Things that go bump in the night

Lion Spoor

 The darkness is blinding. If I were to put my hand in front of my face I would see nothing. I can hear Paul’s breathing as he lies next to me on our bedroll in our tent somewhere in the middle of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR). Even if I try, I cannot for the life of me see him. I hear rustling outside the tent. It sounds like footsteps. Inching closer and closer to the side of the tent. Now sniffing. I can’t see a thing but I can hear my heart beating. What is it out there in the darkness? I try not to move. 

It goes on like this for what seems like hours and when I wake in the morning the darkness and wind are gone and there’s not a trace of a thing having passed outside our tent except my wild imagination…

I love the noises you hear sleeping in the bush. On the above night, however, it was nothing but the wind. On other nights you can hear the call of lions, the cry of jackals, the whooping of hyenas, the barking of geckos or the “HO0-hooing” of owls. Some nights the silence is deafening. On a recent trip to the Kalahari we woke to find footprints of a lion coming down the road leading to our campsite, passing right outside the front of our tent, doing a careful inspection of the entire site, then retreating back out the road. We heard nothing. 

Senyati Watering Hole

Sometimes you get so spoiled being in the bush that when you re-enter “civilization” you’re almost annoyed by the presence of other humans. We had an especially rude reintroduction to human society at a recent stay outside of Chobe National Park. A normally quiet campsite, called Senyati, with an amazing watering hole that draws in tons of elephants was taken over and corrupted by a band of fifteen marauding Afrikaaners drinking and making a racket until the wee hours of the night. 

Sadly they conformed to all the negative stereotypes that anyone could ever dream up about this segment of society. They were loud, rude, drunk and belligerent. At one point I felt like going over to them and saying, “Hey, there are other people here you know!” which made me think this was probably a common sentiment of the vast majority of the population of South Africa during the days of Apartheid. When we went to talk to the management about trying to get them to quiet down a bit, they threatened him with violence if he came back again.

Not getting much sleep that night we were woken before dawn cracked by the same gang yelling in Afrikaans at full volume to each other from across their campsites. Paul sprang to his feet, quickly dressed and confronted them in hopes that our clients might get some much needed sleep (which they were inevitably unable to get the night before). When he went over and said, “Come on guys, really…do you need to yell at each other in the early morning hours?” One of them responded, “We’re farmers.” 

Well...I guess that explains it. Sometimes you have no control over things that go bump in the night (or in the early morning hours).