People We Meet Part 3: The Overland Tourists

We call their tents pimples. They usually show up late and leave very early, and they make such noise that they wake every honest sleeping camper. They travel from Nairobi to Cape Town in 6 weeks and stop to take group photos at the equator. Their big trucks are orange, but manly with huge wheels and customised storage for kitchen equipment and tents. They are the overland trucks, carting the gap year youth of the Western world through the wilds of Africa. In the evenings the girls congregate in the toilets for make up sessions and the boys strut their stuff in their low hanging boxers, just like preparations at home for the Friday night clubbing experience. I wonder what these people carry in their luggage, because we certainly don’t have space for more than one decent outfit per person. At Guma lagoon they used all the hot water, and in the Mara we found ourselves listening to complaints about the shortness of the toilet breaks during the trip. At Track and Trail camp in Zambia a catastrophe was narrowly averted when a group of American youths cornered a passing elephant to take photos and refused to take the mock-charging and flapping ears seriously. A local ranger told them they could stay and eventually be trampled or slowly back away and show some more respect for the wild life.

Occasionally we meet groups of more mature travellers, a sign that overland trucking has become a more acceptable form of holiday travel. In Botswana we encountered the Rolling Hotel (above) which was novel in that the tourists didn’t have to put up their own tents, but slipped into a Japanese hotel style cubicle in the truck itself, a claustrophobic experience, I imagine, but it does keep you away from mosquitos and creepy crawlies.

Luckily they move on fast, so when they descend on us at a camp site or resort, we just have to stay put and they will be gone again. Now that we have reached the countries considered more volatile we have left these types of organised tours behind.

Sleeping in Ethiopia

Most of this trip has been a camping holiday for us, equipped with a roof tent and the Hilton (our sturdy Coleman family tent big enough to satisfy any Kiwi camper) as well as a small pup tent borrowed from my brother, we always had lots of sleeping options. Occasionally we treated ourselves to a room (or it's my birthday and I am forced to spend it in a five star hotel), but mostly camping worked out well, because the countries we visited catered to campers. Level sites, a bit of grass, shower and toilet were usually provided, and sometimes we got so much more.

Not so in Ethiopia. The concept of camping doesn't seem to have reached here, so most camping takes place in the courtyards of the numerous hotels (Ethiopians must be prodigious travellers, judging by the number of hotels in every little village, and the number of people walking along the roads or perching on the back of trucks). Unfortunately the fact that we don't use the rooms doesn't have any impact on the price, we are always charged the same whether we camp or stay in a room. If the rooms were clean and comfy, we would be happy, but we have had the range from unfinished, grotty, uncomfortable, cockroach infested to badly maintained, slightly dusty and raw electricity cables hanging loose. What's strange is that while the rooms are mind-bogglingly furnished, with plaster falling off the walls, curtains that don't cover the windows, doors that don't shut and tiles that are broken, mis-matched furniture and randomly rigged wiring ( usually close to some running tap), the staff in all the hotels have been beyond nice and helpful. No-one ever understands our frustration with the non-functioning hot water or the lack of towels, but they are always more than happy to move us to a new room, bring us towels, buy us SIM cards or arrange for black market US dollars.

The one time we hit the jackpot was in Lalibela, and all thanks goes to tripadvisor.com, where we found updated recommendations that were better than the guide book entries. The Tukul Village hotel had big rooms and even bigger bathrooms, a hot shower and white sheets on the comfortable beds, a balcony looking out over the town and best of all it was all finished. No concrete floors in the bathroom or missing fittings, no raw power cables or loose door knobs. We could have cried, and we did stay longer than planned just to enjoy the novelty of a clean room. The hotel was new, and so was the other pleasant place we stayed, The Sabana resort at Lake Langano. It boils down to maintenance, we have decided, the same lack of upkeep that have made the railways unusable, roads fray at the edges and get pockmarked with potholes, that mean perfectly viable buildings just disintegrate over time and most aid projects fail if there is no contingency made for long term servicing. This is why new hotels are nice and old ones are always described in the guide books as having 'faded charm' and 'former grandeur'.

