I’ve never really seen the appeal of a safari. Quite apart from the threat of
being eaten, or finding yourself in the Land Rover with a family from
America, you have to sleep in a tent.
Now camping is fine if you are nine years old, or if you are stuck on a
mountain and your fingers are falling off, but I view it in the same way
that I view barbecues. What’s the point? Why eat food covered in ash when
you have a cooker? Why sleep on the floor and defecate in a hole if you have
a house, with running water and a bed? Because you want to get close to
nature? Fine. Go and stand by a window.
I put all these arguments, and many more, to a man called Ralph, who looks a
bit like Jim Morrison and who runs a safari company in Botswana called
Uncharted Africa.
He made out that camping with him in the Okavango Delta was as far removed
from boy scouting as an F-16 fighter plane is from Monsieur Montgolfier’s
hot-air balloon. His tents have polished wooden floors, and flushing loos,
and beds, and lots of Edwardian trinketry designed to make you feel like
Clive of India on a gin-soaked empire-building stopover. Oh, and there
wouldn’t be any Americans in the Land Rover, because the whole deal is
exclusive. You’re on your own. Apart from the nine-strong support team,
which includes two guides and a top chef who bakes his own bread in a
suitcase every morning.
So I agreed to go. This made my wife very angry, because she takes care of all
the money in our household and reckoned it would cost more than all the
holidays we’d ever taken put together. It was the children who settled it.
They wanted to see the animals.
Now, the thing about animals is that they’re on television all the time. And
we’re always asked to bask in the turbulence of their magnificence. Or their
cuteness. Or their ferocity.
The commentators, with the exception of David Attenborough, always give them
character from a human standpoint. We can’t navigate by magnetic ley lines,
and because pigeons can, we’re supposed to think that pigeons are somehow
cleverer than us. When plainly they’re not. Or they wouldn’t fly into
windows quite so much.
Dolphins, we’re told, have a huge intelligence. Wrong. Because if a dolphin
really is “intelligent”, what does that make a Saturday shop girl? Animals
can do no wrong. Nobody ever criticises them. Nobody ever tells you that an
elephant will destroy its own habitat, or that when it dies, the smell is
bad enough to melt your face. We found one, half-eaten, and after just five
minutes poking around, trying to find something interesting about it, my
nose looked like Danniella Westbrook’s.
As you can probably tell, I don’t go for all the guff about the magnificence
of the animal kingdom. To me, beasts of the field have always fallen into
one of three categories: cute, delicious or useless. But now, having been on
a safari, I’ve discovered there are other categories as well: smelly,
vindictive and, most surprising of all, unbelievably funny.
I’ve never really thought about the noise a hippopotamus might make. I suppose
if I’d had to come up with an answer or be shot, I’d have imagined it’d be a
fierce roar, something befitting the mammal that kills more humans than any
other.
But it isn’t. It is, in fact, the stupidest sound on earth. It starts as
though it is attempting to hawk two thousand gallons of phlegm from deep
inside its lungs and then finishes with something that sounds like the
Marlboro man chortling. Even though it went on constantly through the night,
waking me up each time, I never failed to burst out laughing.
But the time I laughed at a hippo the most was when we ran one over in our
speedboat. There was a huge crash and a jolt, and I looked back to see this
three-ton barrage balloon with disarranged ears, surfacing with a look on
its face that was properly cross. “Look what you’ve done to my ears,” it
might have said, if it had been Johnny Morris. But instead we got the mucus
thing and the Brian Blessed harrumphing. And I nearly wet myself.
I honestly thought we wouldn’t find anything funnier out there than a hippo,
but I was reckoning without the marabou stork. God’s April-fool joke on the
RSPB.
First of all he gave it a huge inflatable space hopper at the back of its
neck, which is as orange as the seats in a Lamborghini Gallardo. Then,
around its neck, he casually slung what looks like an old man’s scrotum. And
even then he wasn’t finished. Because he gave it bald legs with skin that
burns in bright sunshine. So the poor thing has to spend half its day peeing
on its own legs to stay cool.
Then you’ve got the honey badger. This is a small and very violent animal that
can’t win a fight with anything. So it’s learnt over the years only to go
for its assailant’s testicles. “Isn’t that brilliant?” said our guide. “No,”
replied my seven-year-old daughter. “Not if it’s attacked by a girl.”
