Peeing in the Bush

by Adeline Loh

  We crossed the street towards our last bet, Step-Rite, hoping it had better be a worthwhile place to hang out or the night would be a total bust. Just as we were about to head directly inside, a dark burly figure loomed over us, casting a long foreboding shadow.

  ‘Hello girls, how are you?’ boomed the bouncer. I looked up and smiled sheepishly, expecting a demand for my ID, which I had forgotten to bring out.

  ‘Muli bwanji?’ I cheeped.

  He was taken aback and guffawed loudly. ‘Go right in,’ he said and waved us inside.

  ‘Chabwino!’ I replied – good – and we went in. Bless the broken Nyanja.

  Walking in to the ecstatic beats of Zambian hip-hop and Afro-beat, we soon found ourselves in a bright and salubrious alfresco nightclub packed with trendy young locals. We were glad and wasted no time soaking up the hedonistic vibes, happy to be getting lubed up and boogieing down. Zambian girls, exhibiting their bum-wiggling prowess, were the stars of the dance floor, their hips shaking like they had a high-speed vibrator stuck between their legs.

  I felt my itchy feet disobeying me until I got to talking – nay, more like screaming from the top of my lungs – with two chatty auditors who were in Livingstone for business. Dressed in casual open suits, they spoke articulately and were clearly representative of the well-heeled urban professional in Zambia. But I was unused to long periods of intellectual conversation at a disco, so I excused myself and hovered around looking for Chan. To my surprise, I found her shaking her buttocks in the company of a chubby lady wearing a colourfully loud fruit-and-grass-print smock. I hurriedly negotiated my way between the numerous bouncing bodies with the intention of stopping Chan from embarrassing the locals.

  ‘Adeline! Come meet Maria and her husband Patrick!’ Chan shouted above the loud din of music.

  Maria immediately squealed in delight and squeezed the wind out of me. When the blood seeped back into my disfigured body, I said hi to Patrick and shook his hand. He was sweetly unobtrusive, content­edly nursing a sweaty ice bucket of Mosi, the local lager, at the table.

  ‘Maria’s teaching me how to swing my butt like the Africans,’ Chan explained, beaming.

  Maria looked absolutely hammered. In fact, she looked as if someone had taped the sides of her mouth upwards to form a crescent-shaped smile like the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland.

  ‘We own a farm not far from here – you are welcome to drop by!’ Maria yelled in my ear. ‘You should see my husband, he also sells curios at Victoria Falls! Wheeee ...’ She raised her arms and shimmied her body, showing me where the most jiggly bits were.

  Meanwhile, Patrick sat quaffing his Mosi quietly whilst watching his wife’s animated antics with a knowing smile. As Chan clumsily tried to keep up with her booty-shaking mentor, I sat down to indulge in mindless club chatter with Patrick. But he was having none of that ‘So wazzup my man, how’s life?’ sort of nonsense from me. After I told him where I was from, Patrick immediately engaged me in a heavy discussion about world events – exactly like the two auditor guys I had met earlier. I was beginning to think that Zambian men saw night­clubs not as places to get drunk and behave stupidly but as venues for the local intelligentsia to congregate. Patrick proceeded to give me a fascinating lecture on the political history of Southern Africa before speaking adeptly on international trade relations. He even sang praises of our former prime minister Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad. And I was like, ‘Shut up! You know Malaysia’s ex-prime minister?!’ Guess he must have been pretty famous, being in the papers and all that.

  While the entire conversation could have been intriguing for a ministerial luminary (or curios seller), I felt like I was trapped against my will at a United Nations meeting or something equally boring. Just as I contemplated passing out as a fun way to end the discourse, a fight broke out. There in front of the hole-in-the-wall bar counter was a dead ringer for Jay-Z threatening to give a knuckle sandwich to a Snoop Dogg look-alike. Great, this was starting to look like a normal club at last. But before I could place my bets, the bouncers promptly appeared, put him in an arm lock behind his back and threw him out. I was thoroughly impressed by Step-Rite’s efficient peacekeeping forces, despite the loss of opportunity to wager some serious money.