People We Meet, Part 1: The Independent Travellers

So I promised that I would write about the people we meet on our travels, and now that we have been on the road for slightly over 100 days (yay!) I feel that we have met a good collection of different types of people, so I am going to write a little mini-series.

Let's start with the non-locals. There are a few varieties of those, one of which is the independent traveller (as opposed to the overland tourists, who require a separate post with their big trucks). We meet them at designated traveller hangouts like Fat Monkeys at Lake Malawi, Jungle Junction in Kenya and Eureka Camp near Lusaka. It’s usually a couple between 30ish and 50ish, who have put their jobs on hold to spend a year or more travelling. They drive a robust 4 wheel drive, or a huge MAN truck, or a bashed up old Defender, and they can spend hours discussing car fitouts, routes and favourite camp sites in a range of countries and continents. Some are driving the classic Cape to Cairo (or Cairo to Cape) route, while others loop down through West Africa and up the other side, while we have also met a few open-ended trips, where the plan really just consists of “a year in Africa, a year in Asia and then who knows.” Example:

Jan and Trevor - they left London in their kitted out Landrover for a gap year, driving through Europe, to Turkey and round the Med into the Middle East. We met them in Uganda where they were heading to Rwanda to finally arrive in South Africa at the end of the year. Trevor is a twitcher, so Stuart got on famously with him, as Jan and I were busy sharing movies and audiobooks from their terabyte drives. Entertainment is important on a long journey like this.

Poomba, aka Mandy and Jacques, had been on the road for 14 months when we met them at Fat Monkeys on Lake Malawi. They were heading back home to South Africa from Australia, having shipped the car to Novosibirsk to cross Asia and Europe. Their Land Cruiser was home made, and after such a long trip everything most definitely had its place.

The first big truck we encountered made quite an impression on us. Two German guys had dissolved their company to pay for a brand new truck to be fitted out so that they could go on a World tour. When we met them in Lusaka they had already spent a year dawdling their way down from Europe, planned to spend another year in Southern Africa before shipping the monster truck to South America and carrying on. They were so self sufficient, they looked like they may never return to stationery life.

Uganda Roundup

When we worked out our route we had planned to travel from Tanzania North to Rwanda and Uganda, looping round Lake Victoria to enter Kenya from the west, but problems with the suspension prevented us from doing this. Instead we spent a few days in Kenya, heading up to the Lake and Uganda for a slow meandering arc returning us back to Nairobi after a couple of weeks. The result was that travelling in Uganda felt a bit aimless, being without a northward goal. The place still managed to get into my new top 3 country list (with Malawi and Namibia), for the amazing rain forest, the chilled people and the very funky monkeys (red-tailed, blue-tailed and black and white Colobus). We had no trouble to speak of, despite ongoing problems in the DRC next door and recent riots in Kampala related to changes in government.

Uganda also provided us with two new top ten campsites, a fab birthday treat for me and the fulfillment of one of Stuart's life ambitions, to see the mountain gorillas. We started to call Uganda the land of surprises, as it was so different from our expectations, and just when we thought we had worked out what kind of place it was, a new and unexpected vista opened in front of us.

Uganda was hills after hills after hills of green fertile farms, growing bananas, coffee, plantain and potatoes all mixed up together; it was riding our horses through the sugar cane fields and saying Jambo to every single child along the way, including stopping business at the local primary school; it was the perfect camp site and the wettest, a fabulous lake location where we got stuck due to the beauty and great company for far too long; it was also the frustration with badly-maintained sites that had so much going for them if someone just bloody well fixed the plumbing!; it was our first encounter with real rain forest, a green and dense mass of leaves, mushrooms and monkeys, being chased by the most evil mosquitos, struggling for air in the damp, cloying, hot, wet air; it was intense downpours which broke our awning and my patience, giving us clammy clothes and shoes for days and a great excuse for watching movies for a few days.

And then, after we decided that Uganda was pretty much a big lake and a lot of forest, we arrived at Queen Elizabeth National Park and discovered the Western Rift Valley, with its volcanos and crater lakes, great big hollows where we could watch elephants crossing the high grass way below us, where herds of Topi grazed among Uganda Kob, where water buffalo wallowed in grey damp patches until the layer of mud cracked off their hide, where pools of blue water shimmered against the salty edge separating wet from green, where we could see the next rain storm coming from an hour away across the acacia plains, a grey mass swallowing up the ground and the horizon.

