In the tempting fate department, the following conversation has to be right up there with stuffing grass into a lawnmower by hand:
“What’re you up to there Midge?”
“I’m pulling the knee pads outta these pants”
“Why?”
“They’re driving me nuts – scratchy things keep rubbing on my knee”
“Think that’s a wise idea?”
“Sure it’ll be fine – all my falls are low speed events [the midget had been rolling about on the ground with his bike about 5 times a day on average at this point]. What you think?”
“Well, the thing with knee pads is that you don’t need them until you REALLY need them.”
Fast forward half the day and I come round a corner to find the Midget pinned under his DR like a fat dolphin under a whale. Surprise surprise, he’d smacked his knee in exactly the spot that the pad would have been. Nothing too critical - mere flesh wound – but we’d been carrying a bulky medical kit around for a while now and I spotted an opportunity to play Dr House and abuse someone.
Dr Gregory House – king of acerbic vitrol (not to be confused with tank manufacturer)
On opening the medical kit, it immediately became apparent that the midget had put as much time into stocking it as I had on the food. We had enough pain killers to keep a landmine victim happy but that was simply because the Midget had raided his wife’s private supply. On the disinfectant front we were a tad light so I stuck a stick in his mouth and prescribed a good scrubbing with the precious last remnants of our whisky. Let it never be said that we are uncaring.
Cleaned and bandaged, shrubbery removed from his front spokes and knee pad safely back in place, the Midget hopped back on buttercup and forged on with nary a hint of the near catastrophe.
Disappointingly, I seemed to be in worse shape. The trauma of seeing drink poured into dry earth had left me a little wobbly. By this point, I was a thirsty camel. A very, very, thirsty camel:
The picture’s caption informatively explains: “The photo here does not illustrate the camel's sexual organs but is in fact the lining of the mouth extruded during mating calls”. Because naturally the first thing that I’d be thinking was that those were his balls coming out his mouth.
We had mis-calculated the water situation (we did this just about every day) and the dreaded AfterLife had gobbled up the last of our reserves. I wouldn’t say we were ready to drink the sweat from our socks but I was starting to wonder if we hadn’t ballsed this up rather spectacularly. The area has had no rain for 4 years (the drought has driven the farmers North and East to look for grazing for their cattle). None of the rivers had even a suggestion of water in them and all this was starting to make me a bit dizzy. Even the hard man Midget was getting desperate:
Still, not much to do about it so we bumbled on into the mid afternoon. It was pretty hot and it felt very, very, remote. There wasn’t a sign of human inhabitation, other than the occasional tire track on the road in front of us. Every now and again we’d go over a rise, the mountains would open up and we’d get a glimpse of the huge dunes of the Northern Namibian Skeleton Coast far away to the South. Spectacular.
Then, unexpectedly, we came across this little settlement:
It consisted of only a couple of huts, some families and some uber-cool motorbike rockers. But not a drop of water.
Moral dilemma’s plague me at times like these. I’m pretty much permanently hungry, so any stop means lunch-time to me. But when you stop in a little spot like this the crowds gather round pretty sharpish. And everyone is dirt poor and certainly sporting a more urgent hunger than mine. We were pretty light on food at this stage and we definitely didn’t have spare to be passing around (‘spare’ being relative, granted). So I end up not eating simply because I didn’t want to share, despite the unimaginable wealth gap. These situations leave me feeling mean, and irritated that this is a reality of our world. And maybe guilty for the luck in how my die was cast. In this sort of mood, I cherish the fact that I can disappear into my helmet alone with my thoughts.
With scenery like this though, it’s hard to dwell in melancholy too long…
I have to give full credit to Max here for the shots. He was the designated camera ***** and did a cracking job of charging ahead and getting some shots of me n the Midge trundling through. He had to resort to self portraits:
He’s been furiously editing while I’ve been scribbling so booya to you big papa.
An hour or so further on we rolled into the delightful little village of Iona. Unlike any of the villages we’d been through since crossing at Ruacana, this place was neat and clean and orderly. White painted rocks lined the few roads, a smart looking building turned out to be a school and Angolan flags were proudly hoisted.
More importantly, there was a well, at which I made myself comfortable and set about inflating my humps. Yes, yes, I know that a camel’s hump actually stores fat, not water, but that’s not going to stop me using the expression “inflating my humps”.
Donkey’s can look like motorbikes when you’re at the point of expiry:
There was also a big shiny 4x4 in Iona that looked like it was either government or UN related. It turned out to be neither – a Spanish doctor / anthropologist was there with 2 sidekicks making a film (about medicine or people – can’t remember which). This fellow had worked in Angola before and during the war and was super knowledgeable about the local people and cultures – fascinating to listen to. To be honest, he made me feel a little like a petrol headed pig. But in a good way.
The day was wrapping up so we headed out of Interesting Iona to look for a campsite.
Max is like a homing pigeon when it comes to finding a place to sleep – he’s a campsite connoisseur. Its wonderfully comforting to know that he’s normally got the nap spot covered. 9 times out of 10 it’s a riverbed. Hands down the best place to kick back after Another Astounding Day…
