Peeing in the Bush Page 15

  Thus, like cheating husbands coming home late, we tiptoed from thornbush to thornbush to get a closer gander. Luckily, rhinos can’t see very well so we were perfectly fine as long as we banded together and kept our pie-holes shut. All was well until the mother rhino took its attention away from feeding and directed its frightful snout at the suicidal European lady in our walking troop. She’d half-wittedly stood out from the brush to take a photograph.

  ‘Come back,’ Henry whispered audibly. ‘It doesn’t look too happy.’ She ignored him, and was completely oblivious to the fact that she may soon resemble shish kebab on a rhino horn. Like a miffed celeb­rity about to knock a paparazzo over, the rhino turned its massive armour plated-like body to face her and swayed its head, as if trying to get a good aim at the woman. Since the old rhino was almost the size of a compact car, merely running towards the woman and shoving her would be enough to send her on a permanent vacation. The horn of death just meant that it could kill her twice over, with colour. I readied my camera to capture the drama about to unfold. ‘It wants to charge you!’ Henry warned, getting tense. Then one of her family members had to go and spoil it all by pulling her back to us.

  Henry was not amused. ‘We’re less than five feet away! Listen to me next time!’ he scolded her. Just to be extra annoying, and because the picture that could’ve propelled me to fame and fortune had failed to materialize, I tutted and wagged my finger at her.

  Soon it was feeding time. As nutrient-rich food was scarce in the current harsh winter, one of the rangers hurled a sack of fresh green grass in front of them. Park rangers did not usually interfere with the natural order of things but the survival of the last two white rhinoceroses was crucial – even if only to prove to kind donors like South Africa that being sent to Zambia was not a death sentence. ‘Long-term food supplementation is not healthy, though,’ Henry said disapprovingly. ‘The rhino’s innate instincts will be dulled like those of a domestic animal. A rhino in the wild should adjust to the dry season by eating whatever’s naturally available. Even if it’s the horrid-tasting dried grass.’

  Try telling that to the spoilt 2,000-kilo brats. Having caught on that lunch was served, the male rhino brutally impaled the sack, flung it around in the air and dropped it impiously. No matter how many times it tried, though, the stubborn sack refused to spit the grass out. To prevent the rhino from getting too frustrated, the scout armed himself with a long stick and waved it at the brute to get it to back off. The scout then slashed the sack open with a sharp knife and shook the greens out. Almost immediately, the ill-tempered mother and son horn-fought each other for first dibs on the grub. As they ferociously clashed horns, we gulped and stared at the display of mindless violence.

  ‘Nothing to be alarmed about,’ Henry broke the silence when he saw us standing unnervingly rigid like wooden dummies. ‘It’s just the rhino way of saying grace.’

  14. OF FLYING AND LIVER DEGRADATION

  It’s not terribly difficult for the terminally disconsolate and mentally unstable to find novel ways of ending their suffering in the woodlands of Zambia. Baboons threaten you on your way to the kitchen, lions circle hungrily within a finger’s length of your open vehicle and hippos sharpen their gargantuan tusks as you approach. So why did I feel the need to fly over Earth’s widest waterfall on a brittle microlight? I have no idea. Maybe I wanted to be one of those old grannies who boasted about her wild salad days and bored kids senseless by repeating the same stories endlessly on the pretext of Alzheimer’s.

  Although Chan – the intelligent and sane one – refused to try it with me, she tagged along anyway. I thought she was providing moral support but really she just wanted to record the time of my precipitous demise. ‘Well, somebody has to call your mum and tell her what happened!’ she justified. Chan could be so sweet and thoughtful sometimes.

  At Maramba Aerodrome, I filled up the obligatory can’t-sue-us-if-we-kill-you-by-accident forms and was tossed a large blue flight suit, which looked like it was suspiciously fashioned from a disused sleeping bag. I stepped into it and Chan zipped me up. Then she took a few steps back to check me out. ‘You look like you are wearing a bin bag with arms and legs,’ she laughed cruelly before snapping a photo for future taunting.

