WE had quite a party, the night of the goat dinner.
The strangest musical instruments appeared on the scene, made out of anything we could find. Deidre had a tin mug full of shells, I tuned eight beer bottles and we made the most dreadful din, until Mike’s fishing line became disconnected from his oil can and somebody spilled my F sharp.
I suspect that the latter was done deliberately, as people were getting very tired of my rendition of ‘Three Blind Mice’.
Desperate Don should have arrived at the same time as Deidre and I, but nobody seemed at all surprised that he was overdue. Apparently everything always happened to Desperate Don. This time a drunk had stepped into the road in front of his Land Rover, and Desperate had been held for three days, while the powers-that-be decided whether or not to charge him with manslaughter.
He was very lucky in that there were witnesses and they all agreed that the man had run into the Land Rover, rather than the other way round.
Don was the kind of person who, in the middle of a deserted beach, 50km from the nearest post office, would ask you if you could tell him the postal rate, airmail, from Inhambane to Oslo. And he would get quite upset if you couldn’t.
When we left, it was Don who was detailed to give us a lift back to Inhambane.
Pete’s Land Rover was loaded to the gunwales and towing the compressor, which they had been using to refill the aqualungs. There was obviously no room for Deidre and myself, so we waved them off and sat down on our rolled-up tent to wait for Don.
At first it looked as if we should get away fairly soon after Pete’s group, but then Don decided that things had been packed in the wrong order, and everything had to come out of the vehicle and be repacked.
Then he wanted to do a detour via the nearest tap to wash his hair.
When we got there, he decided he needed a shave as well, and a good deal of unpacking and repacking was necessary in order to extricate his razor from the luggage. We got away two hours after the others.
Anyone else would carry a boat upside-down on the roof of a vehicle, but not Don. He had a couple of pieces of wood, cut to size, to hold the boat right-way-up.
Halfway across the swamps, one of these broke and the boat started slipping sideways. Of course, his tool box was underneath everything else, so we had to unpack yet again to get at that. He sloshed about in the mud for a while, doing a temporary repair and then couldn’t find anywhere to put the tool box.
Rather than go through the unpacking procedure again, I volunteered to sit on it. It wasn’t very comfortable!
When we eventually got to Inhambane, it was past midday. I had hoped to get across the border that night and travel non-stop to Johannesburg, but that now seemed to be out of the question.
It was only when we got to the outskirts of Lourenco Marques that I realised that we could still make it to the border before the gates closed.
All I had to do was to cover 100km of winding track, in the dark, in 70 minutes. I tightened my seat belt and put my foot down.
Deidre, who was the world’s worst back seat driver, said nothing for the next hour. When we arrived, with three minutes to spare, her only comment was that it was a good thing we had seat belts.
Officialdom hurried us through the border formalities in record time and, travel-stained as we were, we drove straight to the nearest motel, marched into the cocktail bar and had a couple of stiff drinks. Nothing could have induced me to drive any further that night.
We pitched our tent by the Komati River and crashed into our sleeping bags. I should have slept like a log, but when I fastened the mosquito net, I trapped one inside. My thumpings and slappings failed to wake Deidre, but they must have loosened some tent pegs because, after I had finally killed the bug and just as I was dropping off to sleep, the tent fell down!
We returned to Johannesburg with several hundred mosquito bites, coral poisoning, half a ton of sand and something to write home about at last!
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