Either we are getting more sociable or Uganda just has more interesting people, but we made some real cool new friends: a particularly good source was the Rwenzori guesthouse in Fort Portal, where we chatted with Donna the gorilla marketing lady from VSO, an auditor working on anti-corruption campaigns for USAid, some chimp researchers, an Israeli couple on holiday who entertained us with their horror story of getting Malaria on the second day of their trip, and the host himself, an opinionated Brit with fourteen years in Uganda and he was not holding back. We learnt a lot. Mustn't forget to mention the other overlanders, Trev and Jan, Anja and Jörg and Ben and Kate, fantastic company and deep wells of information, GPS tracks and ripped DVDs.

The perfect campsite

The perfect campsite

We are in Uganda, country number 9, and staying at the Haven, a lodge near the source of the White Nile. It's raining for the first time on this trip, but this place is so fabulous, so comfortable that it could stand as the epitome of the perfect camp site. So here are the ingredients, which I have determined to be necessary for a great camp site after exhaustive research in 9 African countries, encountering the best and the worst that the tourist industry can come up with:

First the basics, the foundation if you will. There should be a lawn, green and fresh, covering the tent pitches, and we should be able to drive our car onto it as we have a roof tent and it's really annoying to have to look at the grass rather than be on it. The pitch should be nice and big, so that we can spread out with our other tent, our table and chairs and general kitchen acroutements (sp?). It helps if the ground is flat so we don't have to navigate back and forth for ages to find a good spot to park the car. It's nice to have a little border to separate us from the other campers, but not too high so we can't meet new friends. This lawn should be dotted with shade giving trees, just big enough to fit the car and the tent under, but without gooey fruit that drop on the tent and make a mess, or worse, without being a monkey sleeping tree as they tend to pee from a great height during the night. If the camp site looks out over an amazing valley, or a lake with gently lapping waves, or a similar view of great stunningness, that is an extra bonus. If we can see fish eagles hunting or elephants crossing the dried up riverbed or hippos grunting the day away, our life is complete.

Next come the facilities, and this is where many camp sites do badly. Toilets, to get the gross item out of the way first, don't have to be flushing, long drops are fine as long as the smell is under control, they are clean and airy and there is toilet paper. I have to praise Mushroom Farm (Malawi) here, where not only is the long drop nice smelling, but the product is composted and used on the organic vegetable garden. Showers don't need to be hot, although I would not have wanted cold showers in South Africa or Namibia in mid-winter. And most places could manage hot water if they took the Haven as an example, where the owner has installed solar panels for water heating, and even though we are in the rainy season now, there is always enough sun to have lovely hot showers. The thing that is essential with a shower, and often taken for granted, though, is water pressure. You can have as much water as you like, if it dribbles out of the shower head you are not going to get clean. And we have had many a shower lacking sufficient pressure, from Sesriem in Namibia to Aruba in the Maasai Mara. Personally I find good water pressure trumps fresh water, as I was happy to have a slightly salty shower (at Makadi Beach in Tanzania) or one that is a bit rusty (Green View Lodge, Mbeya), but when I am standing naked in the shower and turn the water on I like to see more than just a trickle. The shower room should be a decent size to facilitate getting dressed, although it doesn't have to be a private cubicle for the pitch (as we had in Swakopmund and El Toro, Botswana). It's nice but unnecessary. More important is that there is a good lock on the door and a bit of privacy. There should be no dusty corners where dead flies congregate, nor grubby edges making it impossible to put down my soap, and while on the subject of putting things down, a few hooks, a ledge and a bench outside to keep my clothes dry and my towel in reach are surprisingly often afterthoughts. Also, if there is a tap, it's good to be able to open it, and if the shower head doesn't fall on my head that also helps my cleaning enjoyment. German run camp sites like the Haven are remarkably consistent in providing good quality showers. Maybe it's our history of heavy engineering?

