THE following morning didn’t start too well. When the water boiled for early morning tea, I picked up the pan through the hole in the cloth, stuck my thumb in the flames and dropped the whole scalding lot on my foot.
Karen made a grab for the hot teapot and Corrie came up from the river to find us both howling.
The afternoon was unbearably hot, and we spent a considerable amount of time reclining in the shade, studying what appeared to be a small, green lizard, sitting motionless in a tree. I finally summoned up the energy to fetch the binoculars and make a positive identification. It was the remains of a balloon.
Somewhere a grey lourie was calling ‘go waaaay, go waaaay’. We scanned the trees in vain. There was no sign of the bird.
I eventually tracked the sound to Karen’s camping cot. “Me go-way birdie,” she informed me, grinning from ear to ear.
By late afternoon there were definite signs of a storm brewing. Corrie fancies himself as a weather forecaster. He listened to the distant thunder, gazed intently at the sky and prophesied a dry storm. No sooner were the words out of his mouth than the heavens opened and we all got soaked.
On the fourth morning we did a stock check and discovered, to our horror, that we had only four beers left. To make matters worse, it was New Year’s Eve, and the native drums from the cattle post on the other side of the river had been summoning all and sundry to a beer-drink for the past two days.
We heard the message relayed from village to village. It was going to be quite a party – it made us thirsty just to think about it.
While the rest of the party were sleeping off lunch, I amused myself by experimenting with my new macro lens. I was busy adjusting the focus for a close-up of the mouth-parts of a dung beetle, when Clumsy Pup arrived on the scene and chewed up my beetle.
Our evening washing-up was left undone, because there was a large black mamba curled round a branch just above our washing-up spot.
Hopefully the snake would have moved by the morning and we would be able to clean up everything then.
We decided to go to bed early. The weather prophet said it would rain, and it did. The dogs all piled into the tent with us and there was a great deal of yapping and snarling before we all settled down for the night.
One of the dogs passed wind, and I bitterly regretted having given them the left-over curry with their supper.
We awoke just before midnight, to the sounds of the drums beating in the New Year and the rain, so essential to Botswana’s economy, pattering on the roof of the tent. We wished each other health and happiness, in a shared glass of Botete River water.
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