  She was right, though. The baggy flight suit would have been a decent fit for the average Caucasian but I was practically swimming in it, with room to spare for an anserine waist float. Even though the suit’s crotch space was down to my knees, I was raring to go – until, of course, I turned around and glanced at the open airfield. To my dismay, the nerve impulses which were supposed to relay the messages ‘Danger!’ and ‘Are you out of your mind?’ to the rational part of my brain had only just been delivered. My bravado simmered down almost immediately and I was reminded of all the things that I promised myself to do before I departed Earth: meeting Sheryl Crow, beating up my exes and staging an insurgence against the proliferation of tasteless tattooed eyebrows. No, I still had my whole life ahead of me! I started questioning my sanity when I remembered something – oh crap, was I going to get airsick?

  Flashback: A few years ago, I was trying to write a magazine article about flying schools. In the midst of wrapping up an informative inter­view with a young flight instructor named Lokman at an aerodrome in Kuala Lumpur, a retired doctor walked in on us wanting to renew his Private Pilot’s Licence. Lokman took up his case immediately, and made preparations to assess if the doctor could still remember how to keep an aircraft above ground. Since I had the unenviable knack for being in the wrong place at the right time, Lokman invited me to join him for the doc’s test flight. I quickly agreed, seeing that it was a rare opportunity to be in a single-engine Cessna. Yet, I can’t say I was thinking with both cerebral hemispheres when I elected to hand my life over to a feeble 60-plus-year-old uncle who was not going to have the greatest eyesight and hadn’t piloted a plane in yonks. More than this, I had read that driving was 26 times safer than flying in a private plane.

  ‘Hey, there is nothing to worry about,’ Lokman reassured me when he noticed that I had suddenly gone a shade paler. ‘I’ve been sitting next to dozens of learner pilots and I’m still alive, aren’t I?’

  This was true.

  ‘But just in case – you better take this.’ He handed me a doggy bag.

  ‘This is my comfort amenity, I suppose?’ I said woefully, holding it up.

  Lokman grinned and nodded.

  So out we went to the airstrip where the ripe doctor began pre-flight inspections by molesting and pinching the light aircraft’s external bits under Lokman’s watchful eye. When everything appeared to be in tiptop condition, he toppled into the pilot’s seat with Lokman beside him while I climbed in the back. For a moment I thought I had just gotten into a clunky 1970s Daihatsu car because the smelly insides of the plane looked like they had been in use long after the expiration date. Plus I had to slam the tinny door three times before it would close. The doc, however, was so efficient at testing buttons and fondling dials that in 15 minutes, we were good to go.

  We took off without a hitch. But once we were up in the air, the clackety prop plane bobbed and wobbled erratically.

  ‘We are gonna crash!!’ I shrieked.

  Unfortunately, the earmuff-type headphones the men had on rendered them deaf to my cry of panic. The flying tin can continued to rock and sway. With every sudden unexplained dip, vomit fluids mixed and congealed within me and lurched a notch up. I whipped out the doggy bag with great urgency and held it open in front of my mouth to prepare for the inevitable. The doc steered the plane like a drunken sailor for half an hour before landing. And taking off. And landing. And taking off. I wasn’t sure if I could keep my insides where they belonged any longer. At the fourth landing, with my hand cupped tightly around my mouth to prevent myself from spewing on the pilot, I shakily tapped Lokman’s shoulder and asked to be let off.

  With this memory fresh in my mind, I had purposely eaten like a bird at breakfast to avoid blowing chunk
s from 300 metres up above. God bless the innocent creature browsing below – a headdress of half-digested Chinese fried noodles would be so unflattering.

  So there I was reciting the second last line of Hail Mary when I was summarily summoned to the airstrip. With an incomplete prayer and a nervous spring in my step, I tripped on my own heel walking towards the microlight, which looked like an overdressed tricycle with red V-shaped wings. Kevin, the genial middle-aged English pilot, greeted me calmly and I duly lubricated his firm handshake with cold sweat. Behind the open cockpit of the microlight, I saw the incredible motorized mechanism that would be keeping us aloft – a large three-blade propeller. Someone somewhere was probably missing a ceiling fan. A staffer tucked me into the tandem seat perched precariously on a flimsy undercarriage, and pushed down on my head a heavy helmet with headphones and microphone attached before strapping me up.

