Strip Pan Wrinkle

by David Fletcher

  Still, tradition always trumps suspicion, and before very long Brian and Sandra were scribbling minor variations of the “wish you were here” theme on the back of each card, and Brian was lapsing into futile ruminations. For he’d begun to wonder how the postal service worked on an international basis and, in particular, if he’d bought a Botswanan stamp issued by the Botswanan Post Office, how the Royal Mail got remunerated for their part of the job, all that sorting and delivering of the card they’d have to do back in England. Because it didn’t seem they got remunerated at all. And surely it couldn’t just be on the basis of “swings and roundabouts”, where the Botswanan Post Office provided a similar free service for items mailed in Britain and sent over here. Apart from anything else, the volumes in each direction would be completely out of balance. (How many Botswanans send postcards from Brighton? And, for that matter, how many Spaniards, Greeks and Tenerifians send postcards from Bognor?)

  Brian tussled with this conundrum for some time and eventually came to the conclusion that it was very likely that there was indeed some sort of international agreement that meant that every country retained all the money it had collected for international postage, and that in the case of Brian and Sandra’s postcards, Botswana would be quids in and the Royal Mail would have to do its bit for nothing – just like it does for all those millions of postcards from the Med and from a host of other popular holiday destinations. That is to say, Britain has signed up to an agreement where we permanently get the rough end of the deal. No way can we send enough stuff out of Britain to foreign parts to make up for all these damn postcards coming our way. And wasn’t that typical! Not content with giving us dodgy chalets and damaging directives from Brussels, the rest of the world is screwing us on postage as well. No wonder the Royal Mail is in such a bloody mess. It’s subsidising every other mail service in the world!

  Well, this was all too much. Brian now didn’t want to send the postcards, even though they were all written. But when he made the appropriate submissions to his spouse, she reminded him that they had already bought the stamps and that therefore there was nothing they could do to prevent the Botswanan Post Office from having their money, and little point in trying to save the Royal Mail a few pennies, for which in any event they would receive no thanks. And furthermore, just because it was his birthday, he didn’t have the right to puncture the idyll of Muchenje with another load of his nonsense, and wouldn’t it be better if he focused on their rather fortunate physical situation – and on the abundance of wildlife hereabouts – which, if he gave it more than a moment’s thought, he might recall was the primary purpose of their having come to Botswana… ?

  Well, put in those terms, Sandra’s observations were difficult to challenge, and Brian promptly abandoned his concerns as to the invidious nature of the international postal system and its deleterious impact on Blighty – and picked up his binoculars. And Sandra was right again. There was wildlife everywhere. And many of its avian representatives were around in the close-by trees and eminently observable with his binocs. There were carmine bee-eaters, arrow-marked babblers, boubous, firefinches and, overhead, some yellow-billed kites. Then the four-footed stuff on the flood plain below: waterbuck, zebra, more sable – and still some cattle. (They really did look incongruous.) Oh, and there were more birds down there as well: all sorts of storks and egrets and even some white-backed vultures. Wildlife around Muchenje was… well, around it. And by just sitting on the deck of a chalet, perched on top of a giant escarpment, one could see it all.

  One could also see that the remainder of the day was going to be a somewhat leisurely affair. The benefits of the immediate situation, the heat and the need to have a private celebration of Brian’s birthday would make sure of that. And that’s more or less what happened. There was a little activity around lunchtime when lunch was taken with a new crop of guests – and their rather ill-mannered children. And a little while after those private celebrations in the afternoon, there was then dinner to attend to as well. But even then, the pace remained leisurely, right up to the near-conclusion of the meal.

