Strip Pan Wrinkle Read online

  DAVID FLETCHER

  (IN NAMIBIA AND BOTSWANA)

  Copyright © 2014 David Fletcher

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

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  Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  For Phil and Heather

  Contents

  2011

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  2011

  1.

  It was undeniable. Brian was a loopaholic. Whereas some people are addicted to alcohol, or to Dr Who or even to British socialism, Brian was addicted to loops and, it has to be admitted, to a minor extent, to alcohol. But that is by the way. And to return to his looping predilections, it can be stated with absolute certainty that whenever he made a trip anywhere – under his own steam – he would go out of his way (sometimes literally) to return by a different route to that which he’d originally taken, to achieve the craved-for loop in his itinerary and the consequent gratification of his addiction.

  Yes, Brian’s loops could all be drawn on a map. So, for example, a visit to Waitrose in Droitwich would entail his driving along the Saltway through Hanbury, but then his taking a more circuitous route home through the lanes around Crowle. Similarly, a longer trip to, say, Tenby would be executed by taking the M5 and then the Heads of Valley Road for the outward leg and then a more leisurely amble through the Brecon Beacons and rural Herefordshire for the return leg. And it went beyond this. For he had approached a tour of Scotland by driving up its east coast, then along the length of its north coast and finally down its west coast and back to his starting point – and the end of his loop. Ditto in both islands of New Zealand, on the Atlantic island of Boa Vista in Cape Verde, and around the whole of the nation of Namibia. In fact, his loopaholism was so intense that he could now not really contemplate a visit anywhere in the world that would involve a trip from A to B, other than when A and B were the very same place and the start and the end of a suitably gratifying loop. He was a completely hopeless case.

  So, no great surprise then that in planning his latest expedition, Brian had organised another looping itinerary. But this one was different. It was to be the loop of all loops. A loop that outpaced that Tenby expedition by miles, a loop that put the Scotland excursion into the also-rans, and a loop that even exceeded that ambitious drive around the whole of Namibia. For this loop would be through three countries. And not silly little countries either, like Luxembourg or Liechtenstein, but big proper countries, and not in innocuous Europe but in inimical Africa. Well, no, not really inimical at all, because the three African countries to be visited (and through which a loop would be conducted) were the old favourite of Namibia, its neighbour, Botswana, and its rather more remote neighbour, Zambia.

  Yes, as anyone who has visited either Namibia or Botswana will confirm, the likelihood of coming to harm in these nations is probably less than it is in Tenby (after closing time). And as for Zambia… well, the loop would just scratch a corner of its territory, and the biggest threat that might be encountered there was the unwanted attention of mosquitoes. That said, there would be roads to find, lodges to find, borders to cross and, no doubt, animals to avoid. So it wouldn’t be a walk in the park. Not even a circular walk. No, it would be the biggest loop Brian had ever driven. And, all being well, it would satisfy his loopaholic cravings for weeks, if not months. Even if, to start with, it was difficult to believe that one was on any sort of loop at all. And that, of course, was down to Namibia’s roads…

  The journey had commenced in Namibia’s capital, Windhoek, and Brian and his wife, Sandra, were now driving north up this country’s main thoroughfare, the seemingly endless two-lane B1. And this road, like most other roads in Namibia, is just a surfaced straight line. It is a strip of undeviating tarmac, edged with wide cropped verges cut through an infinite spread of thornveld, where there is as much chance of meeting a bend as there is of meeting one’s maker, (for as well as being straight, this major road is virtually traffic-free, and collisions with other vehicles would have to be arranged by prior appointment).

  But anyway, at the moment, Brian was conscious only of the straightness of this highway, and was intrigued by the thought that his currently curve-less progress was still an integral part of that much discussed loop. For after all, don’t most loops have at least a degree of curvature in their design?

  He was also intrigued by the thought that this straight-line road – and all the other straight-line roads in Namibia, whether metalled or un-surfaced – were a product of the country’s colonial past. This place had once been a German possession. And could it be that these unfussy, not to say strictly disciplined, by-ways were the result of Germanic precision and Germanic resolution? In the face of Teutonic determination and single-mindedness, would a bothersome topography stand any chance at all? ‘The road needs to go zat way, and zat is where ve vill build it.’ Uhmm, a little unfair possibly, and on the same basis, all the roads in ex-French colonies would be full of contortions, bifurcations and deviations, and in ex-Brit colonies, they’d just be completely higgledy-piggledy and full of dead-ends and dips. So maybe it was something else, like the absence of a discernible population in the country. If you needed to build a road here, there were barely any towns or other settlements to avoid. You simply built it where it needed to go – in a straight line – and no one was inconvenienced.

