Far Horizon (14 page)

‘My relief driver is on holidays in Zambia, and there's no way I can go. It'll be easy, Mike. It's a short trip. Jo'burg, Kruger, cross the border into Zimbabwe at Beitbridge, Bulawayo, Vic Falls, down the Caprivi Strip into Namibia, Etosha, then finish in Cape Town. You know the way, you're a qualified guide and you can drive a truck. What are you waiting for?'

‘I'll give it a go,' Mike said.

Susie went into early labour the very next day, shortening Rian's briefing to Mike on the trip and Susie (the overland truck) to all of ten minutes. ‘You'll find everything and get sorted as you go,' he said with a wave as he sped off to the hospital. All the camping sites along the route had been booked, which was one less thing for Mike to worry about, and he had a list of names and flight times for the arriving tourists. That was it.

He was straight from the army, still with a crewcut and a soldier's high expectations of planning and preparation for any endeavour. His first load of passengers was a shock to him and he supposed they felt the same way. He hadn't mixed with young people for quite some time, and those who he did meet were usually fresh out of recruit training with haircuts like his and no body jewellery. This lot were pierced and tattooed, tie-dyed and dreadlocked. He pretty soon worked out that he was not what they were expecting. Other overland tour trucks he saw on that first trip all seemed to be driven by tanned young men with long
hair, sideburns, assorted bracelets and, at the very least, an earring. Mike had none of these.

He managed to collect them all from the airport, but that was where things stopped going to plan. The old Bedford overland truck broke down on the way to Kruger, on the first day. The clutch fluid pipe sprang a leak and they had to wait four hours in Witbank while a backyard mechanic made a new pipe. That's the good thing about African mechanics, he learned – if they don't have a part in stock they'll make one. The bad thing about tourists was, no matter how young, hip and laid-back they pretended to be, when it came to unexpected delays they tended to get mad with their tour guide.

When they finally made it into the national park, just on closing time, his passengers were surprised to learn that he had no idea where anything was and the tents, kitchen utensils and gas bottles all had to be searched for. Around the campfire, after a makeshift dinner of potatoes, tomatoes and bananas, he came clean and explained he was not the African Crocodile Dundee they had been led to believe would be guiding them through the dark continent. A couple of the Brits seethed and he later overheard them mumbling something about the amount of money they'd paid to be stuck with a learner driver, but most of the crew could see the position he was in and pitched in to help him find his way.

‘Overlanding is like that,' he said as he recounted the story to his second load of passengers. ‘It's about people working through their problems and learning to pull together as a team. In some ways what we're
doing is like any other organised tour – me, the tour guide driving a bunch of tourists around in a bus. I'm expected to know where we're going, what we're going to be doing next, how much things cost, exchange rates, international dialling codes, and everything you ever wanted to know about the country we're currently in and its people and wildlife. But, in other ways, it's much more than that. Here, everyone's expected to pitch in and help with the day-to-day running of the trip. There are meals to prepare and cook, dishes to wash, shopping to be done, and problems to solve. If someone's not pulling their weight, it's up to the group to pull them into line.'

The people on the first tour had helped pull him into line. None of them knew the tragedies he had endured, but he thought they had guessed he needed some sorting out. The sheer volume of work that had to be done getting three meals a day on the table for a big group, as well as taking them on game drives and sightseeing expeditions, left him little time to dwell on his personal situation. In the end, tourists and guide parted as friends. The passengers had worked well as a team and Mike found he had learned a lot about people twenty years younger than himself.

He found they were not like him in so many ways. They didn't drink a lot of alcohol, but they did smoke dope, something he hadn't done since he had joined the army. He liked music – they liked a strange thumping sound. They liked long hair and flared trousers – he had been very glad to turn his back on both decades ago. The men didn't shave – he had short hair and scraped his face religiously every day.

Soon they found some common ground, however, as any group of people thrust together always does, and they learned from each other. They started rolling their sleeping bags and zipping up their little canvas bell tents after he caught a mopani snake – a harmless, pencil-thin little thing – that had slithered into one of the girl's tents and nearly given her a heart attack. He learned to like Pearl Jam and discovered that a couple of tokes of Malawi Gold can ease a tension headache and give you a new perspective on world politics.

Susie broke down two more times on that first trip and he later told Rian he could find another driver if he didn't find Mike another truck. Rian was chuffed with his new baby son and did not fancy going back on the road again himself. He assigned Susie to Dave, a diesel mechanic from Sheffield in England, who was his other regular driver. Dave loved mucking around with cantankerous engines, so it was a match made in heaven. On Mike's second trip, and every one thereafter, he put his faith in Nelson Mandela, and the truck did not let him down.