  This evening session had kicked off with a conversation with the English co-owner of the lodge who had just arrived from Britain – with a case-full of whinges about what he’d left there. These not only put Brian’s own whinges in the shade but also spoke volumes about what this chap thought about Britain’s liberal elite and what havoc he believed it was wreaking. This led on to some less contentious topics over the meal itself, including the impact of quantitative easing and the correct way to eat bananas, until, just after the main course had been cleared away, the lights were extinguished…

  The lodge was full this evening. So there was now a dining room filled with almost two dozen people, all clearly wondering what was going on. Then one person guessed. He did this just a nano-second after he’d heard some traditional African chanting from the kitchen. Yes, Brian knew immediately that a gentleman back in Windhoek, by the name of Robin Marsh-Taylor, who had organised Brian and Sandra’s expedition, had also organised something else. And this something else was a rather less private celebration of Brian’s birthday than had taken place earlier. He’d no doubt done this by contacting the lodge, and there was no doubt about what was to happen next…

  Four of them emerged from the kitchen. Four very traditionally-built Botswanan ladies, still singing, and three of them waving sparklers. And the fourth lady, in her kitchen whites and her chef’s hat, was carrying before her not just an ample bosom but also a more than ample chocolate birthday cake. It would feed all the diners with chocolate to spare.

  Brian felt hotter than he’d felt all day. And when the African rhythms were abandoned in favour of a tuneful rendition of “Happy Birthday”, accompanied by a less than tuneful contribution from the complement of diners, Brian felt hotter than ever. This was an experience which, whatever it was, was certainly not “leisurely”. No, it was much nearer to disconcerting, with the disconcerting soon being overtaken by the memorable and then by the quite delightful. How could it not be? Even sour sixty-somethings aren’t impervious to generous gestures, and when the gestures involve a slice of communal silliness as well as a slice of chocolate cake, they can be completely pervious not to say slightly overcome.

  So despite the initial surprise – and the attendant shock – this ending to the meal had been a fitting end to the day, a day when Brian was clocking up another milestone on the odometer of life and a day when he was just about coming to terms with the world’s discrimination against Britain. Although, maybe if Lord(!) Sugar were asked… well, maybe he could come up with a plan, something that would mean that the Royal Mail could come out even and not continue to act as a paymaster to all the other postal services in the world. Something like telling these foreign mail organisations that they were all completely useless and that therefore they were all fired!!

  There again, possibly not.

  Oh, and the weather had changed. As Brian and Sandra had retired for the night, a wind had blown up and there was thunder and lightning in the distance. All good for the airflow through the chalet – and a comprehensive distraction. Brian gave not a further thought to postal inequities and so-called lords of the realm but instead relished his good fortune. He was now sixty-something plus, but he was still batting, still driving around Botswana in a Land Cruiser – and still celebrating with his wife.

  So who would want to be a lord anyway?

  14.

  By six the next morning, the wind had disappeared. So too had the chance for any more head-on-pillow time for Brian and Sandra. For today they had another journey to undertake, and this journey would need an early start. Not only was it nearly five hundred kilometres to their next hostelry, but part of the way there involved a road from Kasane to a place called Nata, and they had been warned (by everyone) that this road was not in tip-top condition and might take some time. So… by seven-thirty, having said their goodbyes to Richard and Kim, they were on their way, and just a few minutes
later they were approaching the entrance to Chobe National Park.

  They were on the same route that their guided convoy had taken just two days before. But this time there would be no off-road driving and instead Brian and Sandra would be staying on the main tarmac road, a road that sliced through the park in a straight line and that would take them directly to Kasane at the park’s eastern edge. It was a good road but, as it passed through a wildlife haven and there were elephants and other potential road hazards about, it was only sensible to abide by the fifty kilometres per hour speed limit – which inevitably made their passage a rather slow one. However, past Kasane, the limit rose to one hundred and twenty kilometres per hour, and Brian would now be able to make up some time, despite advice to the contrary.

  He did. Having refuelled in Kasane and having made his way through just a mile or so of road-works, he and Sandra were on a straight, well-surfaced open road with no side-roads off it and barely any traffic on it, and there was every prospect of their being able to reach Nata, which was three hundred kilometres away, in under three hours. Clearly there was nothing to stop them, and those warnings they’d received about the road were either misguided (and based on some local digging-up around Kasane) or they were completely out of date. Hell, had Brian known then what he knew now, he could probably have spent at least another hour in bed.