Next come the non-essential niceties. That includes water taps dotted round the tent sites, a sink for washing up, a washing line, and - for us most important - a power supply so we can sit and tap away at our laptops to our heart's content. Tables and benches, sometimes under cover, have been a specially useful addition, so we don't have to get our own tables and chairs out. Where there is a bar or restaurant there is often a nice view to sit and compute or capture footage while drinking a cold Savanna, and the bar staff is usually happy to provide us with electricity in exchange for us running up a bar tab.

Last but not least on our travels we have found security to be most important. It's a sad fact that we have had thefts from our car in two places, and both were not Nairobi car parks, which we have been warned about at great length, but camp sites. A fence and a security guy who walks around at night are pretty standard, although that didn't help on those two occasions. Just being in the centre of the site rather than at the edges seems to make a difference, or just makes us feel safer. Security from wild animals also becomes an issue, as we have had jackals chewing straps off our bags, elephants charging Stuart into the toilet, baboon attacks on our food and nocturnal visits from village dogs.

My top list of camp sites so far, in no particular order:

Mahangu Lodge, Namibia

Guma Lagoon, Botswana

The Haven, Uganda

Jungle Junction, Kenya

Makadi Beach, Tanzania

Naukluft, Namibia

Track and Trail, Zambia

Mushroom Farm, Malawi

Fat Monkeys, Malawi

Abiqua, Namibia

Before and after

Man, we drink a lot of tea on this trip and our mugs bear witness to that. On the top is my mug in its normal state after many early morning cuppas and on the bottom is Stuart's mug, which Merryl took the scrubbing pad to so that it looks like new. We bought these in Maun one monts into the trip and they already lost their handles. Oh well.

Doing the Maasai Mara crush

Kenya = Maasai Mara, the famous game reserve that spans the border to Tanzania where it is called the Serengeti. Full of animals and home to the Mara river crossing featured in countless wildlife documentaries, where thousands of wildebeest and zebra throw themselves across the river trying to evade the waiting crocs and lions. Land of empty open plains swaying with grass, the odd tree decoratively breaking the endless horizon, where vast herds of exotic animals graze, from zebra to impala, gazelles of every variety alongside elephant and giraffe, eland, reed bucks, topi and kongoni; where predators roam looking for easy pickings, lions, leopards, cheetah, hyena and fox, a place to go at least once, although it would be hard to think we will never return.



I had heard many stories before we came, had a picture in my mind of how it would be, and it all turned out exactly like that and at the same time completely different. Access to the park is unlike any other we had been to, the road up to the first gate was terrible and only got worse as we pushed on to Aruba Bush Camp, whose owner, a Bavarian lady, we had met at Jungle Junction in Nairobi, and who promised hot showers and clean toilets at her camp site. Due to the bad infrastructure, the lack of signage and bad tracks in the park we had been told to take a guide, so Daniel, a local Maasai, hopped in the car with us in the morning. This turned out to be an advantage as well as a drawback. Daniel knew the roads, so he took us into the park through a shortcut. He was also on the phone a lot, for reasons of navigation, it turned out, as the mobile was the communicator for those guides not belonging to a lodge (their cars are equipped with two way radios). So in order to find out where the game was he called and was called, and he promptly took us to a spot where we could see a cheetah. A cheetah, wow! These guys (or often gals, as the females are extremely territorial and keep all males out of the way) are pretty hard to spot, as they are very shy and spend most of the day in hiding. But there it was, all lean and elegant, if panting a little from the heat, a real live cheetah in the wild.



Unfortunately that was also our introduction to how things work in the Mara and the drawback of having a guide in the car with us. There were three other safari cars around, each of them nudging in to see the cheetah better, taking turns to close in, overtaking and cutting each other off, in the process pushing the animal to move on just as it had found a shady spot to rest. It was looking increasingly harassed and when we told Daniel that we didn't want to approach any further he looked at us, mystified, and carried on encouraging us to go even closer. It took some will to refuse, but we could as we were driving ourselves. A side effect of all this jostling was that all the cars went off the main track, crunching over the vegetation and churning up the dry soil. It hasn't rained here yet, the Mara is the driest it has been since the 50's so the environment is very fragile, and I was shocked to see that all through the day not only did big 4x4 Landrovers and Cruisers drive on the lesser used tracks, which cut across the plain all over the place, but in the search for a better view they would drive into thickets, reverse over shrubs and pull up right on the river bank, making new tyre marks that would then be used by other cars. Part of the problem is of course that there is no established road system in the Mara such as we are used to from other parks, whether that be Kruger or Etosha or South Luangwa. Even when the signage was bad, there were always clear road markings and offroad tracks were blocked by stones and Do Not enter signs. there is nothing of the kind here, and I have yet to even see a map of recommended routes.


