Mosquitoes, Moustaches and Saddam Hussein


Mosquitoes, Moustaches and Saddam Hussein

One memorable holiday, Julia and I headed off to a lodge in Hluhluwe. It was December. In the hot, hot heart of Zululand.
But this is not about the curtains of mosquitoes that obscured our view of the sunset. It’s not about the death of the generator, that awful moment when the world went quiet, except for the persistent sucking of the swamp and a collective shiver of delight from the clouds of mosquitoes, sensing their moment had come.  
There were choices, of course. We could stay in our room and join the puddle made by our fridge in extremis as we melted without the air conditioning, or, we could open the windows and be bitten to the bone by vulture sized mozzies. There was one other choice.

A quad bike ride to a lake to view hippos seemed enticing. After all, I have ridden camels in Egypt, climbed the Great Wall of China and once, even knitted a jersey. (The fact that the jersey was so hideous that not even a camel would wear it doesn’t detract from my knitting feat.) So a quad bike would be a ride in the park.

Julia decided to ride pillion. A wise decision, I thought, to defer to my great skills. It seemed simple enough: keep your thumb on the throttle and point in the general direction of forward. The complication was that I had recently broken the thumb on my right hand. Well, I didn’t break it; the woman who sat on it during an ice-breaker of musical chairs at a conference broke it. She stood up as fast as I fell down. The point is, the thumb was not fully operational. I soon solved the problem by crossing my hands on the handle bars, using the left hand on the throttle. We were off.

There were no serious injuries when we roared into the ditch at the side of the road. What joy it gave us to bring such merriment to the locals who fell about laughing while we, um, I, revved the engine and eventually got us back on the road. (This is an important plot moment; it was a red, dirt road.)
We forged ahead. I was able to use my skill as a game tracker (I was the one who found the Boggle) to pursue our guide who had abandoned us in favour of a more competent couple. Navigating the rutted road, goats and then sand dunes, we finally made our triumphant arrival.

The view was spectacular. A heat haze, a few boiling cows and in the distance, rising like a pale pink rash on the far bank of the lake, the hippos we had come to see. We knew they were hippos because the female member of The Competent Couple described them as she gazed through the lens of a camera that could probably be used as a rocket launcher. Her husband confirmed the sighting while delicately focussing his Zeiss binoculars. We stared in the general direction of the rash and nodded sagely.
We stayed for at least forty minutes. Mr Zeiss was a cultured man. We discussed poetry and literature while they sipped on water and nibbled at a picnic lunch. We hadn’t brought any supplies but hid this further evidence of inefficiency by saying that we were undergoing a day of fasting to cleanse our auras. They were impressed.

As we were leaving, Julia was kind enough to quietly point out to me that I had conducted this entire erudite conversation, wearing a giant, red, dirt moustache. I looked, she said, like a wild female version of Saddam Hussein, although perhaps even he didn’t have quite such a luxuriant moustache.
When we got back to the lodge, we packed and escaped to Durban. Mr Zeiss, from Scotland, probably still tells tales of Africa, adventure, hippos and the wild woman of Hluhluwe.

(This is a true story. Names and places have not been changed. We got a full refund from Nibela Lodge. But we won’t be going back anytime soon.)





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