  ‘Ah, they just had too much to drink. Not like you, my friend – let me get you another drink,’ Patrick said good-humouredly when he noticed my hands were no longer wrapped around a cold one. As moved as I was by his alcohol altruism, I declined politely because I could not shake the images of deprived Zambians struggling to make a hand-to-mouth living. Like a tacky neon sign, the statistics blinked in the back of my mind: 70 per cent of the population survive on less than US$1 per day. Flash! Flash! Flash! I imagined Patrick toiling away at his crops in the day and carving warthog statues at night in order to earn a couple of meagre bucks, only to fritter his hard-earned money on me. People offering to buy me drinks never brought a tear to my eye before, but I might have started bawling if we did not get out of there.

  By the bleary-eyed hour of 2 a.m., Chan and I staggered back to the hostel with our arms draped around each other’s shoulders. Although she woke up from the previous night’s modern-day cultural experience with a nagging hip ache, it did not stop me from drag­ging her out limping to check the folder of activities and see what additional mischief we could get up to.

  There was no doubt in my mind that we had to sign up for the notorious sunset booze cruise – a splendid game-viewing boat stacked with lethal doses of alcoholic concoctions – as a gesture of respect for Livingstone’s status as the party capital of Zambia. Yes, it reeked of sin and debauchery – I needed a bib just thinking about it.

  ‘Let’s do the booze cruise, Chan!’ I said excitedly, showing her the page with photos of tomato-faced people holding up bottles. ‘For 30 dollars, you get to drink all you can while watching hippos for four long hours! And a barbecue dinner’s thrown in too.’

  ‘I’ve seen enough hippos, thank you very much. I’m even starting to dream about them. As for the barbecue,’ she knuckled my forehead, ‘hel-LO, meat disgusts me.’

  ‘But hippos look prettier through tequila goggles!’

  She did not buy it and refused to go.

  So I went for it myself. The booze pontoon was a massive double-decker with railings thoughtfully placed all around the edges to discourage wasted punters from becoming best friends with crocodiles. I was the last aboard, after signing a piece of paper that allowed the boat operator to disavow my unfortunate alcohol-fuelled death, and was soon in the company of a boisterous bunch of overlanders. A cackling bartender standing behind a gleaming fully-armed bar welcomed us onto the liquor love boat and set the appropriate tone for the evening by shoving a drink in each of our hands. Next to the bar was a kindly lady preparing the smell-licious barbecue dinner. I followed the crowd up a rusty ladder to the high viewing platform, lined with a satisfac­tory number of long wooden bench seats.

  Amid the flood of Caucasians, a 50-plus-year-old Taiwanese mountain guide called Mr. Wang and I immediately noticed each other’s Asian-ness. It was extremely rare to see another Chinese travelling alone, much less a middle-aged man on an overland trip usually overrun by depraved twenty-somethings. He struck me as the outcast of the group because he did not stick to anyone else, and so I felt a strong duty to befriend him. Unfortunately he couldn’t speak my not-quite-there Cantonese and I couldn’t speak his complicated Mandarin. Nevertheless we got on like a house on fire with simple English, even though he spoke it like he had a mouthful of marbles.

  ‘This is a booze cruise, people. Drink up!’ said the barkeep, sensing a slowdown. We were glad he reminded us of our priorities and went back to the bar for refills, randomly pointing to the pretty bottles of tequila, vodka, rum, gin and whiskey all lined up in a row. My college education hadn’t been wasted.

  We teetered on the edge of the upper deck, waiting with our cameras for submerged hippos to surface and show us more than their beady eyes, but all they did
was honk rudely at us. Losing interest, I paid the bar another visit and helped myself to a fifth toxic cocktail. I was soon happily buzzing by sunset, which I might add, was the most mind-blowing sunset that I had ever seen. It gave such a radiant glow to the lovely yellow grass plains, broken intermittently by green forest islands on the sparkling sapphire river. It was true – everything looked ten times better through a drunken haze. Three cheers to the erosion of healthy brain cells.

  We were given another unforgettable show by Mother Nature when colonies of migratory carmine bee-eaters darted in and out of their burrows and transformed the dull beige soil of the steep riverbanks into a shimmering maelstrom of colour. Our toasts to each bird we saw were interrupted by the passing of the African Queen – the Titanic of sunset river cruises on the Zambezi. The atmosphere over there on the three-storey luxury vessel was understandably more civilized than our budget ark for dipsomaniacs and the rich tourists on it equally stuffy. Standing at the railing, I waved to them in an uncouth manner and noticed that the widening wake from their boat was disturbing the water. ‘Hey, you people are ruining the beautiful golden orange reflection of the sun on the water!’ I slurred loudly, after which a noticeably embarrassed Mr. Wang sidled away from me to be closer to more intelligent beings.