Another problem are the tourists who push the guides to drive ever nearer to the animals, and since most guides are dependent on the tourists' goodwill and their tips, they are happy to oblige. I felt that Daniel considered this just the way things are and since there is no penalty for bad behaviour and no immediate impact he is happy to carry on and satisfy the tourist wishes. Of course there is a long term impact on the environment and - through stress - on the animals. I wonder if the guides were paid a wage, or if they got ranger training so that they could gain an understanding of the impact of their actions combined with the confidence to be guardians of the landscape rather than collectors of tips, if better infrastructure and more policing of visitor behaviour would help here. I am sure many people have already thought of solutions to the problem, but it's sad to see that not a lot seems to get implemented.



Our stop to watch the river crossing became another ambivalent event. The Mara river had slowed almost to a trickle anywhere else, but here there were still rapids, and they were crowded with a dozen patient, scaly, and hungry crocodiles. There also floated the carcass of a wildebeest, horn stuck on a rock, slowly bobbing in the stream, apparently too smelly to still be interesting to the pre-historic beasts hanging around for the next victim. Along the bank a herd of wildebeest was crowding at the edge of the river, bumping and retreating until one took the - literal - leap into the water, and then they were all running, jumping and leaping over each other, pushing from behind, at the point of no return until they - on reaching a deeper channel - had to swim a way to reach firm ground again and stream up the other side to safety. Somehow this time they all made it across, maybe because after a large group had crossed the throng suddenly screeched to a halt and the rest of the herd stumbled back up onto the bank to find another crossing that was not quite so croc infested. Another flow of bodies took place out of our sight, but we soon realised that this one hadn't gone as well as the last. As we watched, a sleek brown body came floating round the bend, legs akimbo, occasionally a horn popping up from the water. Too slow, or maybe a stumble, a bump at the wrong moment, and a wildebeest had become a victim. The carcass was surrounded by crocs, who, pushing and snapping and twisting, tried to take a bite, jostling each other not unlike the ungainly Landcruisers when lining up for a photo of the evasive cheetah earlier in the day.



Unfortunately the ridge was lined with up to 20 cars, all heads sticking out of the roof hatch, 1200mm lenses cranked up to get that perfect shot, pink snappy cams next to pro level camcorders, all facing the iconic sight. Lodge cars were arranged as in a car park. When the spectacle was over they vanished round the corner in expectation of an even better view - and then, to our luck, most of them disappeared. It was lunchtime at the posh lodges.

Finding Jungle Junction

What's the most elusive thing we've encountered on this journey? Not cheetahs or leopards, not the endangered fish eagle or the malachite kingfisher, the nocturnal hippos or the tiny lion ants that hide in the ground and wait for their prey, no it is Jungle Junction, the much-praised camp site in the middle of Nairobi, which every long distance overlander waxes lyrical about, with its acclaimed showers and copious internet, and not least of all its accommodating and generous host Christoph. The problem is, it advertised itself with a latitude and longitude only, even a Google search didn't yield any more detail (such as a street name, maybe) and, having entered the co-ordinates into our GPS, we still struggled to find the entrance gates in the whirl and commotion that is Nairobi on our first day. We drove round and round the block until a kind stranger pointed out the black iron gate with the large double-J cut into it. Ah, there you are! The problem with Jungle Junction is that it's just so easy to stay there. When you arrive you have usually just come from the wilds of either Ethiopia or Tanzania, and you are ready for some civilisation. But Nairobi is overwhelming, the biggest city in East Africa, so you also need a place to hide out from where you can occasionally venture out into the crazy city to sort out your visa or buy that thing that broke, but where you can retreat and pretend you are in another place, a calmer place, an organised place with no surprises. Jungle Junction provides normalcy, sofas in the lounge and reliable internet, a clean kitchen and fixed prices for washing, dinner and drinks. It's really just a big family house with public spaces downstairs and some guest rooms upstairs, camping on the front lawn and showers in an outhouse round the back. the front door has a reception added to it and houses a large fridge filled with drinks dispensed on the honour system. Internet is fast and free, so fast that I feel like I am back home, and that's such a comforting feeling. Yes, there is the problem of only having electricity during the day every other day, but at least he's clear about this up front, and it's just as he says, power returns every evening at 6pm. Then there are the notice boards, fantastically useful and split out to list accommodation on one, Nairobi info on another, there's a board holding restaurant info in the kitchen and a free for all where visitors can leave their cards and photos by reception )I had no idea there were so many overlanders with business cards).


