your toenails.