Day 205 - The African way

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We spent the morning hanging around the campsite, and at 11:30 Ed decided to catch a taxi into town. The first hurdle was that the phone line in the campsite office was dead. So Ed borrowed the manager's mobile to call for a taxi, following instructions to "walk down the track until you come to a huge termite mound and climb the tree next to it" in order to get a signal. That half worked and in between crackles it sounded as if a taxi was on its way. Half an hour later Ed borrowed the same phone and climbed the same tree, only to hear that the phone had run out of minutes. More time went by until the campsite manager realised that his landline phone could call other landlines, just not mobiles. So he called a friend of his whose phone was working fine, and the friend phoned for a taxi on Ed behalf. All in all, it took over an hour and a half - not long in 'Africa time'. This little story sums up a lot of what we've come across in Africa so far: the people are keen to be helpful, on the surface things are more similar to first world countries in terms of infrastructure than is generally perceived, but in practice basic things often just don't work out as advertised. And it's also worth noting that the Africans don't really care about delays in the same way that time poor Westerners might. As if to reconfirm all this, once Ed made it into town the internet connection crashed every 5 minutes.

With the rest of our group back from their bush camp in the Okavango Delta (and having had showers thank God) we were in good shape for a big visit to the bar. Gemma cleverly began a craze for making people's bottles of beer foam up by smashing her bottle down onto someone else's. So most of us ended up covered in beer and the floor ended up covered in broken glass as many a bottle slipped through hands as another bottle hit into it from above. We called it a night at about 11:30 nicely tipsy; others stumbled back hours later and would be easily identified the following morning trying to pack their tents in the classic 'still drunk but with hangover starting' mode.

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