  These sorts of musings got Brian past Otjiwarongo (where there was a discernible turn in the road that now took our two travellers in a north-easterly direction rather than due north) and only ended when Sandra made an observation about the time.

  ‘How long now?’ she said. ‘ We must be almost half way.’

  Unusually for Brian, he was prepared for this question and responded without hesitation.

  ‘Two and a half to three hours, I reckon. And yes, we’re just over half way. So, all being well, that’ll be five hundred kilometres in under six hours.’

  ‘Umm, that’s good.’

  ‘You don’t mind sitting in a car for almost six hours then – just looking at all the thorn t
rees?’

  ‘Why would I?’

  ‘Well, think of all the other things you could have been doing instead.’

  ‘Such as?’ queried Sandra.

  ‘Well, I don’t know… I mean, given six hours, you could have… ’

  ‘Yes… ?’

  ‘You could have read two thirds of that Alistair Darling book on the banking crisis… ’

  ‘You mean that one that made you despair?’

  ‘Yes, that one. Or you could have wormed your way through BT’s automated fault-reporting system and found a human being to speak to… ’

  ‘Unlikely.’

  ‘Or you could have watched six episodes of the X Factor – if it’s actually possible for anyone to watch six in a row. Or you could have had a dozen or so colonoscopies… ’

  ‘It’s OK, Brian. I did mean it. I do enjoy sitting in a car. And you know I do. Especially when the car’s in Namibia. And, of course, when the car is a Land Cruiser… ’

  Brian turned to face his wife and smiled.

  ‘Just checking,’ he said. ‘Just checking.’

  But he wasn’t really. He was just giving his wife and himself an opportunity to relish their situation – which was in Namibia, a country they loved, at the start of a great expedition and, as Sandra had just pointed out, in a wonderful Toyota Land Cruiser.

  This one was the new model, a useful-looking beast that was described in the paperwork as “brown”, but was actually a rather fetching take on beige. It had a 4.2 litre diesel engine, and this gave it all the torque necessary to pull it through the deepest sand and the deepest mud, if not to propel it up long inclines on long metalled roads with all the umph one would have wished for. But that was the trade off you got in the torque deal: more power for the rough at the expense of speed on the smooth. (Although Brian didn’t really know what he was talking about, having peaked in his knowledge of the workings of cars at the age of fifteen, when he’d flunked an evening class in car mechanics attended with some of his friends from school. And no, they never did get their immobile Ford Consul to move even an inch.)

  Brian and Sandra’s precious 4x4 also had a few extras. There was a big bull-bar thing on its front that made it look like an overgrown offensive weapon; there was an extra spare wheel on its roof rack (if one was feeling in need of a strained back); there was a fridge in the rear (for water and medicinal alcohol); and there was an “inverter” behind the front seat. Brian had no idea what it inverted, but one could plug things into it and recharge batteries, and Brian suspected that even Jeremy Clarkson hadn’t got one of these. Oh, and there was also a GPS on the dashboard – which consistently showed just a vertical straight line on its screen: the apparently endless B1, just as disciplined and just as unswerving as it was when it first left Windhoek.

  Of course, it wasn’t endless. Only government incompetence and mismanagement is endless. So eventually, Brian and Sandra found themselves near Tsumeb, where the B1 doesn’t actually end, but where it makes a sharp turn north-west to begin its last act as it skirts the eastern edge of the great Etosha National Park. Brian and Sandra would be with it for just a little while longer (for they too were on their way to the eastern edge of the park), but before then there was a diesel stop to attend to, and that meant a serious pause.

  There are no self-service fuel stations in Namibia. Because, if there were, it would threaten the existence of one of the principal Namibian art forms, namely that of the filling of a fuel tank by a forecourt attendant until there is simply not a cubic nanometre of space left in the tank available for any more fuel. Such art work cannot be hurried, and there is therefore always time at these stops to visit the loo, reconcile one’s bank account, add a codicil to one’s will – or, if one is Brian, to examine a puddle… Because, for the last three hundred kilometres up that B1, the air had been filled with literally millions of white butterflies (and the windscreen splattered with hundreds of their fragile bodies). And now, around a puddle formed by a leaking tap at the back of the forecourt, were hundreds more of them, and Brian wanted to see what he had been killing. They were beautiful. Not plain white, but white with delicate black markings – and Brian felt quite miserable. After all, it was one thing to see a splat, but it was quite another to see, close up, what that splat had once been: an exquisite creature full of life and enchantment. Brian could console himself in the only way he knew how: by reminding himself that his species had, for as long as it had existed, majored in the thoughtless destruction of all other species, and wouldn’t it be conceited to consider himself any different from his same-species brethren?

