by Adeline Loh
‘Better cherish the good night’s sleep we’re going to have on these beds,’ I said, falling face-first on what I thought was going to be a silky soft mattress when I slammed my cheekbones into a thin piece of foam that was probably layered on top a block of concrete. ‘For we start camping from tomorrow onwards,’ I continued in a cracked voice, rubbing my sore cheeks.
She released a drawn-out moan dripping with misery. ‘You had to remind me, didn’t you?’ she whimpered.
We got clean and did the necessary at the ablution and loo hut located grandly next to an immense termite mound a hop, skip and jump away. After which the saliva-inducing whiff of a fine warm dinner lured us to the elevated chitenge facing the sparkling river. With a candle flickering on the wooden table, moonlight filtering through the trees and the mystical bush engulfing us, it was the perfect making-out recipe for a lustful couple. Unfortunately Chan and I were anything but. Famished from the fiasco-filled journey, we tucked into a lip-smacking dish called Roast Chicken A La Daniel cooked with aromatic wine-infused gravy. But then again, anything tastes good when you’re hungry. Oh, and Daniel’s also an award-winning chef, didn’t we know? At least he had some salvageable talents. And thus began our love-hate relationship with the big ape.
Grabbing the leftover bottle of red wine from dinner, we prepped for our night game drive. Generally speaking, all African safari guides are incredibly competent and well-equipped. Daniel, however, chose to stand out from the crowd – he did not own a spotlight.
Are we going for a night drive or a blind drive?’ I asked.
‘Well, there’s still the van’s headlamps,’ he consoled us weakly.
‘Um, I’m no bush expert like you, Daniel. But I don’t think wild animals are flaming exhibitionists dying to jump in front of our vehicle,’ I said. ‘Unless they have a death wish of some sort and want to get run over.’
He laughed sheepishly. ‘You can try using that torchlight you’re always carrying around.’
Not surprisingly, the feeble beam from my torch hardly picked up anything more interesting than inanimate twigs and sashaying grass. The inaction continued for a few hours until midnight. Tired and bored stiff, Chan was dropping off and groaned that her sore throat felt like sandpaper. At her behest, we headed back to the lodge.
As Chan slid open the van door and got out in front of our rondavel, Daniel kept the engine running. ‘Do you want to continue the drive, Adeline?’
I paused. ‘Are we allowed to drive so late in the night?’
‘Who dares disallow me? Chunga Camp owns the wildlife trails around this area, I can drive anytime I wish. Not like other vehicles that have to be out of here by twenty-one-hundred-hours,’ he swaggered.
I had the assumption that national parks were off-limits to humans after a certain time for good reason – because animals that were shy in the daytime turned into rampaging, murdering maniacs at night. But then again, we were enclosed in a van so how dangerous could it be, right? Apart from the possibility that it was all a sham and the real plan was to take me out alone to be assaulted and chucked out for hyenas to devour the evidence, I should be safe in the hands of two strange men I hardly knew. So I agreed to continue the drive. Famous last words.
Before leaving, Daniel grabbed a six-pack from the kitchen. ‘No traffic police in the bush!’ he said and laughed raucously. Evidently he’d forgotten about the existence of trees and the slamming into them bit. This time, Steven insisted that I ride shotgun to get a better view but I soon gathered it was just so he could catch some Zs in the back.
And so we headed off. Whizzing through the bush in the wee hours of the morning, I bottomed-up the wine while Daniel cracked open his third can of beer. Thanks to the alcohol, I was chipper in spite of it being a nipple-erecting seven degrees. ‘Hey, hippos out of water!’ I shrieked excitedly, happy to have seen my first mammals of the night. Daniel burped. To my chagrin, the buffoon was more interested in getting drunk than pointing out wildlife. He appeared to be cruising aimlessly along the track without attempting to spot anything.
Presumably in a stupor, the arrant degenerate started hitting on me. I was totally grossed out and evaded his icky proposals to be my boyfriend and ‘meet my needs’ as civilly as I could. This went on for some considerable time until my blood began to boil, and my right hand was restraining my left from breaking the wine bottle and pronging the jackass in the one good eye he had left. But no, I reasoned to myself, my life depended on him. Someone screaming with a bleeding eye would not be very useful in a survival situation. I glanced back, hoping to be rescued by Steven, only to find him conked out on the seat with his ring finger stuck in the mouth of a Mosi bottle. Fantabulous.
