BECAUSE of the lack of facilities in Moremi, one has to go behind a bush to commune with nature. Corrie, with his gammy leg, has great difficulty in squatting, so I had made him a camping loo seat.
This consisted of a plastic toilet seat, fitted to the legs of a folding fishing stool. It had given me no end of grief in the manufacture.
I had no saddle brackets, clips or pop-rivets, so I had to make my own brackets by bending bits of aluminium flat bar and bolt the whole lot together. It took me a whole day to make it.
On my first attempt I put the bolts in in such a way that sitting on it could cause a nasty injury.
So I turned the bolts round, and it looked fine, but when I sat on it, it bent nearly double.
I took it apart, cut struts of plywood to reinforce it under the seat and bolted it back together again. Corrie sat on it, pronounced it satisfactory and packed it.
On the first morning at Third Bridge he unpacked it, pocketed a loo roll, picked up a shovel and headed for the bush.
I didn’t see the ensuing drama, but I gather that all went well so long as he was sitting still, but when he shifted his weight to one side, as one must eventually do on such occasions, there was a resounding crack and he landed in the undergrowth.
In Maun we had met some people who had seen a Sitatunga at Xaxanaxa. This rare, web-footed antelope, which we dearly wanted to film, normally stays well away from the mainland, preferring to live on the floating islands of papyrus, which are a feature of the Okavango Delta. We didn’t give much for our chances of seeing one there, but we drove up to Xaxanaxa anyway. Sure enough, there were no Sitatunga. There was nothing.
We decided to have a quick snack before going back, so I opened the packet of Jägerwurst. Ugh! This was no Jägerwurst. This had once been polony. We buried it.
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