Delays and Mishaps...

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I'm not quite sure where to start this blog, so I'll start in Botswana where I made the choice to go back to Victoria Falls 'the other way'...
I'd visited the Zimbabwean side of the falls and wanted to go to the Zambian side on my way to Malawi, back east. From where I was in Maun, central/western Botswana, it's about 900kms and a days bus travel east and north. Easy. The other way, is via the Caprivi strip in Namibia, (west, north and east again) and although the distance is fairly similar, the lack of public transport means that travel times aren't guaranteed and hitch hiking is pretty much the only option.

There were a number of times where I just missed something by a few minutes, or a few hours, that would've changed the trip in a big way. The evening before I left Maun, I was chatting to a guy in the kitchen of the campsite who said he was a pilot and had flown an empty plane up to the town I was aiming for first, near the Namibian border. Too late though, so next morning I went to the bus stop to catch the 9:30am bus. It finally left at 11:00 and about halfway into the trip the driver swerved to miss a cow or a slow car and when a passenger told him to slow down and drive sensibly he stopped the bus and they had a bit of an exchange of words while everyone sat and waited. We finally arrived in Shakawe, about 15kms from the Namibian border about 20 minutes before the border closed. Everyone said there was no way I could make it, so I set up my tent at a guest house down a dusty road somewhere.
In the morning, I walked back to town, waited for the share taxi to fill up, then we rolled slowly down the road untill the turnoff to the border to Namibia, 4km's away. I walked the 4km's and got across without any worries but then had to hitch a lift with the next 4wd leaving and paid him double to drop me at the camp site, another 4km's off the main road.

Finally in Namibia, the camp site was awesome, with hippos and crocs in the river, lots of trees, and no one but honeymoon couples, aged tour groups and families there. Great. I ate dinner at the bar by myself and made up my mind to leave in the morning. Reception said they would drop me at the main road, but come 7am the next morning they weren't so sure if they had enough fuel. Because an 8km round trip is so bloody excessive... So, I walked along the sandy track and sat on the side of the road for an hour and a half untill someone picked me up. Another guy in the back of the pick up was heading north east for the same town I was, and so walked with me to the next 'bus stop'. It was a police check point where cops checked the rego of cars going past. At least there was shade. We sat there for 2 and a half hours and when the bus did actually drive past, it was already full. Then the police decided to flex a bit and came over and said tha everyone sitting here was open to a full inspection. The cop in charge came to me and demanded my passport and then spent 10 minutes looking at every single stamp. I had a dry mouth and was waiting for him to say I needed to pay a 'tourist tax', but in the end he smiled and wished me a happy stay in Namibia.
After a bit over 4 hours of waiting, I got a lift in a truck to the town on the border with Zambia. The driver thought we might make it in time, but the 300km's took too long in the end, and we got into town half an hour after the border had closed. It wasn't too bad though cos he was parking the truck at the same place where I could camp. It had taken me almost 12 hours to travel about 300 kilometres...

I was woken up in the middle of the night from things crawling on me. At first I ignored it but it was persistent so I turned on my torch to see that a colony of ants were invading my tent, apparently my sleeping bag was the place to be. I put my mat outside, which was crawling with the little bastards and went back to sleep for another couple of hours untill it was light, then shook them off and packed up. I was up to day 4 by now, and was ready to get to Livingstone, in Zambia, and to the Zambezi river to do some more rafting. When I finished packing I walked out of the camp site and saw the arse of the truck driving down the road towards the border. I managed to get a lift by walking along the road and left Namibia a couple days after I'd arrived.
The border checkpoint in Zambia was a concrete building with a long queue of Africans on the side of the road. No boom gate, no one to ensure you stop and get a visa, not even a sign. I did stop and pay US$50 for a visa, (without waiting in the line) as most foreigners do, and while I was doing that, the bus for Livingstone, 200km's away, left. Without me. Once again, I'd missed something by a matter of minutes, and it was only 9am. I went to speak to the truck drivers, some who'd been waiting for a couple days for their permits to continue, and sat under a tree to read a book. And wait. eventually, I crossed the bridge to the other half of town and found an empty but that would leave when it was full, or at 12:30, whatever came first. I waited around near the bus and 12:30 came and went. A guy in a car said for an extra couple dollars more than the bus, he'd take me. We left around 1:30pm.
I sat in the middle of the back seat, between a plump but chatty girl on my left, and a skinny quiet guy on my right. The person to my right changed a couple times, but was usually a quiet skinny guy. We stopped in a village and had a fried fish for lunch for about a dollar, and I kept reading my book.
At about 3:30pm the driver said something about a cold drink and started to slow down and pull over to the right.