  Even after we had docked, the bartender forced us to briskly down a couple more before allowing us to stagger down the boat ramp. All of a sudden, the sky was black. Okay, clearly I hadn’t been paying attention to the progression of time because I was drunk as a skunk. Apart from vaguely remembering that we had to stop the car for cross­ing elephants, I had no recollection of my ride back to the Laughing Dragon. I could have been forcibly anal-probed with a brinjal for all I knew and I would’ve been none the wiser.

  When I got back to the room, I poked clumsily at the keyhole for what seemed like 15 minutes before I successfully unlocked the door. Inside, I found Chan in a position of familiarity: horizontal on the bed. I relayed incoherently that I needed something to stop myself from throwing up and woozily rummaged through my bag for my unfailing Chinese herbal tea bag.

  Then I moved like a crustacean to the restaurant area, with Chan kindly redirecting me from banging into a pillar. I ordered some hot water and two half-boiled eggs, and thought I’d better walk off the queasiness outside while waiting. Thinking that I wanted to get out of the courtyard, the watchman quickly took his keys. I stood next to him and watched him unlock the gate, grinning inanely as if I was waiting to be released from the funny farm following a botched lobotomy.

  ‘Don’t let her out! She’s drunk!’ Chan yelped at the watchman. I found her so hilarious that I instantly broke out in fits. ‘Come back in NOW, Adeline Loh!’ she bellowed like a fierce mother.

  I’d never seen Chan so demanding. I could tell by the mention of my full name that she meant business. Straight away I quit laughing, complied like a mindless drone and hobbled back to the restaurant where I tossed my tea bag in a cup of scalding water and sipped it until the three heads I saw sprouting from Chan’s neck return to one.

  Back in the room, I collapsed on the bed with imaginary guinea-fowl clucking around my head and swore to myself, ‘No ... more ... drinking ... alco ...’ and then conked out before I could finish swearing.

  15. FUN WITH GERIATRICS

  At breakfast, both of us hoed in bland Chinese fried rice with copious squirts of chilli sauce for the third day running. It was the cheapest item on the Laughing Dragon restaurant menu, and we leisurely flushed it down with all the free Chinese tea we could humanly drink. Having distended our tummies considerably, we went back to our room where Chan fell unconscious on the bed. Her flu had returned like a bad movie sequel. At her sniffling request, I fetched a kettle of bubbling hot water from the kitchen to keep her alive for a couple hours whilst I went for a wander about town all by my lonesome. It was a clement day ripe for such nosy activities as people-gawking and eavesdropping.

  My first task of the day was to buy our bus tickets back to Lusaka. At the bus ticketing booth, the guy manning it wrote down ‘0630’ on the tickets and circled it with a red marker pen before saying to me: ‘Be here at oh-six-hundred-hours.’ The locals always quoted military time here for reasons unknown to me. They would say stuff like, ‘Meet me by the old building at oh-eight-hundred-hours,’ or, ‘Mother should be coming back here with the five-gallon jerry can of water at fourteen-hundred-hours.’ It kind of makes you want to drop down and give them 20.

  Passing the shops, eateries, banks, post office and female vendors leaning against urine-stained walls, my next stop was the Livingstone Adventure Centre. It was a fruitful visit – the Zambezi River sunset float was on and I was good to join the group departure at 2 o’clock that afternoon.

  At a wide and serene stretch of the upper Zambezi – a lovely section miles ahead of the mist inferno that was Victoria Falls – two coupled pairs of geriatric Germans coughed out their names and I nodded politely, pretending that I had got all of them. Apparently, the retirees had driven all the way from Germany to Africa in two four-wheel drives, thinking it a novel way to blow their pension fund. Nearly a year had passed now and the wrinkled foursome were patently pleased to be in Zambia. ‘Can you believe it, we’ve never gotten food poison­ing!’ Toothy Smile Man declared proudly.