Oh, and there's Christoph's motorbike workshop. He is a former BMW engineer and seems to be the go-to man for servicing bikes in the region - i.e. Eastern Africa (he fixed up the Long Way Down bikes when they had a problem in Tanzania). But Christoph is not just helpful for bikers, he has knowledge of everything, from computer repairers to solar panel suppliers, all neatly stored in a set of business card books, each section labelled for easy reference. And really, it's Christoph who is the biggest asset of Jungle Junction. He has created an oasis of calm and organised peace, a quality that propagates to employees and guests alike. Everything is immaculate and cared for, from the big cushions on the sofas to the crockery in the kitchen, nothing is flashy, but everything is looked after by all, and there is an orderly and considerate spirit around the place. There are reminder lists posted on the walls to clean up after yourself, to use water sparingly and to refrain from leaving stuff around (e.g. "Monday is fridge day, everything not labelled will be chucked out"; "Don't leave food on the surfaces, put it in the cupboard", etc), long enumerations spiked with creative spelling and apostrophe crimes, but I suspect that it's really Christoph's calm presence, his open helpful manner and uncynical attitude that makes everyone want to behave well here. I know it worked for me. And for your information, Jungle Junction can be found on Amboseli Rd in Lavington.

When baboons attack

Moremi's Third Bridge camp site is idyllic, set amongst water holes and reed beds as it is, with fabulous views of sunrise and sunset. It's quiet and spacious sites are visited by hippos, kudu and -unfortunately - baboons.

When we arrived early yesterday afternoon we were pleased to see that a lovely camping spot under some trees was still available (park camp sites in Botswana are few and need to be booked in advance - we can't go to Chobe Wildlife reserve, as all three sites are booked out for the whole of August). Perfect, we thought, and put up out hammock, set up the tent and unfolded the roof tent. It was hot and we all had a snooze, followed by a bit of reading, then Stuart went for a shower while Merryl and I decided to start cooking dinner. Mushroom risotto, yum. The fire place was a way across the clearing, so we got the fire started and then got going chopping onions and getting out ingredients from the kitchen built into the side of the car. We had noticed earlier that a few baboons were ambling past, and we had read in the Bradt that baboons were a nuisance round the camp, specially when people left food behind amongst their possessions when they took off for an afternoon game drive. So we had waved our arms, shouted and generally tried to shoo them off - there might have been some throwing of sticks - but they were singularly unimpressed by our antics, although they eventually disappeared.

It was only when Stuart returned from his shower that we realised there were lots more baboons in the bushes than we had first thought. In fact there were about twenty of all sizes, including mothers with babies clinging to their fur, small ones and lanky teens, as well as a large dark grey male, who grumbled at me but kept his distance. Suddenly all hell broke lose as the baboon herd started closing in. I now realise that the two teens we had seen earlier had been scoping out our camp site and when they had discovered food smells they signalled the rest of the gang for easy pickings.

The big alpha male kept coming closer and started circling the car, grumbling threateningly at us all the while, while the smaller ones were all sitting around watching from the side lines. We realised he was figuring out how to get to our food, and as Stuart and I stood guard Merryl packed away everything into the car. Stuart was armed with a burning stick from the fire (very Planet of the Apes) and I first with a towel (for flicking), the first thing to hand, and then, when the baboon tried to grab it off me, a folding chair. It felt like being in a bar brawl, as we were holding off a 5ft, 60kg baboon who kept making threatening feints to get past us, meanwhile showing his massive canines (bigger than a lion's apparently). We weren't sure whether he was showing off to his mates, trying to save face as we were standing our ground in the face of his threats, or to trying to get at our stuff, but as the food was all packed away I am not sure.

