So most of you have seen the pics of my safari trip on Facebook but here’s the long winded story of what happened….
The first part of the trip to South Luanga took an entire day, travelling on rump rattling dirt roads with food and god obsessed Americans who were determined to solve the country’s problems during their two week charitable trip to Malawi
I was feeling pretty charitable myself and decided to toss a bag of crisps from the Landrover window to a couple of kids who had clearly walked a long way from somewhere and weren’t getting anywhere else in a hurry. Unfortunately my small gesture sparked a massive fisticuff between them and they disappeared in the dust before I could see who survived. I’m hoping that once the MSG wore off, they were friends again.
Hannah and I shared our ‘luxury tent’, along with a few hundred mosquitoes and a tree frog. During the first night, we were woken up at 2am by something that sounded like a washing machine. But it was just an enormous hippo who’d come to visit us for a midnight snack, munching away not 2 metres from the wall of our tent. It was pretty magical to watch him for a while. The elephants came to visit the next night, thankfully not such an intimate experience.
We spent the next 2 days and 2 evenings driving around South Luanga like lunatics, on the hunt for giraffes, buffalo and elephants. We saw everything (except Rhinos) including a leopard hunting, hyenas eating a buffalo, two lions making out in the bushes, zebras crossing the road (it’s a Zebra crossing, boom boom!), lizards mating at sunset, red ants moving their eggs around, and the politics of baboons, including one that was having ‘illegal sex’.
And there’s always one. One idiot who loves the sound of his own voice too much. We shall refer to him as ‘The Rudest Man On Earth’ (TRMOE). Unsurprisingly divorced he’d dragged his two uninterested, emotionally immature sons out to the middle of Africa and then tried to impress them by banging on about shooting and eating pretty much everything in the park.
The truck broke down on the way from South Luanga to Victoria Falls . Some cable thingy came loose from jiggling around on the crappy dirt roads. Not that much of a shock seeing as my eyeballs, arm joints and teeth were also pretty loose at that point.
The next day was filled with travelling, more jive talk from the ‘TRMOE’ and a blown tyre. At some point we stopped off at a SPAR mega-mart. Hannah, AJ, Jenny and I trudged in there like the 4 dirty little travellers that we were and I think we were so overwhelmed by the bakery, the fluro lit aisles, the AC and the stacks of chocolate and coffee that there were almost tears. I filled my backpack up with good Zambian coffee, a packet of muffin mix (WTF?!) and a chocolate bar. All of which I lugged around for 6 days and have only just consumed a month later (they were treasured).
That night we arrived late at Victoria Falls, managed to avoid ‘TRMOE & Sons’ at the bar and had a lovely few beers before sleeping in our not so luxurious tent. Fuelled on by drink (always blame the drink) and egged on by fake bravado, we each signed up to do the Bungee Jump and Bridge Swing from Victoria Falls the next morning.
Unfortunately we had also signed up to do the Gorge Swing, which we – wrongly – thought would be a piece of piss. Ummm, stepping BACKWARDS off a CLIFF and falling UPSIDE DOWN for a total of 4 SECONDS is not a piece of piss. Hannah and I went tandem and, after screaming for a full 4 seconds and then experiencing a further 60 seconds of unimaginable discomfort in the harness, we decided to cancel our bungee for the next day. Cue the hotel bar, 4 rum and cokes (just to get over the shock of the swing) and then the walk of shame as we cancelled our bungee booking.
Weird moment: Jenny walking in with bruises all over her arms because a baboon had tried to steal her apple AND her bag. Baboon didn’t realise that she’s a black belt in Kick Boxing and a rainbow belt in Kick Ass. He hasn’t shown his face around that tourist path since…
Next morning I took a Microlight (basically a lawnmower with wings) over the top of Victoria Falls which was occasionally very scary but spectacular all the same. And it was worth it for the sheer wannabe studliness of my driver…and chasing a herd of buffalo.
Onto Victoria
She looked so damned confident that I thought, ‘Sure. Why not?!’ and went ahead and re-booked mine. Why not?! Because it’s freaking unnatural is why not!
Cue wringing of hands for the next hour, waves of nausea, sweaty palms and four beers. I was totally crapping it. As I walked to the bridge with my wing-gal Hannah for moral support, I totally thought ‘What the fuck am I doing?’. Not that they give you any time to have second thoughts, write a will or pray (yes, I rediscovered religion on that bridge!).
They strapped me up. I was jabbering like a woman possessed. Thankfully God was there on that bridge and an American Minister (they’re everywhere in Africa ) who had just jumped started up a cheer squad for me – he was amazing. After getting some video footage of my white, terrified face they counted down from 5 and shoved me off that bridge ridiculously fast. Freefalling upside down, screaming ‘WHOA, WHOOOOAA!’, all I could think about was my eyes popping out and how much I wanted to see my family and Paul again.
Meanwhile the bodies on the bridge were cheering ‘Enjoy it!’…
Next up was the Bridge Swing. Like the Gorge Swing but face first. Holy Crap. Just thinking about it gives me the heebie jeebies. All I will say is that I was screaming NO over and over again from the moment I stepped off that platform until the swing kicked in and then it was an awesome, awesome experience.
I will say that it was the single scariest thing I have ever voluntarily done in my life and that I will never do it again. But I’m ever so glad to have done it. Mainly for the people that I met on the bridge including an incredible African lady who was so lovely to me and prayed, along with her daughters, for me the entire time. And I think she could very well have saved me.
Various moments of ‘survival euphoria’ ensued. Getting drenched in the Vic Falls spray, a gin martini on the Zambezi river at sunset, smuggling a visa stamp out of Zimbabwe , spreading the joy of Dunbar to the wider world, and locking AJ in his tent and terrorising him like rabid monkeys.
The trip home was long, dusty and broken up with the worst toilets in the universe, rice salad and a few more Greens (Carlsberg). And coming back to Malawi
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