  Soon we were led to a wooden platform to meet our guide and oars­man, Moses. As with all activities that carried the minute risk of being killed, he shoved us an indemnity form and snickered like the Grim Reaper as we crouched over our laps to sign our lives away. Lassoed to one of the legs of the platform was a large inflatable raft bobbing on the waves. I stood transfixed, not because the river was particularly mesmer­izing here (though it was) but because splayed right in the middle of the bloated banana-yellow raft was a scrumptious spread of seven varieties of cheese and crackers and two bottles of wine.

  Moses was an elfin man who didn’t look like he could lift an umbrella, much less part waters. When we took our positions in the raft, his spaghetti arms paled in comparison to the longest pair of oars I’d ever seen. These oars were almost as thick as small tree trunks. Yet Moses managed to erase the doubt from my face when he mustered the might of a champion bench presser, complete with popping veins and bulging eyes, and swung back the oars in one powerful motion to whoosh us along the water. His sidekick accom­panied us in a smaller emergency raft, presumably to rescue us from a bloated death should we overturn.

  Ah, this was the closest thing to heaven – nibbling on imported cheese and washing it down slowly with exquisite red wine in the setting of a beatific riverine forest. If I had a monocle and fob watch attached to my breast pocket, my upper-class experience would have been complete.

  ‘Shout if you see a hippo, okay?’ Moses offered me my mission. He was rowing with his back turned and could not see what was coming up in front.

  ‘Mmmff,’ I mumbled, sending cracker crumbs flying out of my mouth.

  With the aftermath of the booze cruise fiasco still freshly vivid in my mind, I decided not to overdo the sundowner intake. But try as I did, I could not resist shouting ‘Prosti!’ (Cheers!) with those lively Germans, and we clinked our glasses so frequently and zealously that they were on the verge of shattering.

  As we supped and munched, every shifting creature was met with a swift grab of the binoculars. We passed the usual banks of greenery, golden yellow reeds and odd African fish eagle. Two colonial holiday homes sat incongruously along a section of the bank, apparently built by a rich English businesswoman with nothing else better to do with her money.

  After a blissful hour, we landed on an almost mythological island with fine talcum powder-like sand and wild date palm trees. While Moses scuttled off to find a tree to pee on, I kicked off my sandals, let the cottony soft sand wrap around my toes and breathed in the phenomenally orange hues bouncing off the neighbouring islands. I began to miss Chan greatly and wished she was next to me, even if it was to mope.

  Having absorbed enough feel-good vibes
to last a hundred days, our raft was re-inflated and we pushed off once more. By this time, the silver Zambezi waters were reflecting another stupefying sunset. As we rowed back to shore (well, Moses did anyway), the streak of light that lit up the tree line grew weaker and weaker until it was banished to an invisible kingdom. My heart became overwhelmed with warm and fluffy feelings.

  Unfortunately, warm and fluffy feelings did not help regulate body heat. The moment the sun took a dive, the temperature followed sharply. Having forgotten to bring my old reliable fleece jumper, and clad only in two sorry-looking paper-thin shirts, the open-top ride back on land was excruciatingly torturous.

  ‘Come sit between me and my wife,’ Toothy Smile Man offered to save me when I began shaking like a leaf. ‘We will warm you up.’

  Words cannot describe how thankful I was to be snugly sand­wiched. Instantly I felt like I was in between two mild heaters and mentally deduced that their impressive robustness was owed to a diet of pork knuckles.

  Moses, who was riding in the front seat, suddenly brandished an unopened bottle of wine. ‘One more left,’ he said with a naughty-boy grin.

  ‘Open it! I squealed excitedly. When he did, I immediately grabbed the bottle and put it to my mouth as if my life depended on it.

  I knew I’d vowed to cut down but when you’re delirious from impending hypothermia, how can you say no to alcohol?

  *

  Early next morning we almost missed the bus back to Lusaka. I’d long dismissed punctuality as a non-existent virtue in these parts due to the fact that locals wait hours on end with their noses squashed against a minibus window before it would move. The guidebooks pretty much confirmed this, telling foreigners to be patient and to get used to leisurely ‘African time’.

  So when we arrived 15 minutes before boarding time, I was more afraid of getting branded uncool than anything else. As it turned out, that proved to be the least of my worries.