Carol’s Column

No beating about the bush

WHEN something goes bump in the night it is usually my husband. But not always.

There we were, in the middle of the Botswana bush, lions roaring, hyenas howling, jackals whining and the tent was shaking ... And in the shaking tent lay my daughter and me. Outside, on top of the vehicle, slept my spouse and son number two.

So what was I doing in a mobile tent in the middle of nowhere?

“What this family needs,” said my financial asset two weeks before, as we sat quietly on the stoep enjoying a drink and watching the dogs systematically destroying our newly planted beds, “is a holiday.” I’d nodded vigorously, dislocating my left shoulder blade and causing a spasm in my lower kidneys.

“We need to escape. We’ll go camping in Botswana.”

So we’d packed our trusty old tank until the prop-shaft scraped the ground and set out to wild Savuti where the lions leap and the warthogs snuffle.

And, after days of arduous travelling, pushing and bumping we’d found the perfect campsite under a wizened sausage tree.

This was our first night and we were being threatened by an earthquake.

I leapt from my sleeping bag and peered out through the tent flap. Three metres away, his tusks waving, his trunk waggling and his ears flapping, loomed the largest elephant I’d ever seen. A giant among giants — and that was without my contact lenses.

“Ag, cute,” said my 14-year-old princess of the curly hair and unflappable disposition. Cute? Would you call King Kong cute?

An elephant’s side away from the tent, two statue-like Lazar figures sat bolt upright on top of the car, not twitching an eyelash.

It was obvious that the gallivanting jumbo had squeezed his bulk between tent and tank, which accounted for the shakes, and was now investigating his surroundings.

He liked what he saw. On the table were a few stray watermelon pips I’d neglected to wipe away. Like a giant vacuum cleaner, his trunk came down and suctioned the pips up, up and away. It was only when he tried to suction my fridge up too that I got a little irate and shot out of the tent clapping my hands shouting “Shoo, shoo.” Other people listen to the radio for fun!

An elephant of feeling, he backed away delicately taking care to avoid the buckets and chairs in his path. His final friendly gesture was to deposit a huge dropping besides the washstand.

Spring was in the Savuti air. We watched lions, elephants, warthogs and giraffes mating.

One night my daughter tripped over a honey badger. On another, a cheeky hyena stole my lamb chops in honey-spiced marinade. Yet another whipped a packet of candles, the soap, toothpaste and forest fern deodorant. Somewhere in Savuti is the sweetest smelling hyena in Africa.

There are so many things to recommend camping. Dirt and sand in food, scraping burnt pots clean in cold water, the treks into dense bush armed with a spade and bog roll.

What can be nicer than sitting around a camp fire having a warm beer from the fridge that isn’t working properly, with the smoke in your eyes and a tickle in your throat from the dust?

What can be more pleasurable than having a baboon scratching his armpit while you drink black coffee because a hyena has stolen the Cremora that was inside the tin trunk, not on top?

Indeed, what is more fun than digging your car out of an aardvark hole with the African sun burning you to a frazzle while a fish eagle screams overhead?

I’ll tell you what could be more fun. Lying at a five-star hotel next to a turquoise pool sipping iced champagne cocktails while five white-coated waiters hover hopefully in the background waiting to attend to your every whimper.

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