You want nastiness? Okay, go and find a colony of meerkats. Aren’t they sweet.
So cute. Look at their adorable little eyes. Yes, and now marvel as one of
the women in the tribe eats the newborn baby of her best friend.
Horrid? Well, wait till you hear what Mr Zebra does with his ridiculously long
penis.
Apparently, lady zebras are always pregnant to the single male in a herd, so
if he is eaten, or has his testicles torn off by a honey badger, and a new
man comes along, then the first crop of babies will be from the sperm bank
of his predecessor. His first job, then, is to go round the herd using his
huge tool to abort the foetuses before implanting his own seed.
See? You don’t get that kind of info on Animal Planet. They’re always too busy
talking about bloody lions — which, having spent an hour looking at a pride
doing absolutely nothing, I’ve decided are the single most boring creatures
you’ll find anywhere outside a bus shelter in Leicester. They don’t do
anything. Ever.
This brings me on to the impala, which is a sort of deery thing. Our guide
spotted one heading toward the lions. “Oh no,” he said in a hushed whisper.
“He’s going to be eaten.”
Good, I thought. That’s exactly what I’d do to a deer if it walked right past
my kitchen window. Shoot it and put it in the fridge. But no. The useless
lions just sat there and let it stroll right on by. I’ve seen faster moving
telephone boxes. I’ve seen more action in a French film.
What about the other big cats? Well, one morning, I was roused from my comfy
and warm bed, at a freezing cold 3am, to go and look at some wild dogs,
which are dogs that are wild, and there, right outside my tent, as I stood
cleaning my teeth, was the unmistakable shape of... drum roll... a leopard.
Continued on page 3
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So, let’s analyse the contestants. In the jungle corner we have a big cat,
more than 100lb of streamlined muscle, one of the fastest animals on God’s
earth and one of the most efficient killers. And in the tent corner, we have
a fat 46-year-old, with arthritic hips, in his boxer shorts.
The leopard must have known it held all the cards. It could see, plainly that
I had a beer gut and arms like pipe cleaners. But it scarpered. How pathetic
is that?
Each day, we would get back to the camp, having seen lost aardvarks walking in
circles,and monkeys having casual sex, and my eyes would be red-raw from
laughing. This was turning out to be not only the most expensive holiday
we’d ever had, and the best, but also the funniest.
The day I saw my first buffalo, I honestly thought I would need oxygen. Its
horns. They look exactly like Norma Major’s hair.
I really wasn’t expecting this. I wasn’t expecting to be sitting in the middle
of the Okavango Delta, dipping freshly baked bread into my beetroot soup,
while howling with laughter at a hyena that was walking through the camp
with a face that looked like he’d spent the day head-butting a
saucepan, and fur that appeared to have been half burnt off with a
blowtorch.
You hear a lot about hyenas on nature programmes; that their poo is white from
all the calcium in the bones they eat, that they have the strongest jaws of
any animal, that their favourite food is 11-year-old boys and that they have
front-wheel drive. But so far as I know, no television naturalist has ever
pointed at this biblically ugly dog-cat and said: “Have you ever, honestly,
seen anything as ridiculous as that?”
So, you may be wondering, did I encounter anything on this feverishly
expensive holiday that genuinely amazed me? Yes, of course. The night sky
out there, in the dry season, is spectacular beyond the ken of man; the
termite was impressively industrious; and I thought the lilac-breasted
roller to be extremely pretty.
But towering above these things were the Yamaha quad bikes we used to cross
the Makgadikgadi salt pans, and the food, and the way our tents had been
decorated, by Jim Morrison’s girlfriend. In other words, the most impressive
things I discovered out there had all come from the brightest and best of
all the creatures: man.
Travel brief: Okavango Tours & Safaris (020 8343 3283, www.okavango.com)
has three nights at Jack’s Camp (where Jeremy Clarkson stayed) and three at
Pom Pom C from £3,543pp, which includes flights from Heathrow to
Johannesburg with British Airways, then to Maun with Air Botswana,
full-board accommodation, transfers and safari activities.
Alternatively, try Cazenove & Lloyd (020 7384 2332, www.cazloyd.com),
Expert Africa (020 8232 9777, www.expertafrica.com)
or Aardvark Safaris (01980 849160, www.aardvarksafaris.com), or contact the
Botswana-based company Uncharted Africa (www.unchartedafrica.com).
