SHORTLY after we returned to camp, the rest of the party arrived, and presented us with a bag full of our lost belongings. They had found everything except the gas cylinder.
“Did you see the lion?” asked Corrie, while I organised cold beers all round. “Yes,” said Bob, “on the antbear hole. Thanks for the marker.”
Corrie said he meant real ones, not the brewery variety and told them about the kill. Ed said they had seen nothing, so we all went out together to look for the remains.
I was absolutely flabbergasted. In two days, nature had cleaned up the mess completely.
There was nothing but a small blood stain in the sand to show what had happened there. It wasn’t until the film was processed that anyone really believed our story.
We left fairly early on Sunday morning, with us leading the three-vehicle convoy. Just past the spot where we had lost the tent, we came to a steep slope, leading down to a small salt pan. It looked fairly smooth. We were travelling quite fast.
Suddenly our whole world went crazy. Katie the Land Rover, jumped three feet in the air and came down with a resounding crash.
We all hit the ceiling. The cargo on the roof-rack shifted and the barbecue grid, a heavy steel contraption with legs, came hurtling down, to be stopped by a retaining rope only half an inch short of crashing through the windscreen. Karen screamed – and the engine died.
We sat there in stunned silence for a few seconds and then Corrie, who seldom, if ever, swore, uttered a very rude word.
While we were assessing the damage, the others caught up with us. We could not restart the engine, so Bob towed us, 45km through desert sand, on a three-metre towrope. At times the dust was so bad that we couldn’t even see his Land Rover, let alone the tension on the rope.
At one point there was a tree in the middle of the track and we couldn’t see which side of it Bob had gone.
The towrope broke four times and the whole hellish journey took almost seven hours.
Ed and his family followed behind, once again picking up all the things which fell off our roof and out of our back door. Ever since then, that bit of track leading down to the salt pan has been known locally as ‘Corrie’s Calamity’.
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