WHEN we packed up and left Savuti, we fell foul of the same particularly bad bump again.
We had put the remaining bottles of wine into the trailer, so they were safe, but a case of canned beer came hurtling down from the roof and landed with a resounding crack.
Only one can exploded, but its contents made a nasty, soggy mess of the box and involved us in quite a bit of repacking to find homes for the other 23 cans.
This made us late in setting off and we were a long way behind schedule when we reached the sand ridge. Desert sand fluffs up in the heat and is therefore much more difficult to drive through in the afternoon than in the morning.
We hit the ridge just after midday and got stuck in, right up to our axles. For three-and-a-half hours we shovelled and dug, pushed and heaved, puffed and panted and moved about five metres.
Then someone had a bright idea and we did what we should have done in the first place: unhitched the trailer and man-handled it onto firmer ground. Without the extra drag, Katie came out easily and Corrie was able to back her through the bush to where we had left the trailer.
From there on, we drove through virgin bush, preferring the risk of getting a thorn through a tyre to the virtual certainty of getting stuck again.
All this time we had been hearing the call of a couple of beers in the fridge at Kwaai River Lodge. The hotter we got, the louder the beers shouted, but how could we go to a smart hotel, looking the way we did?
The river itself provided the answer and I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed a bath more than that nude dunk in the Kwaai. With clean clothes and dripping hair, we looked reasonably presentable when we sat down on the hotel patio and – oh bliss – the beers were so cold that they even had little bits of ice floating in them.
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