In the months that followed, Nelson and Mike took scores of young Britons, Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders, Americans, Danes, Swedes, Germans and Swiss tourists to some of the most beautiful places on earth. In those days the longest trips they did were from the Cape to Uganda. Rian had taken his trucks all the way to Cairo when he first started the business, but the perennial wars in the Sudan and Ethiopia were hotting up again, and the fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo meant it was just
about impossible to reach Egypt anymore. Still, they were epic trips, taking in places like Victoria Falls, the Zambezi Valley, the Masai Mara and Serengeti in Kenya and Tanzania, Zanzibar and the Virunga Mountains, where Mike had seen the mountain gorillas on the Rwandan side many years before.

The new job was changing his life, and he hoped it was for the better. He let his hair grow long and was soon sporting a goatee beard. Except for the odd strand of long grey hair and some wrinkles, there was now not too much difference in appearance between him and the other guys driving scores of overland trucks up and down the African continent.

The army had given him an AIDS test when he left, and he had passed with a clean bill of health, despite his futile attempts to save Carlos's life. He was a single, healthy, heterosexual male, but he found it easy to stick to Rian's golden rule of tour-guiding despite the occasional offer. The groups were technically aimed at the eighteen to thirty-five age bracket, although some people a little closer to his age slipped through the net, and they were usually women. Single women. At the end of each trip they always had a party, a big night with plenty of booze and sometimes, depending on the crew, plenty of dope. It was here that most of those offers arose. Some of the women were very attractive and it was not only always the older ones who wanted more than a group T-shirt as a souvenir of their trip.

But Mike still found himself thinking of Isabella and none of the women he met on those early tours could compete with the memory of her. The daily
routine of driving and organising meals and tours, crossing borders and changing money kept him busy. At nights, in his tent or just under a mosquito net looking up at the stars, he still thought of her and the life they might have had.

M
ike didn't know if it was the typically chilly Punda Maria air or the shock of Theron's message that caused his shivering. He had retired to bed early, avoiding Sarah's questions about his conversation with Rian.

Mike knew from the moment he met her that Sarah Thatcher would be trouble. From the outset, his latest tour had started to shape up as his most difficult. For the first time he had a non-paying passenger on board – a journalist on a junket – Sarah Thatcher. He feared she would not fit in with the rest of the group. He thought she did not like him, and he knew she did not really want to be riding around southern Africa in the back of a bright yellow ex-army truck.

As usual, the day before the tour started the tourists had arrived on their various flights, mostly from London, and assembled at the Holiday Inn at Jo'burg airport. He had stopped by their rooms, introduced himself, checked each of them off his manifest, and then given them all a basic briefing over crisps
and Guinness in the hotel's imitation Irish pub that night.

‘You all know the route and the itinerary from your brochures – from Jo'burg to the Kruger National Park, then north through Zimbabwe to Hwange National Park and Victoria Falls. We'll transit through Zambia and back into the other side of Zimbabwe at Lake Kariba for a trip on a houseboat, then head back into Zambia to South Luangwa National Park. After that we'll cross into Mozambique and then follow the coast south until we cross back into South Africa from Maputo,' he explained.

‘We'll get to know each other better during the trip. That, I promise you. The only thing I've got to add to that,' he said, winding up, ‘is you've all got to remember that this is Africa and things don't always go according to plan, so stay flexible, stay happy and we'll all have a great time.'

Sarah had sat slightly apart from the group, jotting in her reporter's notebook, which made Mike feel uneasy. He didn't know how she wanted to play this game, so he'd let her introduce herself and explain what she was doing in her own time. A couple of the other passengers eyed her suspiciously as well.

The next day they boarded Nelson and set off for Kruger.

‘Ooh, look. Two rhinos. Fantastic. Aren't they gorgeous?' cooed Linda, one of the English girls.

She was a redhead, attractive and slim. Too young for Mike and not his type. No one seemed to be his
type these days, he reflected. That was the problem. Maybe it was being back in the Kruger National Park again. Maybe it was the light. Maybe it was the rhinos. Maybe it was the attractive girl. All of it made him think of Isabella.

‘That's a young one, walking behind the bigger one. That must be its mother,' said Nigel the New Zealander. Nigel was already annoying Mike, and it was only the first day of the trip. He was a know-it-all who didn't know very much.

‘They're a mating pair. Mummy and daddy,' Mike said.

‘How can you tell?' Nigel asked.

‘The smaller one's walking behind the larger one. They're white rhinos and white rhino cows always make their calves walk in front of them, where they can see them. The smaller one's a female.'

‘They look dark grey to me. Maybe they're
black
rhinos,' Nigel said, challenging the guide yet again.