As we were clearing away the dinner preparation from one side of the car I noticed alpha male eyeing up something on the other side, where Stuart had left one of the tool boxes from the recovery gear side of the car on the floor. I thought it was our medical kit, but it later turned out to just have been a box containing our 'water gear': solar shower bag, water hose and window cleaner. The box was sitting on the ground by the back wheel and when I wasn't paying attention for a minute, the ape swiped the tool box, hugged it with both arms and tried to make off with it. I did not want all our expensive medical supplies being nibbled at by a baboon and chased after him. Luckily he realised I would catch up with him and he wouldn't make it into a tree with the heavy box, and dropped it. Humans 1, Apes Nil. He immediately turned on me again and tried to scare me, but I snatched back the box and retreated. It was like a pitched battle. He climbed a tree stump next to our tent, still watched by his mates all waiting to see who would win this fight.

As a precaution we packed up the tent again and closed all the windows in the roof tent, and while our backs were turned Alpha Male tried to snatch our cutting board with his big hairy hand grabbing as fast as a monster in a horror movie. This time Stuart fended him off, as even pushing at him with the chair didn't deter him - he just tried to pull the chair off me, baring his teeth all the time and making a low growling sound. It was pretty scary being so close to an undomesticated animal, specially such an aggressive one, even though lots of it was just posturing - it worked to intimidate us.

Eventually we had everything safely stowed in the car, including Merryl, who decided she would prefer to sleep on the back seat rather than brave the possibility of being baboon bait. We later realised that the spot we were camping in was actually the baboon herd's sleeping trees, and that another camping group had trouble the night before and had moved for that reason, but neglected to point this out to us. Neither did the ranger who came to collect rubbish earlier in the day. So I guess the humans at this site were pretty much as useless as the baboons.

As it got dark Alpha Male wandered off with his entourage and harem in tow and as it got dark they all settled down to sleep - barring a few noisy squabbles.

Postscript: the night contained a few more noisy rebellions that had to be put down by the seniors which all involved high-pitched squealing, breaking of branches, slapping of inferiors and a constant loud roar from Alpha Male and his competitor - it sounded like very aggressive shouts of  'Rahoo, Rahoo' which went on for far too long.

Postscript Two: We have become Third Bridge folklore already.When we met a group of young German students at the other side of the camp site this morning to scope out a better sleeping place and other people's baboon experiences (they had a two kilo bag of pasta stolen last night), they asked us if we had heard about the people who had to fight off a group of baboons with a chair! We have great hope that our story will end up being mentioned in the next edition of the Bradt guide.

Breaking news - our first theft

One of the pieces of warning we have been getting from the very beginning of talking about this trip has been that we will have to protect our possessions as everywhere there is a chance of stuff being swiped. So we have locked the fuel canisters, padlocked the roof boxes, locked the gas bottle to its holder and had locks fitted to the cupboards, drawers and storage spaces. In the meantime we joked how the first time we will get mugged will be in Italy, and people told us stories about muggings in London, Stockholm and New York. Today we lost our mugging cherry. We had been camping in a lovely spot right by the Okavango river, across the border from Angola, all by ourselves at the slightly disheveled camp site. It had been quiet, the only visits had been from an owl, a bush baby and the dog with six super cute puppies. Oh, and the guy sitting watch by the fire all night. Stuart brought him a mug of tea and some soup, but we lacked a common language, so couldn't work out if he was guarding us or keeping out the riff raff from across the river. He left this morning, having scrubbed the pot and cup we lent him to within an inch of their lives. I wish he had stayed: We had a dawdly morning, eating breakfast, showering, charging laptops. We were round the site most of the time, but there must have been a moment when Stuart went down the path, I was in the toilet and Merryl in her tent, when someone snuck in, climbed the ladder of the tent and grabbed everything in it. Two bags and some clothes, ready at the edge of the tent to be packed away for the day. We can't have been out of sight for more than a minute, and heard nothing. Luckily all that disappeared was our two favourite Crumpler bags, but nothing of value was in them, and the clothes had been wearing the day before. We first thought our phones had gone, but luckily we had just mislaid them. The camp site people were very good and sent out a search party, but all they recovered were some kid's size foot prints and some tablets that must have dropped out of my pocket. I was a bit worried at their enthusiasm, the gardeners who went off in hot pursuit were carrying machetes, I hoped just as that's what they were working with at the time. So now we are a bit shaken, but trying not to let the experience get to us. We will certainly be a bit more careful in future and appreciate the car guards at the shopping centres more than we did in the past.

