Don't Look Behind You!: A Safari Guide's Encounters With Ravenous Lions, Stampeding Elephants, and Lovesick Rhinos by Peter Allison

Author:Peter Allison
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: BIO023000, TRV002000
ISBN: 1599214695
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2009-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

After a month at Jedibe, news came through that I had to get into Maun immediately to sit a guide’s licence exam, then return to Mombo. After a trip to the airstrip along now-familiar channels past now-recognisable plants and bird life, I waved goodbye to Aukie, Mark and the dogs, all of whom I had grown quite fond of, and waited for the plane to taxi us to the far side of the strip.

‘Shouldn’t we take off into the wind?’ I asked the pilot, indicating the windsock which flared with some rigidity. Some of the pilots had let me fly the planes when no tourists were on board and I’d been gathering what knowledge I could about aircraft.

‘Oops,’ said the pilot, a new guy I didn’t know well, then added ‘Daisy.’

My confidence plummeted. If he couldn’t remember something as basic as taking off into the wind, how would he handle something more complex, such as landing?

‘There are two holes in this strip,’ he finally explained, ‘named “Oops” and “Daisy”. If you don’t hit them at the start of your run you’ll end up in the river.’

‘Oh goody, that’s fine then . . .’ I said.

We powered up, hit Oops, bounced into Daisy and popped up into the sky. As the plane banked I saw Jackson heading to his tree, Mark deftly turning the boat and water—so much beautiful water— sparkling in the slanted light of the sun, and felt a pang that I hadn’t understood this place better.

The pang turned to full regret within a year when it was announced that Jedibe, our least-occupied camp, was not commercially viable and would be shut down. My time there had not always been enjoyable, or explicable, and many tourists had felt the same. It was a place where cows could be accomplices to a crime, where you could fall through the earth, where animals wild and domestic mingled, a place which would surprise you at every turn. I never found a place more mad or more exciting. Nowhere quite as African.

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