  However… after fifty or so kilometres, he wasn’t so sure.

  First there were temporary speed-limit signs for roadworks. Albeit these road-works never materialised. All that was ever observed was the evidence of some small-scale road-works in the past, with a few empty tar-barrels at the side of the road and maybe an abandoned digger. But never more than this Marie Celeste encounter and never a road-work-type person in sight. This was all a little unnerving, and it certainly reduced Brian’s average speed – quite significantly. Although not by quite as much as the road surface soon did.

  It was still tarmac and it was still essentially coherent tarmac, in that little if any of it had started to separate. But that said, it wasn’t “encouraging” tarmac. It had a finish to it that wasn’t… well, particularly well finished, and in certain stretches even the less than perfect finish seemed to be wearing away. It tended to make driving in a straight line something of a challenge and occasionally (and unpredictably) it was so bad that it threatened to subvert the action of the steering wheel completely. Brian began to feel that he might have an unscheduled meeting with the flat (and un-surfaced) Botswanan landscape to either side of the road at any moment and without any warning. He therefore slowed some more, and the chances of a three-hour journey time to Nata were now looking slim.

  More time was then lost at another “vet check”, another chemical dip blocking the road, and a dip that required not just the emersion of the Land Cruiser’s tyres and a stamp of footwear on a sodden mat, but also a stamp of all one’s footwear on a sodden mat, whether said footwear was on one’s feet or in one’s luggage! Needless to say, a token selection of the packed footwear was made (a pair of Sandra’s sandals), and this seemed to satisfy the requirements of the observing officials. But it still consumed time. So much so that Brian was keen to press on and to find “a bit of better road”. In the event he found “the detour”.

  It wasn’t a conventional detour. It was nothing less than a one hundred and thirty kilometre stretch of the Kasane-Nata road, where the road itself was pristine, but not in use – and running along its side was the aforementioned “detour”. It was a tarmac track, bumpy, narrow, full of holes and eminently scary. And to understand why it was so scary (and increasingly slow) it is necessary to describe its bumpiness and its narrowness – and its collection of holes – in rather more detail.

  Sandra likened its surface to the uneven topping one finds on a fruit cake – scaled up to road proportions. Brian considered it more like the surface one finds in a lava field. To him, this detour track was like a long, linear strip of some long-cooled volcanic flow that had been pressed into service as a highway and that certainly hadn’t been built by any road builders. Or if it had been, then they hadn’t used any steamrollers, but just a giant pallet knife to smear the lava into a series of uneven waves. And then there was its narrowness… which alternated between very narrow and, where the tarmac had frayed at its edges, stupidly narrow. Indeed, in places it was not much more than the axle width of the Land Cruiser, which was something of a problem when the pot holes appeared…

  To begin with, they were regular pot holes. But the closer to Nata Brian drove, these “depressions” in the road surface had to relinquish their pot hole handle in favour of “crater holes”. Because that’s what they’d become: holes which were so big and so deep that they were properly craters. It was as though somebody had grown tired of that giant pallet knife and had taken up instead a giant ice-cream scoop, and had used this to gouge great chunks of tarmac-lava from the so-called surface of the so-called road. Indeed, later on in their holiday, Brian and Sandra would learn one of the standard jokes about this stretch of purgatorial highway, and this concerned rabbits. For it was said that if one was driving down this “detour” and one saw the ears of a rabbit in one of its many craters, one would realise, as one neared it, that they weren’t the ears of a rabbit but instead the ears of a giraffe! The Kasane-Nata “pot holes” may be amongst the deepest in all Africa, and those that spanned almost the width of the road must also have been some of the biggest. Thank god, thought Brian, that they had this Land Cruiser and that they were able to drive through these monsters. Or should that be ‘drive into them and then out of them’?