Not paying attention to where he was going, Daniel drifted off the track and the wobbling vehicle was now sounding like a shaking can of almonds over the rough terrain. Then suddenly, he sped over what felt like a huge log. Our butts rose from the seats and we landed with a Lord-almighty bang. Steven was violently pitched out of his seat. ‘Wh-what happened?!’ he yelped.
Daniel laughed maliciously, by now totally smashed from alcohol overdose. ‘Ah, must have ran over something,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing. Go back to sleep, you old goat!’
Incredibly, Steven obeyed like an android and nodded off again. The tinny van’s vital metal organs were now reverberating worryingly. I was sure whatever we ran over had plowed into the undercarriage. But Daniel wasn’t the slightest bit concerned. Blithely making a U-turn at the edge of a riverbank – which we thankfully did not plunge into – Daniel leaned his chin on the steering wheel and squinted intently at something up ahead.
‘Lion!’ he shouted. I thought he was bluffing or hallucinating under the influence, until we inched closer to find, indeed, a beautiful full-grown male lion. With a tawny Tina Turner-inspired mane superbly framing its feline features, the king of beasts regarded us with bored indifference. After 15 minutes of goggling and gasping on our part, the lion started to get the willies. It stood up on all fours, shot us an I’m-suing-for-tourist-harassment look and dawdled back in the tall dense grass.
‘Wow, that’s a big lion!’ Daniel exclaimed with a wide grin, dazzling me with his keen powers of observation. ‘You’re very lucky to see that, you know.’
Lucky, my butt. After the lion snubbed us, the van’s engine oil indicator on the dashboard lit up in danger red. ‘Uh-oh, that can’t be good,’ he muttered and ground the van to a halt. No shit, Sherlock.
‘Steven!’ he called. ‘Steven, wake up!’
Steven slowly regained consciousness and told Daniel to move out of the driver’s seat. I, in turn, clambered to the back seat to let the squabbling couple figure out the problem.
‘Didn’t your company do regular maintenance on this van? You should’ve checked the engine oil before taking it out,’ Daniel conveniently exculpated himself.
Steven was dumbfounded for a moment ... out of many other moments. Then he started the van and stepped on the accelerator.
‘Stop moving!’ yelled Daniel.
‘Then what are we supposed to do out here?’ Steven echoed my exact sentiments.
Daniel thought for a bit. ‘Let’s check the engine oil,’ he said calmly.
Steven agreed and lifted the front passenger seat to get the oil dipstick out. Wiping it off, he lunged it in again. When the dipstick was pulled out, our worst fears were confirmed – there was no film of oil on it. ‘How far away is camp?’ asked Steven.
Daniel began to say something and then paused.
Panicked by Daniel’s blank expression, Steven got back in the driver’s seat and turned the key once more.
‘Are you deaf? I said stop moving or the engine will knock!’ Daniel shouted crossly. ‘You’ll damage the van!’
“Then tell me how much farther are we from camp?!’ Steven’s voice hit the pitch of a gerbil.
‘Maybe about seven kilometres.’
‘We can drive there, it’s not too far.’
; ‘I told you no! Do you want to destroy the engine and ruin the whole safari?! It’s not like we have a backup vehicle, you know – this is our only one!’
This absurd drama went on for what seemed like an eternity, with Steven start-stopping the van and Daniel shouting vehemently.
So here I was stuck at 2.30 in the morning, watching two grown men bickering in a wilderness teeming with bands of saber-toothed creatures. Nightmarish visuals ran through my head like in one of those When Animals Attack-type nature shows; the leading stars being a pack of African wild dogs that hadn’t eaten for days astutely cooperating to break the van’s windshield and windows. Cue flying blood and dismembered limbs. When we were good and dead, the savage beasts would drag us to a clearing and gnaw us to bite-sized pieces, before regurgitating our body parts – bones and all – to feed the little ones.