Next thing I knew, I was waking up from a vague dream about something I couldn't quite remember and we'd stopped. The girl was still on my left but the guy was gone. I asked her why we were stopped and in the same instant started feeling an intense pain in and around my left ear. All I remember her saying was, "We've been in an accident."

Not really what I had hoped to hear while travelling around Africa, or anywhere for that matter, but especially Africa. I realised we were in a different car and as I looked around and started to figure out that it was real, I could feel blood filling my ear behind my eardrum. It wasn't leaking out, but I knew this wasn't good and that we needed to go to a hospital. Everything was so surreal, and time seemed to speed up to normal speed. Finally the guy from my right got in and the driver took us 10 minutes down a dusty road, to an even dustier village, with a dusty corrugated iron shed. I remember the nurse and the confused village people standing around staring at us, me holding my ear and swearing in english, and not quite sure what to do. She took my blood pressure, my temperature, gave me a couple ibuprofen pills and shrugged her shoulders. There wasn't any more she could do. After piling back into the car and collecting our luggage from the crash site, I noticed quite a crowd had gathered including police, who wanted me to write down my injuries. I scribbled something and tried to explain that I actually needed a hospital sooner rather than later...
The 60km's to Livingstone went fairly quickly, and the people at the hospital were more worried about me filling in the appropriate paper work than my injuries. The pain was quite intense and I couldn't move my head without flinching. My left ear was very quiet and sounded like it was full of water.
Realising that my concussion was not going to help, I gave the clerk $2 to let me use his phone and called a hostel in town. The owner came straight to the hospital, called the paramedics and made the rational decisions on my behalf. The plump girl from my left wasn't so chatty any more but she was sent home. I'm not sure if the other guy even got checked.

I was transferred by ambulance to a private hospital, where the doctor had some sense, but really lacked the facilities to do too much besides keep me under observation untill morning.
At 3:00am, the insurance company called from Australia and said they would be paying for me to get air lifted to South Africa in the morning. At 9am, more paramedics, more ambulances, and a 1 hour and forty minute flight south, strapped to an inflatable 'body splint', with suspected neck fractures. Hurrah.

I was cleared of a broken neck after the CT scan, but there was a fractured mastoid, just behind the ear. It was decided to put me into Trauma high care, because there was a possibility of a slow bleed into the brain.

So, all in all, there's not actually too much broken, and it could've been much worse. I spent 5 nights in hospital for observation more than anything else, and luckily, nothing more eventuated. The ear doctor did confirm that my middle ear was full of blood, and putting a lot of pressure onto the eardrum, so he put a small cut in it and vacuumed the blood out. Not very comfortable, but it meant I could hear something again and it released some pressure. I'll have to get it done a third time, and it'll still take a couple weeks before things are back to normal.

But when I said I wanted to write an interesting blog about the dumb shit that happened to me, I didn't really mean to this extent. But hey, shit happens. Just have to wait and see what happens next ay...

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Comments

[Alyce Merrilees]

Thank god you are alright
Babyyyyyy we have all been so worried about you over here! I cant beleive you wrote on your blog already you must be ok! I'm so glad you are ok sounds like a serious adventure! Take care of yourself and get well soon! Love you! I dont even know where this comment is going to go I'm hoping somewhere you can view it lol I've never done this before

[Wendy Dyete]

Woooow
Instead of reading a book you should be writing a book. Can't wait for the next chapter. Dont have to tell you to be carefull I think you found that out yourself.