Mike sighed inwardly. There was one on every trip. ‘The terms “white” or “black” don't refer to their colouring. The term “white” is a contraction of an Afrikaans word, for wide, referring to its wide mouth, which it uses for grazing. The
black
rhino has a narrow mouth, with a prehensile lip. After the name “white rhino” caught on, people just started calling the other species black, for convenience.' Mike refocused his binoculars so he didn't have to look at Nigel as he spoke. He had to give the boy room to back down with grace.

‘Got a degree in this stuff or something?' Nigel asked sarcastically.

‘Yes,' Mike said, and Kylie, a plump Aussie girl with glasses, giggled. Mike liked Kylie already.

‘Time to make camp,' Mike said, and turned Nelson's key. The truck started first go, with a belch of black diesel smoke and a noisy rattle.

They had entered the park via the Malelane gate, but they weren't going to stay at Malelane Camp, where Mike had taken Isabella, where they had made love for the first time. He didn't want to stir up any more old memories than he had to and, besides, he thought his charges were in need of a swimming pool and a shop where they could buy cold beer and carved wooden elephants. Mike thought of Isabella again, though, as he put the truck in gear and his tourists babbled away in the back.

It was nearly five o'clock when they coasted through the wooden gates of Pretoriuskop Camp, about sixty kilometres further north into the national park. The rhino sighting had delayed them. Mike pulled into the car park outside the thatch-roofed reception building.

‘OK, everyone. Toilets are over there, shop's that way. I'm going to check in and we'll drive down to the camping ground after that. Stretch your legs and don't get lost.' He sort of hoped Nigel would get lost and bump into a lion, but the electric fence around the camp meant the odds were in Nigel's favour, not his.

Mike walked down a paved path edged by manicured lawns to the reception building. The young man behind the desk gave him a big smile.

‘My friend, good to see you again,' he said, extending his hand. They shook, three times, in the African
way, first shaking their right hands in the usual European manner, then lifting them to clasp and shake with the thumbs interlocked, then once more in the European way.

‘Lloyd, how's it? Campsite for eleven, please. It's already paid for and booked under the company name.' Mike handed him the National Parks booking slip and they exchanged small talk about the weather. Once Lloyd had placed a receipt in Mike's park entry permit he went outside and rounded the crew up from around the car park for the short trip across to the camping ground.

Kylie and Linda were the last aboard, having stopped to place a green-headed pin on a large map of the Kruger park on a board outside the tourist information office next to reception. The map was for game sightings, and tourists placed coloured pins corresponding to different animals at spots on the map where they had been seen. The green pin was for the rhinos they had just been watching.

‘Pretoriuskop is the oldest camp in the park,' Mike said over his shoulder to the group as they drove through the camp. ‘It dates back to the '20s.'

They passed rows of circular tan-coloured
rondavels
, each hut topped with a pointed thatched roof. The buildings faced onto grassy lawns shaded by mature trees. The
rondavels
ranged in size from simple two-bed affairs, with communal shower and toilet blocks, to larger, fully self-contained structures with toilets and kitchens.

They drove past the small service station and another circle of
rondavels
. The first
braai
fires of the
evening were flickering brightly in the fading light and the smell of woodsmoke filled the air.

‘Look, reindeer,' Kylie said, pointing out a herd of a dozen fawn-coloured antelope grazing on the lawn between the huts, seemingly oblivious to the humans who sipped drinks and watched them from shaded verandahs.

‘Impala,' Mike said, gently correcting her. ‘There are about a hundred thousand in the park and they're the most common antelope you'll see.'

A few people waved at them as they negotiated their way along the camp's winding internal roads. ‘Most of the people who come here are white South Africans. Altogether nearly a million people, including foreigners, visit Kruger each year,' Mike said, continuing his tour guide's spiel.

The camping area was only about a third full so he had a good choice of sites. Night was falling and Mike quickly set about the business of setting up camp. The first set-up was always the slowest, as he had to give a demonstration of how to erect the two-person green canvas dome tents the tourists would sleep in.

That first night, as usual, Mike cooked the meal pretty much solo. He always prepared something simple at the start of the trip – boiled potatoes, coleslaw and a green salad he'd made the day before and stored in Nelson's portable refrigerator, and a
braai
of steaks and sausages. He found that looking after the first meal on his own always taught him about the group. It showed up the helpers – those who would eagerly volunteer to assist; the loafers – who would gladly sit back and watch others work;
and the leaders – those who organised the washing-up at the end, a chore he deliberately left undone.