I shuddered and peered out the windows, straining to see if I could spot gleaming teeth in the Stygian gloom. Our remaining sources of illumination were the headlamps, a dim interior light and my trusty torch. What if all the batteries died at once? What if we were attacked? Then I was struck with a bizarre feeling, the kind caused by cheap thrills. Although the breakdown had added a macabre note to what started out as an innocent game drive and my life hung by a thread in the hands of a shit-faced guide and a none-too-bright driver, it was turning out to be quite the rollicking adventure. I couldn’t believe it, but I was secretly loving this.
‘Let’s walk back to Chunga now,’ Daniel suggested preposterously.
Steven shivered at the thought. ‘No, it’s too dangerous!’ he protested. ‘We’ll never make it back alive!’
‘Oh, stop being a bloody wussy!’ Daniel scolded.
Wussy or not, Steven was adamant about staying put. Eventually, what I had known all along to be the wisest solution was decided – we’d sleep in the van and wait for daybreak before walking back to Chunga.
Steven killed the lights and left us festering in the coffin-like blackness and silence. I gritted my teeth, partly due to the cold and partly to suppress a string of profanities, and moved to the rearmost seats to lie down. Daniel drew the window curtains close. ‘It will keep the heat in,’ he said. But it did nothing to ease the misery, what with my fleece failing to hold up and being thirsty as hell from all that wine. To keep my icy fingers from falling off, I folded them under my armpits and enviously imagined Chan dribbling in her warm cosy bed.
I was not secretly loving this.
19. STAYING ON THE SUICIDE PATH
Distant chattering roused me from my rough and uncomfortable snooze. Morning had broken and I was most relieved to find that I had survived the night intact. My criss-crossed arms, however, hadn’t moved the entire night and were now firmly cemented in my armpits. As I straightened my torpid limbs with great difficulty, I could feel the tingly rush of stanched blood circulating freely again. Mustering just enough strength to poke my head above the headrest, I spied the two jokers kicking dirt about outside the van. Conditions were still arctic. I clambered out, exhaled morning breath into my cupped hands and rubbed them together vigorously.
‘Oh, good morning, Adeline!’ chirped Daniel. ‘Lions found us last night. Did you hear them?’
I scowled at him. ‘No,’ I uttered curtly.
On hearing the dreaded word ‘lions’, Steven immediately grabbed a Mosi bottle from the van as if that would do a fat load of good against a vicious feline attack. It was all he could do to stop the heebie-jeebies of being part of the food chain. Bearing in mind that lions liked to pounce on the weakest member in a group of prey – usually the young and infirm – I made sure I stayed between the guys at all times. Since we didn’t have a rifle-slinging park scout, we were reduced to being mobile lunch boxes to the deranged predators around us. Believe me, I enjoyed morning strolls as much as the next person ... if I wasn’t sleep-deprived, dehydrated and having my sanity threatened by the spectre of amok beasts. With all due disrespect to Daniel, I doubted he could even save us from a porcupine. And so, like wildebeests making the age-old seasonal Serengeti migration across vast dry grasslands fraught with peril and death, we slogged on. I was worried that we would never make it because every time Daniel said that we were going to be there soon, we weren’t. All of a sudden, an elephant trumpeted loudly to our collective terror and made us synchronize-jump rather stupidly.
Slowly but surely, the gruelling marathon ended without any loss of essential body parts. By the time we got back to Chunga, however, my feet were heavily blistered from chafing against my boots and my mouth was experiencing severe drought. I expected Chan to be worried sick because I’d been away the whole night. Instead, she was well-rested and insanely cheery.
‘Hello, my dear! Did you have a good time?’ she asked jovially after opening the door for me.
I stared at her in disbelief. Then I gulped down a litre of water before lazily relaying the horrid tale with a half-dead face.
‘Ohmygod! I thought you guys were having fun till morning!’
I heaved a tortured groan, plonked onto the bed like a starfish and pulled the sheets over my head.
Later in the afternoon, the camp workers retrieved Beat-Up Van and wheeled it to Chunga’s emergency garage. Just as I’d suspected, engine oil had leaked from a perforation under the van carriage, no doubt from that head-bopping thump last night when Daniel was drunk-driving. The workers roughly sealed up the hole, but it was merely a temporary measure to buy us some time until we got the old clunker to the expert mechanic at Mukambi Lodge, northeast of Kafue River. And so off we rattled.
