CHECKING our dodgy wheel every twenty minutes and stopping for virtually nothing else, it took us until six o’clock to get to the company’s house in Maun.
Now all we wanted was a hot bath and a cold beer. Unfortunately, as we should have expected after our previous experience with them, some of the domestic appliances in the house were not too helpful, so we had to put up with cold baths and warm beers.
The following day the fridges repented of their obstinacy, but the geyser continued to sulk.
The kitchen was unbearable, with pans simmering on the stove for bath water, but we couldn’t face the thought of tackling the next stretch of dust without first washing off the last lot.
In Maun we added to our stock of miscellaneous nuts and bolts and supplemented our supplies of petrol and beer, before heading north to Moremi. We managed the first 100km without any major catastrophe.
We churned throughout thick sand without getting stuck and lost only a very small chunk of roof rack on the way. Just inside the game reserve, we had a puncture in one of the trailer tyres.
We were carrying one spare wheel for the trailer, but until we had the puncture, it had not occurred to any of us that we had no way of fixing trailer tyres – they were tubeless.
This time we didn’t make the mistake of heading north, but managed to find the turn-off to Xaxanaxa. At least, we assumed that it was the right turn-off, but the map which we had acquired in Maun was of rather dubious accuracy.
However, a passing tourist confirmed that we were going the right way and suggested the ‘Third Bridge’ would be a better place to stop than Xaxanaxa.
When we got to First Bridge, we found that it had fallen down and that we had to use the ford to cross the river.
Katie must have felt like going for a swim, because she stuck her wheels firmly in the mud in the middle of the river and refused to budge for the next 20 minutes.
Digging a vehicle out of mud, while no less messy, is certainly a cooler job than digging out of sand.
Second Bridge had also fallen down, but the ford was a lot less muddy than the last one and it gave us no problems.
Third Bridge hadn’t fallen down. We stopped right in the middle of it and jumped straight into the water. It was two feet deep, with a sandy bottom, and crystal clear. It tasted marvellous.
We found a shady spot to camp and pitched our tents, the big one under one tree and Richard’s little one under the next.
In the middle of the night we were woken by the sound of a small, frightened voice, calling “Dad, Dad. I think this elephant’s going to tread on me.”
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We looked out and, sure enough, a rather large jumbo was methodically stripping leaves from the tree under which Richard was sleeping. Richard spent the rest of the night in the Land Rover with Jacquie; Corrie, Karen and I returned to our beds in the big tent.
I was just dropping off to sleep when a lion wandered into the camp, roared in my left ear and wandered off again.
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