  Kevin slipped into the seat in front of me and started to reverse out of the small bay. ‘You all right back there?’ he asked through the microphone.

  ‘Um, my feet are dangling in the air ...’ I said, embarrassed.

  ‘Oh, the footrests are over here if you can reach it,’ he answered, pointing to two short bars sticking out.

  The aircraft was clearly designed to discriminate against short girls. I slumped down the back of the seat, stretched my legs to the max and managed to reach the footrests with only my tippy toes. In trying to centre myself, I had wrapped myself so tightly around Kevin’s thighs that I might have violated him a little.

  ‘Okay? Are you ready?’ he asked.

  ‘I guess so.’

  He switched the engine on with a key and gently pulled the recoil rope starter a few times – not unlike a lawnmower – to make the propeller fan behind me thud vigorously. As he turned the stick aircraft on a dime and taxied down the long runway, Kevin barked out some instructions – whether they were for me or the control tower I could not tell because the propeller was making the most god-awful racket. I could not make out what it was he was saying and became increasingly uneasy. I feared I wouldn’t be able to hear him ordering me to do something later in midair like, ‘Stop leaning to the left, you daft girl, you’re going to crash us!’ Dear Lord, would my ignorance cause us to spiral headlong into the gorge? I prayed it was normal to have difficulty hearing and that it was the same for other passengers as well.

  As Kevin revved up our sophisticated kite, I gave up the prayers and instead promised God a nun-like existence if I survived this half-hour ride in the sky. Picking up speed along the airstrip, I quickly hung on for dear life by white-knuckling the edge of my seat. The weedy contraption was bouncing so furiously that I thought I was going to get pitched out of my seat before we even took off. Then without warning, we soared almost straight up. The ground abandoned us and the altitude winds started pounding at me. I could almost feel my cheeks jiggling against the gale.

  ‘Hmdf podf mlghpe nefie. Fdiowen feefeo likeie,’ Kevin mumbled.

  Damn, what in the world was he going on about? No matter – in less than a minute, we were directly over the falls and I became blissfully distracted. Kevin continued talking, probably explaining what we were flying over, but I could not understand a thing he was saying above the propeller pandemonium. As we zoomed across the 360-degree boundless blue sky, my trash bag suit flapped wildly in the strong wind and I started to imagine that I was a graceful pterodactyl hunting a big fat aardvark for supper.

  From this sky-high vantage point, I saw the falls for what it really was: a gaping smoking fissure in the earth adorned with green knolls. The dense cloud-like spray that filled up the deep narrow gash of the earth’s crust made the gorge look as if it was stuffed with a giant wad of cotton wool. We hovered over Batoka Gorge – a serpentine geological formation of eight kilometres that contained the raging Zambezi River – when I noticed what a comical silhouette our microlight was casting on the labyrinthine topography. So I contorted my fingers and swung my arms around madly, making our shadow appear like it was being brewed alive in a witch’s cauldron.

  It’s sad what turns me on.

  Then on the Zambia-Zimbabwe border of the falls, I spotted Livingstone Island, a scruffy lump of rock. This was where that fanatical Scotsman first laid eyes on the falls’ pillars of spray after being rowed across upriver by the local Makalolo oarsmen. As one might have guessed, Livingstone was consumed by the impressive sight, and was inspired to write the kind of slush that all colonialists love: ‘No one could perceive where the vast body of water went; it seemed to lose itself in the earth, the opposite lip of the fissure into which it disappeared being only 80 feet distant. At least I did not comprehend it until, creeping with awe to the verge, I peered down into a large rent which had been made from bank to bank of the broad Zambezi, and saw that a stream of a thousand yards broad leaped down a hundred feet, and then became suddenly compressed into a space of 15 or 20 yards ... the most wonderful sight I had witnessed in Africa.’ Sniffle.

  After 15 rapturous minutes, we swooped across the emerald Zambezi floodplain and over Mosi-Oa-Tunya Game Park. Though I must admit that in between feelings of fright, stiffness of fingers and the bewilderment of soaring through the air, it was a tad dif­ficult to focus on spotting wildlife. All I knew was that the hippos, elephants and crocodiles looked like they were plucked out of a SIMS computer game.