Upon arrival at Mukambi, we headed straight for the outdoor garage where we were greeted by a fitting display of crumpled off-road vehicles. The vehicle surgeon popped his head from under a Land Rover’s hood and wasted no time getting under our battered van to look at its bits. We anxiously hovered over his legs.
‘Is it bad?’ I asked.
‘Well, it doesn’t look good,’ he said, wiping his hands on a greasy cloth before getting back on his feet. ‘But I will do my best.’
‘Please do. You are our only hope,’ I said gravely.
‘All right, but it is going to take some time. Come back in a few hours.’
Assured that Beat-Up Van was in good hands, we walked to the lodge’s riverfront deck to have a picnic lunch of sandwiches and orange cordial while we waited. We unfolded our canvas stools under a tree where a kudu skull was mounted and I finally managed to relax after what seemed like a lifetime of stress and anxiety. Gazing out at the deep blue river was so calming, so soothing and so ... short-lived. Daniel, feeling the urge to massage his massive ego, had to go and shatter the peace. Again. Why couldn’t he come with a ‘Shut Up’ button?
‘Hey, didn’t I promise to show you the picture of the biggest leopard I killed? The one that was in all the newspapers?’
I had completely forgotten about it, and to be honest, I was not the least bit interested. But ‘Delusions of Grandeur’ happened to be Daniel’s middle name and he duly dug out a laminated A4-sized photograph from the van’s glove box. In it were him and a wizened Caucasian client clutching buffed-up hunting rifles. A handsome leopard with glazed eyes lay lifeless at their feet in stark contrast to their deliriously brain-dead grins. I was instantly reminded of the beautiful leopard that strode across the South Luangwa plain, and my stomach began to churn.
‘Isn’t she a beauty?’ he asked, proudly parading the disgusting photo before us to fish for compliments.
‘She was,’ I pouted.
‘Wake you up ... it’s time to go-go,’ Daniel sang annoyingly and poked me in the ribs. Having dozed off at Mukambi’s reading lounge with my face buried in a photo book’s lurid double-page spread of a regal black-maned lion, I unglued my eyelids and murmured in the affirmative. Beat-Up Van had been patched up and was as good as new. Okay, I exaggerate.
Just as we were about to get underway, our plans were thwarted by the powers that be – this time, surly park scouts at the ch
eckpoint of Kafue Hook Gate. Apparently, Daniel had neglected to pay the permit fees and so was not allowed to enter the northern section of the park. When he tried to convince the scouts that he was the rather important manager of Chunga Safari Camp and that he had a special prior arrangement with park headquarters because he knew people in high places, the scouts radioed HQ to check his story. HQ’s reply? That it was the most ridiculous thing they had ever heard. If Daniel was well known in Kafue, I was queen of the universe.
But Daniel, being Daniel, was not the slightest bit daunted, of course. Not when he had amassed all those years of being humiliated dozens of times. ‘Not to worry, everything is under control. We will make a plan,’ he blurted his trademark motto again.
And what a plan it was. He took care of business, true to form, using the time-honoured techniques of a drama queen: gratuitous voice-raising, wanton gesticulating and mad pacing around the security booth. Miracle of miracles, it worked. I seriously had to fight the wild urge to admire this man. Thus we were able to leave for the bottom-numbing pilgrimage to handsome Lufupa Lodge, our chosen base camp near the wide expanse of Busanga Plains.
Owing to the tree-choked denseness here in the central part of the park, spotting mammals along the way was a hit-and-miss endeavour. But what Kafue lacked in big game sightings was more than made up by the riot of colours bursting out of the miombo woodlands: autumnal shades of attention-seeking reds, flirty browns, psychotic yellows, expressive greens and a blaze of other in-between hues. Feeling inspired, I snapped some blurry shots of trees rolling in motion in the hope the photos might turn out arty. (They didn’t.)
We continued on a particularly uneventful stretch of dry bush in the sweltering hours of late morning. In order to avoid being barbecued between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., buffaloes and antelopes were often found hiding in the shadows of trees and chewing the cud whilst twitching their ears to fend off the no-see-ums that swarmed around their heads. Nothing happened and there was no indication that anything was about to happen, either. Eager to kill the monotony, it was also the time of day that we were most prone to false alarms and magic mushroom-type sightings (‘I saw a pangolin on top of an elephant there!’) Naturally, such silly proclamations led to demented wild goose chases.
