I got a disease in a swimming pool. I got out and there were all these mad lumps all over me. I wasn’t allowed cook dinner and sat at the edge of the group like a ginger leper. It cleared up and I was accepted back into the group.
The following day we left civilisation to enter the heart of the Okavango Delta. We were dropped off at the collection point and there were nine or ten dugout canoes called Mokoros there waiting for us. They’re very thin and since the delta is relatively shallow, they are propelled by lads withs long sticks pushing off the riverbed. When I met my guide he said his name was Ongst but I didn’t believe him for a second because I knew he was P.Diddy. He was the exact spit of him. I accused him of being an imposter and he stared back at me as if I was the crazy one. Diddy’s like that though.
We set off and we again molested by flies as we barged through the reeds. We slowed down to be shown a large male elephant having a drink at the side. Staying true to ‘The Inner Tourist’ we happily snapped away at him. We continued on to find our camp but we stopped again about 100 yards from the elephant.
‘Another elephant?? Where is it’
‘No, this is our campsite’ Diddy replied, struggling to hold down his american accent.
This is what I signed an indemnity form for I thought. We struck up our tents faster than ever before and lit the biggest fire yet. It was then time for our evening game walk in the bush. Dids gave us a brief safety talk and told what to do if, say, we got charged. ‘Whatever you do, don’t run’. We set off with the rapstar up the front and Andos, a second guide, at the rear. We headed straight for the ellie that we saw earlier. As we were walking we noticed a guy with a camera up ahead, he was walking in the same direction as us. I assumed he was a guide himself or a National Geographic man. About 10 minutes later we found our ellie in a clearing. The camera lad was there but still a bit away from us. We stood and observed both of them. I noticed that he was waving enthusiastically and pointing at us. After a confusing 10 seconds or so, I noticed that it was a warning. I wheeled around to see three young rowdy elephants rushing out of the bush. Shit. They were heading straight for us and we immediately started walking towards the nearest cover, I was relatively calm until Andos left his position at the rear and hurriedly walked past us. That freaked me out. The three elephants kept a moderate pace until our friend who warned us began sprinting away. The elephants picked up a lotta pace, trumpeted and changed direction ever so slightly away from us and towards the American Idiot. They raged straight by us and into the bush. Andos went to fetch the longhaired gobshite from his hiding spot. He joined our group for the rest of the walk. It turns out that he’s just a normal tourist who decided to leave his campsite by himself to get some photos. He was a proper gobshite. We asked Andos that night why he overtook us and he said ‘I was trying to save my own life!’.
That night two of us were leaning against a tree beside the fire and we spotted one of the most venomous scorpions sat on the other side of the trunk, literally at eye level. We threw him in the fire.
Mother nature got her revenge on me by sending about 40 mosquitos into the tent that night. I counted 89,568 bites just on my arm the next morning. I have been taking my anti-malarials with Nazi precision since.
We stayed at the place with the disease pool and after a pathetic deliberation, I got in again. I caught the mad chlamydia rash thing again but the effects we lessened this time round. Good old immune system.
On the drive to the Namibian border our driver swerved. It was just a little one to avoid something on the road. I asked Kanyo later that day and he said it was a huge spitting cobra. I’m gona pay more attention to the swerves from now on.
I inadvertantly cut my finger on my keyboard and there’s blood everywhere.
So as we approached Namibia we were swerving a lot. I was bouncing off the walls looking for critters. We rudely halted and pulled up at the side of the road. There were no reptiles, our driver was vomiting. I then remembered that he wasn't feeling well at all earlier that day. He was at the doctors and was given the all clear, saying it was just a cold. We realised that he was very sick, and we had another 80 km to go till we got to Grootfontein, Namibia. The journey was terrifying. There were a few very hairy moments and I was literally counting down the distance. Kanyo had called ahead to the campsite to get an ambulance ready for him. At dinner that night he told us that he had to keep talking to him to keep his conciousness and our lives. We were ment to stay at that site for just the one night but it ended up being two.
Myself and the only other Irishman set out to not only to celebrate our lives but to try and find a place where they were showing the Heineken Cup Final. We were directed towards the local rugby club which seemed promising. There was South African rugby game on when we arrived and I asked this guy whether they were showing our match or not. I quickly realised that this guy was yet another moron. He was quite stocky and so I agreed with everything he said and laughed at his jokes. He said that there’s no way at all we’d be able to watch it there because there was an important Bulls vs Sharks game on. He then lifted up his sleeve to expose a Bulls tattoo. We didn’t protest. I then realised that it was quite a dodgy place filled with men that looked like they love killing deer and headbutting each other. We mentioned skydiving as some of us are interested in doing it in Swakopmund. He said he’s done 5500 dives and all the different ways that he’s done them. It ranged from the plausible ‘doing a jump in a wheelchair’ to the outrageously untrue ‘ I throw parachute out, light a cigarette, then jump out after it and put it on in the nick of time’. We conceded to the fact that we weren’t going to be viewing the match and relied on updates from friends. Unsurprisingly, many people were reluctant to tell us about the first half but 40 minutes later we were flooded with joyous and drunken texts. We had a toast to good aul Johnny in the back of a pick up truck whizzing down the motorway back towards our camp. We had decided that we were getting tanked in the name of Ireland but when we arrived back there was a very sombre mood. Our driver was diagnosed with full blown malaria. He had been wildly misdiagnosed back in Botswana. I compromised the conflicting emotions by being quiet but still getting locked. The morning we were supposed to leave and he was supposed to be released from hospital, we were told that they overdosed him on the drugs so we were further delayed. Thankfully all went well after that he has made a heroic recovery.