  His average speed was now about twenty kilometres per hour, falling all the time. Near the end of the tribulation it was barely walking pace, and he was beginning to concede that all those doom merchants who had warned him of this route over the past couple of weeks hadn’t warned him sufficiently. Even taking account of the sand-tracks he’d tussled with already on this and on previous holidays in Africa, this really was the worst road he’d ever driven on – by miles.

  However, it was coming to an end. On the detour, there was an arrow-sign ahead, and this arrow was directing him back onto a regular stretch of road – with a regular pot-hole-free surface of regular tarmac – and he could finally apply some pressure to that right-hand pedal. He speeded up and kept up this speeded-up speed for more than a kilometre – until he encountered the next barrier in his quest to reach Nata. And this was a fire!

  Unbelievable. But he had to believe it. There, at the side of the road, was an enormous conflagration. Not the first that he and Sandra had seen, as in this part of the world, wild fires are common, as is the practice of burning near a highway to keep it clear of encroaching vegetation. But this one was a whopper, and it came with the added features of a blanket of smoke and an intimate proximity to the road. And, with the way that the wind was blowing, that meant that the smoke and the flames were actually across the road. Cue use of footbrake as well as accelerator, some erratic turning of the steering wheel and some growing activity in Brian’s sweat glands. So that when he’d finally reached an expanse of Botswana that wasn’t alight, his armpits were flowing over only slightly less than was his relief. And now he had only the donkeys, cows and goats to contend with…

  Yes, he and his wife had reached the outskirts of Nata – and the outriders of its complement of roaming domestic animals. They were all over the place – including the road. And whilst a few of these four-legged hazards had been encountered earlier on in Botswana (on the way to Nxameseri), they hadn’t before been encountered in such copious numbers. Still, once the travelling duo were through Nata, all would be fine. Brian was sure of it. And that meant that although they had taken over four hours to reach this place and not the three that Brian had anticipated, they could make up some time. They had reached the extremity of their southern progress and would now be turning west towards a place called Maun, and the Nata-Maun road had nothing like the notoriety of the way they had come. It would be a doddle.
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br />   So too was Nata. Not so much a town, more a junction with a couple of service stations. And having used one of these to fill up again, Brian was soon out of it and on the easier route. And it really was. It was (inevitably) straight, it had a good road surface, it had essentially no traffic – and it had just a few of those mobile hazards, especially donkeys. But soon these occasional hazards had disappeared – to be replaced by continuous hazards! Yes, Brian could barely come to terms with it, but this road, leading into the heartland of Botswana, appeared also to be leading into the heartland of its donkey population. And it wasn’t as though the cows and the goats had disappeared either…

  Jesus! The odd four-footer he could deal with, but this was like driving through an unending herd of them. And according to the road-safety section of his Guide to Botswana, legally they had the right of way. Hit one and not only do you damage an animal and your vehicle, but you also damage your prospects of leaving the country without a fine or even a prison term. Again, Brian found himself driving at a rather sedate pace – and studying the habits of the different species in the ubiquitous throng.

  The donkeys were keen on whatever grazing was available at the very edge of the road (which was negligible and looked more like a green spray-can job than anything that was substantial enough to eat). But they were careful – and predictable. Brian quickly learnt that they very infrequently made sudden movements and, in fact, they were pretty disinclined to move a great deal at all – and never at speed. A bit like Brian himself really. But not like the cattle. These chaps tended to move as a group, and if the leader of the group (and there was always a leader) decided to lead his followers across the road, they would all trail behind him and show disdain for any vehicles. They were almost sheepish in their behaviour and indifferent to its consequences. So a little like committed socialists. And talking of sheep, there were then the goats. They were the most unsettling of all, essentially because they were very irrational in their behaviour and they would panic, and if one panicked they would all panic – with unpredictable and potentially disastrous consequences. So they were a bit like bankers…