  When he then recounted these thoughts to Sandra (who had herself examined the puddle after returning from the loo with her bank reconciliation) she responded by telling him that he obviously needed a drink, and they should push on to their destination where said drink could undoubtedly be secured. And then all would be well.

  Brian could find no challenge to this proposal and accordingly pushed on as soon as he had delivered a small fortune to the service-station attendant. (Fuel in Namibia is as outrageously expensive as it is in the UK and, unsurprisingly, 4.2 litre engines demand rather a lot of it.) And lo, within less than half an hour, the pushing on had delivered them to the first of the eleven lodges they would be visiting on this expedition, and this lodge rejoiced in the name of the “Mushara Outpost” – and it probably still does.

  Brian approached it up a long gravel track, and when he’d drawn the Land Cruiser to a halt, he immediately decided that it was very similar to the Mushara Bush Camp. This was another of the four lodges in the “Mushara Collection”, and where he and Sandra had stayed on their last visit to this Etosha region. The similarity was welcome, because this meant that the Outpost boasted a beautifully designed open-sided “lodge house” where one could eat and drink whilst enjoying a subtle blend of fawns, blues, greys and whites, and it also offered individual tents that were both private and very comfortable. And by tents, we are here referring to “tent-like structures of wood and canvas”, which make tent-type tents look like something from a bygone age. For who in the Boy Scouts would expect his tent to come complete with an elegant loo, a huge shower, a simply gigantic bed, a shaded deck and an air conditioning system!? Oh… and there was a chilled mini-bar as well. And within seconds of arriving in their very own “tentlike structure”, Brian and Sandra had concluded that it was now late enough and hot enough (it was roasting) to raid the minibar and, by combining some of its contents with the tent’s shaded deck, to discover whether the product of this mixing was even better than the sum of its parts. It was. Windhoek was now six hundred kilometres away, but two glasses of Windhoek Lager were just an arm’s length away – on the deck’s table. And then another two glasses. And this proved exceedingly agreeable; a fitting conclusion to all that driving stuff, and a necessary pause in their itinerary before our two lodgers then prepared themselves for dinner.

  There was a mosquito net in the tent-like structure, so although it was highly unlikely that any mosquito could breed in the arid environment around the lodge, Brian decided to deploy his standard mosquito defences. These consisted of a long-sleeved shirt, a pair of long trousers, a pair of standard socks worn over a pair of knee-high flight socks, both doused in DEET, and a pair of tightly-laced desert boots. He wasn’t taking any chances. (Unlike Sandra, who could have gone down to dinner naked and would have remained there unbitten and unstung by any insect until the same time next year. She really was that unattractive to bugs with mouthparts and stings and could genuinely claim to be her very own mosquito repellent. Brian envied her something rotten.)

  However, as it transpired, she did put on some clothes on this particular evening, so that when Brian accompanied her down to the lodge house, the half a dozen Germans who were gathered just outside it (around the statutory but ludicrous-in-this-climate log fire) didn’t become unduly distressed. All they did was nod (in the way that only Germans can nod) and then ignore their new companions. This was
a little odd, but could have pointed to their being in that tiny minority of Germans who have no facility with the English language (and which is mirrored in Britain by that tiny minority of British people who do have a facility with German). But in any event, it meant that Brian wouldn’t be able to debate with them that possible Teutonic influence on the local roads. He and Sandra would have to amuse themselves – whilst tackling the first of their aperitifs – in splendid English isolation.

  However, this isolation was not to last. For as dinner time approached, so too did a Scotsman and his wife. And Ted (for that was his name), despite being Scottish, had been attracted by Brian and Sandra’s English voices. Or maybe that was just their English as opposed to German vocabulary. But for whatever reason, Ted and his wife, Dot, joined their English preferences for an extended chat – and another aperitif.

  The conversation kicked off in the way it always kicks off in a lodge, with questions exchanged on ‘where have you come from?’, ‘how long have you been here?’ and ‘where are you going next?’ From these questions, Brian and Sandra learnt that their new acquaintances had already spent some time in other parts of Namibia and were soon off to Zambia. But they also learnt that Ted had spent a great deal of time in other parts of the world, and parts that they themselves had visited.

  It started by accident. But when it had started it soon gathered pace, as Ted discovered that this English pair had been where he’d been in Guyana, where he’d been in Assam – and in Borneo and in Madagascar and in Costa Rica – and in a whole string of other “unusual destinations”. It was as though Brian and Sandra had been stalking him. Or was that Ted stalking them? It really was quite incredible; a man whom they had never met before who, generally with his three brothers, took himself off to foreign parts, which were the very same foreign parts that they themselves had visited. And so incredible – and so intriguing – that Ted suggested that for tomorrow’s dinner, Brian and Sandra should join him and his wife to discuss this shadow-travelling further.