Damaged suspension, a closed gateway
Friday, 9 May 2014
Four hundred kilometers of rain in the night, to the south. Three to four kilometers back into the flooded country and stuck in mud. An hour to get free. The southeast is now closed to us for this safari. A road nobody had driven in a long time, cut open with our winch and our machetes, leads us to a windmill pan with no elephant sign at all.
Dark sky again. The air heavy. Four hundred kilometers to the south it rained last night. We drove the dirt road where we had left off yesterday, trying to push in to our favorite country in the southeast.
Three to four kilometers in, the mud took us. An hour of work to get free. Five hundred meters in reverse to a point wide enough for a turn. Our gateway into the southeast had just closed for the season. We would need two months of dry before that country would hold a vehicle again. It would be gone for this first safari.
We drove west to a windmill-pump pan we had not yet checked. The grass in the area was tall enough to hide the road; no one had been in there. We cut through leaves and branches most of the way. We hit a stump hidden under grass and damaged the right front suspension. An hour in the bush to put it right.
Along the way, four or five old bull tracks — all of them big, all of them yesterday’s. At the pan, no elephant sign. They must be drinking somewhere else.
After lunch, east on a new dirt road. Old sign everywhere. Plains game. We stopped at a bushman village to ask if anyone had seen a big tusker. Two hundred kilometers of driving today. One young bull, total. Felix, who has done this for twenty years, said this is the toughest he has had here. The ground is too hard from the rain to hold a print. The grass is too high to see. The bush is too thick to glass. The elephants do not need to come in to water. You ask yourself, some days, whether you have earned it.