Yet another use for the Pogo

So I mentioned my cool photo toy - the Pogo printer from Polaroid - before, but with our travel prep in full swing I came up with yet another useful application for it. We have a set of 6 ammo boxes filled with stuff stacked on a shelf in the back of the car, but they are black so it's impossible to see what's in which one without dragging them out and looking inside. Instead of writing labels I photographed the content, printed a photo and used the sticky backing to glue it straight to the box. Voila.

My new grownup feet

Ready for a six months long camping trip!

Lesotho at Easter

Here is Stuart's takeon our first visit to another African country since arriving in South Africa:

http://www.stuartrturner.com/Site/Blog/Entries/2009/4/13_Lesotho.html

Plus some great photos.

International camping

The only camping we have done so far has been in Kruger Park in South Africa these last few days, but local similarities to the camping professionals that are the Kiwis are becoming obvious already. Camp sites are quiet and people obviously stay for a long time. As in NZ they seem to treat the camp as their holiday home where they return every year with their families. We saw this at Abel Tasman with families visiting regularly for 30 years without fail. This also means that groups arrive with incredible amounts of equipment, from fridges to double beds, bicycles and surf boards, wind screens and tents the size of houses. Here, though, we see a lot of very well equipped off- road vehicles with high lift jacks, roof tents and spare jerry cans, probably because it is so easy to drive into the bush to Botswana or Namibia, whereas in NZ most camping is fenced.

A glaring difference is the fact that camping here seems to be an exclusively White affair. I a week in Kruger I have not noticed one Black camper. Kiwi sites, specially up in Northland, were much more mixed.

I guess camping is a tempting holiday option in countries where it is expensive to fly somewhere else, and South Africans may feel similarly restricted in destinations as New Zealanders.

And by the way, this is our semi-pimped Defender. It now has a built in kitchen with a table, water tank and extra fuel tanks.

Shape of the day

Lesotho day 1 and the shape today is a cone. The mountains are strangely symetrical, shepherds are wearing conical hats, straw is ties in the fields in a cone shape and the rondavels dot the villages with their straw roofs.

I was expecting this country to be emptier, but there are many people walking: from church and to girl guide practice, riding their donkeys and ponies and waiting for one of the ubiquitous minitaxis.

Fossil Rock - again

It seems that for an overnight camping trip this is going to be our favourite haunt.

Fossil Rock, named after the marine fossils that can be found embedded into the craggy outcrops - is conveniently close to Dubai, it combines desert dunes for a fun drive with impressive scenery to watch the sunset. We stopped off in Al-Awir to get petrol and tomatoes. It's a one-camel kind of town (well, actually there are probably hundreds, but you know what I mean), dusty and empty, but it provides us with essentials and we bought our very serviceable kettle there on our first trip.

Then it's the usual routine: Get off the road, let some air out of the tyres and make sure everything is strapped down for the bumpy bits. Last time we lost two cups to a sudden drop in the track - keeps IKEA in business, at least. It was Marcus' first trip driving his lovely new Discovery, so we took it easy to start with. But by the big grin on his face we soon knew that he was ready for the bigger bumps. We only got stuck once, and helped out a stranger whose appetite for steep hills was bigger than his engine, otherwise the trip was trouble-free. We even saw a lizard, a rare occasion to see life here apart from camels and goats.

We are tonight camping by one of the rocks that were once underwater cliffs, the fire is toasty and the marshmallows are sticky and sweet. There's a million stars and a big silence, it's not too chilly: life couldn't be better.