We bumbled on to Etosha National Park, our last one. On our first game drive we saw the awkward stance that giraffe adapt whilst drinking and a mother lioness transport 4 month old cubs across the plain. They waddled along in single file behind their mama parallel to our truck. An unholy amount of photos had been taken when she reached the thick shrubbery and deposited the simbas.
The campsite we stayed that night was bang in the middle of the National Park and is run by the Namibian government. The jewel in the crown of that site is the waterhole. It's floodlit and about a 5 minute walk away so we brought some beers and our sleeping bags and waited to see what would come. An elephant apparated and so did two rhino. We watched in silence and fascination. We got sleepy as we were up very early and decided to hit the sack. At half twelve I was awoken to the sound of two male lions fighting. I jumped out of my tent and legged it to the waterhole. The winner was sitting with his ladies. He was still screaming at his opponent in the distance, It sounded like a v8 engine right in your ear. I sat and watched for a good while. The male got up and we all saw his battlewounds. He had the filthiest limp going and I reckon he’s good as dead now. As I was getting back into my tent I looked across at another tent and saw the fly sheet being ripped off abruptly, I then saw a jackal run away behind the tent. What a lil messer.
A cheetah licked my knee. We visited a family of brothers who keep cheetahs, wild and tame. They have 3 tame ones that are literally like big housecats. They have them just wandering around the house. There were 16 wild ones in a 250 hectare enclosure. So we all went in to see the tame ones. I was sitting on the doorstep when one came straight of my knee. She gave it a few good licks and went on her way. One of them got a bit playful and took a small chunk outta one of the lads’ foot. It was then time for the feeding of the wild cheetahs. We entered the enclosure and drove around for a while to ensure all the cats knew it was dinnertime. We were told of this one old cheetah who lost and eye to a venomous snake. When she arrived, all the others had a go at her asserting their dominance. She was visibly skinnier than the rest and at the bottom of the pecking order. 16 cheetahs circled us as the brothers were throwing out chunks of giraffe to them. They each got a slab and raced off to eat in peace. The cheetah with the gammy eye got a surprisingly large piece surprisingly early and we were all happy for her. That night we all gathered in a super slick bar that the brothers built. We hovered around the pool table getting the cans into us when one of the lads challenged us to a game, but with no cue. Instead he produced a broom handle that had about 89,568 splinters on it. For fear of looking uncool we played them. By the end we all supported a small forest inside our hands.
‘OK, So the next game is this. Whoever pots the white ball has to take it out of the table at the end’
That’s pretty standard I thought, until he whipped out a stick of dynamite and placed it in the hole. Yet more maniacs in my presence. We all had a hearty chuckle and I went to bed soon after hoping my tent was outside the blast radius.
I saw the largest recorded meteorite and a 5000 year old cave painting. I’ll leave it at that because there’s no animals involved.
I just had three nights in Swakopmund, Namibia. We were thinking of doing skydiving there but we were told that all skydiving had been halted for the last month. Upon further probing we found that some guy’s emergency parachute didn’t work last month and he splatted into the desert. So I settled for sandboarding, quadbiking and snake hunting. We climbed a 90 metre high sand dune so we could board down it. After a bit of swaying and falling, I got the hang of it and my coolness levels increased. I did a run on a lie down board and the speed gun clocked me at 73 km/hr. That was good craic and I’d have done it a lot more if I wasn’t so knackered from climbing the dune all day. I had a monster lunch and prepared for quad biking. Our guide looked like he stepped straight off the set of Jackass 4. We covered 60 km altogether and it was the best non-animal thing I’ve done here. Jackass-man spent more time on two wheels than four. Gravity wasn’t an issue for him.
We watched the Champion’s League Final in a Man Utd pub. It was packed to start with then by the final whistle it was empty.
Yesterday I went snake hunting in the desert. Tommy was the guide and he knew his stuff. We were about 30 seconds in when we found the venomous Horned Adder and I did my first ever backflip with all the excitement. We saw amazing creatures and more snakes and I was properly in my element.
I am so cold right now with 5 layers and a sleeping bag. This desert climate messes with your head.
It’s the beginning of the end now as I only have another 10 days here.
Silar erbody
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