At last they were sitting around the campfire on fold-out canvas and aluminium camp stools, stomachs full and tongues loosened a little by beer and wine over dinner. A million stars blazed above them and burning embers swirled up from the settling fire to join the light show. Mike felt everyone was suitably mellow for the business of formal introductions. He invited Sarah, who was seated next to him, to begin.

‘I'm Sarah Thatcher. I'm twenty-nine, I'm from Highgate in London. I'm a journalist and I don't really know what I'm doing here. In fact, I don't even know if I want to be here,' she said.

‘Why don't you want to be here, Sarah?' Mike said, breaking the cold silence that followed her opening salvo.

‘God, this is painful. You sound like a psychiatrist,' she said melodramatically.

‘Missing your regular appointment, eh?' Nigel piped in from the shadows. Someone chuckled.

Mike ignored him and said nothing, waiting for her to continue. Cicadas chirped in the bush and somewhere nearby a bullfrog croaked, but they were all waiting to hear more from Sarah. From her accent she sounded upper class, or at least from a moneyed family. He knew why she was there, but he wanted her to let everyone else know.

‘I'm a journalist. I work for a travel magazine in London,
Outdoor Adventurer
,' she made the title sound faintly distasteful as if she herself would never be caught outdoors, or adventuring. ‘Everyone else on
the magazine has been abroad with work, to Bali, to Chile, to Nepal, to India. This is the first trip I was ever offered, so, naturally, I couldn't say no . . .'

‘Naturally,' a female voice echoed mockingly from the other side of the fire, but Mike couldn't be sure who it was.

‘Carry on, Sarah,' Mike said, after the ripple of laughter died down. He could see in her lively blue eyes, which shone in the reflected glow of the fire's embers, that she was getting her hackles up and didn't like to be mocked.

‘Well, I wanted to go to Africa. No problems there, but, well, not quite in this way,' she said, not seeming to notice the open-mouthed faces around the campfire. ‘You see, when the editor said “Africa” I thought I would be staying on a private game reserve. I didn't expect to be with a crowd of backpackers in the back of an old military vehicle.'

Mike wondered how the rest of the group, who had paid to be there, would react. He kept his mouth shut.

‘So you're here for
free
?' came an incredulous English male voice.

‘And what, we're not good enough for you?' said a girl with an accent from the East End of London.

‘Would I pay to do this? No,' Sarah replied matter-of-factly. ‘But it's my job, and I should tell you I'll be writing an article about this
adventure
, and taking photographs. I may want to interview some of you for my story.'

‘Pig's arse,' said Nigel. ‘You're not putting my photo in some yuppie wanker travel magazine.'

‘OK, OK. That's enough,' Mike said, holding up his
hands. ‘Sarah was invited along by the travel company that books our tours to do a story on a typical overland trip for her magazine. It may not be everybody's cup of tea, but a trip like this is as good as you make it. You get out of it what you put into it.'

‘All I've got so far out of this trip is clichés,' Sarah said, loud enough for everyone to hear.

‘I'm sorry, Sarah,' Mike said with feeling. ‘My boss gave me photocopies of some of your old stories to read. Perhaps that's where I've picked them up from.'

She eyed him coldly.

In fact, her stories read quite well, he thought. They'd been about canyoning, parachuting and skiing at various spots in the United Kingdom, and each ‘adventure' had probably ended with dinner and drinks at a luxurious country hotel. Still, she obviously wasn't as prissy as she first appeared, and her outdoor adventuring had not done her figure any harm.

In fact, although she was acting like a bitch, he thought she was very attractive. She had bobbed blonde hair, natural as far as he could tell, those icy-blue eyes, and a longish but aquiline nose, which didn't make her look any less arrogant than she was trying to be. Her skin was fair and unblemished. Her clothes were safari-chic, straight from the expensive camping stores around Covent Garden, Mike guessed. She wore a grey sleeveless button-up shirt which showed off her lithe arms, and khaki trousers with too many pockets and detachable legs. Her Hi-Tech hiking boots, like the rest of her outfit, looked like they'd never been worn before. She continued to
glower at him across the campfire. He wondered if he would still have a job once Rian received the December edition of
Outdoor Adventurer
.

Mike had an old soldier's distrust of the media and he doubted Rian's wisdom in inviting a reporter on one of their overland trips. They were not at the top end of the market by any means, and even on the best planned and managed trips they still had problems from time to time.

‘Let's move along,' he said.

Most of Rian's bookings came via a UK-based chain of travel agencies, but that didn't mean that only English people travelled on the trucks. The agencies advertised in the many free magazines published in London catering for Australian, New Zealand and South African backpackers living in the United Kingdom, as well as glossy magazines aimed at young men and women. The company also advertised itself in
Outdoor Adventurer
, another reason why Sarah was with them.