  ‘Buisenl nfdfte eqerteqe,’ Kevin yammered.

  ‘Haha, yes, that’s right.’ I continued to pretend as if I knew what he was gabbing about. There was no need for me to make a big deal out of it, I thought. He should concentrate on what’s important – keeping us alive.

  Unfortunately, his idea of being alive was very different from mine. With a sudden push of the control bar, the microlight took a dive in direct contrast to the direction of my stomach which lunged up my throat. Skimming the treetop canopy, we rattled the spots of some giraffes and even caused one to drop a mouthful of leaves. I whispered an apology to myself for disrupting their lunch before we banked in another direction to find more wildlife to inflict mental anguish upon.

  All too soon, the ground was closing in and the most courageous thing I had ever done (apart from filing my income tax returns late) was over. Naturally I was relieved once we came to a complete stop, but even more so that I did not feel the immediate need to empty the contents of my stomach onto a nearby shrub, as Chan had predicted. In fact she was eagerly waiting for me next to the landing strip, at once to verify my safe landing and to snap my pallid ‘After’ face in contrast to my rosy ‘Before’ one. Her pleasure was denied when all she managed to capture was a huge, self-satisfied grin that took me hours to wipe off.

  There was one problem left, though ... now where was I going to find a nun outfit?

  *

  Later I saw it fit to go out on a bender to celebrate the ditching of terra firma for loftier heights. Chan and I had hung out with enough boob-tubed blonde chicks, intoxicated safari guides and backpacking hobos who did not shave at the Jollyboys watering hole the night before. Not to mention we had to worm our way out of going on a double date with two musclebound hunters who bought us drinks and told us eerily that we were destined to meet each other. The black Romeos had wanted to drive the two of us to a riverfront bar on the Zambezi that was allegedly quite romantic the following day. Chan told them that we would go ... over her dead body. Anyway, I wanted to check out the real nightlife, not the staid made-for-tourist drinking establishments that were packed to the rafters with sunburnt Westerners chugging down beers and horrid cover bands strangling Top 40 songs, but authentic nightclubs that rocked to down-and-dirty African rhythms.

  ‘Yeah, let’s go out and do some down-and-dirty rockin’ of our own,’ Chan burbled, surprising me by being agreeable to a night on the town. The only down-and-dirty rockin’ she did back in Kuala Lumpur was to Michael Learns to Rock at karaoke joints.

  ‘Awesome!’ I said, strapping my money pouch under my shirt. ‘Watch out for pervs though. They might grope you
.’

  ‘Grope you, maybe. My ugly green scarf will repel them like a magic shield.’

  We clobbered the air spiritedly, gleefully strategizing a flurry of punches, kicks, joint locks, throws and elbow strikes in the off chance we were attacked. I also tucked my pepper spray into my cargo pants pocket with the safety lock off for a quick draw. We were ready to drink, dance, and destroy, as the situation required.

  ‘All right, I’m ready. Let’s find us some drunks to beat up!’ I chirped, as we both giggled out the room door.

  Before leaving the hostel, we made a beeline for the notice board first to look at the list of recommended Livingstone nightclubs. As I thumbed through the names, Chan glanced towards the open bar. ‘Oh no!’ she whispered, tapping my shoulder frantically. ‘Those horny hunters from yesterday are really here to pick us up! We have to scoot before they see us!’

  ‘Step-Rite ... 48-Hours ...’ I read the names of the clubs under my breath before Chan hooked my left elbow in hers and dragged me backwards on my heels towards the camping lawn.

  ‘We’ll walk out this way so we don’t pass the bar. Quickly!’ Chan commanded with all the finesse of a secret agent.

  Thanks to her well-timed covert operation, we escaped undetected. She flipped on her mini-torch and we walked down the dark main street devoid of lamps. At 48-Hours, we ambled in to find all of two patrons playing tonsil hockey on a sofa under very dim and dodgy lighting, with music that distorted badly from cheap speakers. We could not get out fast enough. Further down was Ravestone, which only required a few glances for us to deduce it was nothing but a layabout wasteland with a mirrorball.