Stories and photographs by Charlie Batho

The lush-green and bush-friendly New Zealand with its pastures, rain forests, glaciers and ice fields were left behind. Enter soaring heat, corruption, civil wars and The Big Five. This was southern Africa in the height of summer 2000 from Cape Town to Victoria Falls.

You either love Africa or you hate it. Please don't misunderstand me. I love Africa. I'd go back any time. What I try to explain here is the culture of southern Africa - a hard task when Sarah and I were there for only two months, but an attempt based on what we saw, read, heard, touched and smelt. Much of the text may appear negative - it isn't meant to be. It is just Africa. And that is the love of the experience.

Take the telephone or the internet connection in New Zealand. Rarely indeed do you need to re-dial a miss-connected number. Calling Zimbabwe from South Africa one afternoon took four attempts and a call to the operator asking them to check a faulty line. "There is nothing the matter with the line", the operator replied, "You've only tried four times - be patient". And trying to check your e-mail while travelling through Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe sometimes took 20 minutes to download one message. Patience - this is Africa!

Cape Town is an interesting place and undoubtedly one of the great cities of the world lined with golden beaches, capped by Table Mountain and ringed by local vineyards. But at 6.30pm after the office workers leave their desks - much of the city centre is deserted for fear of being mugged. Why? Because street kids sleep during the day and start to come out during the evening. One child no more than 10 years old was sniffing glue in the main shopping mall at 4.30pm only a few metres from us. Clearly stoned, he ran very close past us. This was a worry, despite his young age, as we'd already been told of the street kids needing to 'fund' their habits.

Another peculiar trait I noticed in Cape Town was the number of racist dogs! The hostel we were staying at for a few days had a resident dog. Nearly all the guests were white but nearly all the cleaners and gardeners were blacks. After careful observation over a few days, I discovered that the dog only barked at blacks. This also extended to blacks walking on the pavement past the gates of the hostel. And it wasn't just that dog that my theory worked on.
Corruption must have been founded in Africa along with the human race. There was a true story in January 2000 of Robert Mugabe winning the lottery which was run by the Zimbabwean Bank which was state owned! And in Victoria Falls be very careful how you exchange foreign currency as it is illegal to do it on the streets despite their impossibly good exchange rates. The catch is that they will plant a few dud notes in your change. All the official foreign exchange kiosks employ armed guards who stand next to you as you take out your passport to exchange a small amount of money which is a month's wages in those parts.

But if corruption was founded in Africa then technically so should football - everyone plays it. All countries take great pride in their teams. So much so that there were some casualties during the African Cup of Nations football competition. This is a quote from the Cape Town newspaper;

"General Robert Guie, military leader of the Cote d'Ivorie detained the country's national football squad upon their return to Abidjan following their failure to qualify for the final of the African Cup of Nations. The General lectured the players on national pride and discipline forcing them to undergo military drills in front of TV cameras. The Zambian team decided they were not going to risk a similar fate and instead of returning to Lusaka the team opted to stay in Johannesburg, unexpectedly prolonging their return. Meanwhile Nigerian fans attacked their team with plastic bottles after an unconvincing 0-0 draw against underdogs Congo."

Heat in Africa in February is something else. After leaving breezy Cape Town, where the Atlantic couples the Indian Ocean at the Cape of Good Hope, the first day of our tour drove 750km north across the Namibian Border. Every afternoon the wind picked up over the desert. I can only describe the experience of crossing the border into Namibia (a country which for just reason has the sun pictured in its national flag) on a windy afternoon as tantamount to someone pointing a hairdryer directly in your face. That same day we went for a plunge in the Orange River and by the time I had walked out to get my towel, two minutes away, I was totally dry! It is in fact so hot in summer that Namibia's most famous tramp, Fish River Canyon, is closed off after someone died of heat exhaustion earlier in the season as temperatures reach in excess of 50 degrees C. The hot springs at Ais Ais were also closed as they were literally boiling out of the ground.

By this time we were well into Namibia heading North. Our tour was to enter Etosha National Park, one of the most famous wildlife reserves in Africa, and continue along the Angolan border (Caprivi Strip) before entering Botswana. It felt like Donald Woods fleeing the apartheid ridden South Africa at the time Steve Biko was murdered! International news had reported 28 people massacred at the weekend on the Namibian-Angolan border by Unita rebels. As a deterrent, Namibia had allowed Angolan troops over the border to pursue the Unita rebel resistance. This was directly in our path! The President of Namibia was quoted as saying "Every Namibian citizen must be ready to be called on to go to Kavango and Caprivi to defend our citizens there." By now, the American and British Embassies were strongly urging its citizens to avoid the entire Northern border of Namibia. We only later found out that three French tourists (children) had been murdered by rebels in northern Namibia on 3 January (one month before our trip). The parents had been spared in order to pass on the news for publicity reasons. That was enough for our tour guide, who had been through the Caprivi Strip ten times already, most recently in December. We re-routed via southern Botswana and the Okavango Delta.

During our trip on African Routes 18 seater truck we stopped twice to assist some fellow travellers. One group were two German tourists who had hired a four-wheel drive and decided to go off road to test out the traction control. No sooner had they gone 10 metres off the road than they hit quick sand and couldn't get out. By the time we turned up they had sunk down to the axel and had already waited two hours since no traffic had past (on the 'motorway' of which 90% were dirt roads). When we finally pulled and dug them out we had gone through one tow rope and much rolling around in mud.

The second form of assistance we gave people was when we were on the way to Luderitz, again in the middle of a desert, when our truck came across a broken down public bus packed with local passengers. The passengers had already waited two hours by the time we turned up and with it being nearly mid day, they had been out in oppressive heat. It is not the fact that they were so friendly to strangers that struck me. Neither the fact that we gave one young lady called Liberty a lift in our truck so she wouldn't be late for work - named by her Father after the liberation of Namibia from South Africa. What struck me smack in the face was, when we offered them gallons of water from our emergency reserves to quench their thirst, they filled each of their 40 or so water bottles so carefully from the four gallon drums that they hardly at all wasted a single drop of the precious resource. A resource that is so ubiquitous and pure in New Zealand - sometimes underestimated. Each time any of the water was spilt there were mutterings of disapproval amongst the watching crowd.

Another striking contrast between New Zealand and Namibia was experienced in a remote country shop. So remote was the shop in Namibia that even in the height of the tourist season only ten cars and one truck passed that way each day. When asked how long ago it had rained in these parts the owner replied that he thought it was about a year ago. But in the middle of this basic shop in the middle of no-where (his postal box was 80 miles away) were a collection of postcards one of which was the lush Tennyson Inlet! I tried to explain how much rain fell in Milford each year, first in metres (which he didn't understand), then in terms of 8,000 millimetres - and he categorically refused to believe me.

As I mentioned in the beginning, this is not meant to be a slanderous report on Africa. I should mention the exhilaration of standing on top of Table Mountain looking 160km along the sweeping coast line, Cape Point and its baboons, ship wrecks and surf, the opportunity of watching hump back whales close in to the shore, the sound and rhythm of African singing, wild desert elephants that we got within 15 metres of on foot, the survival of the 1,000 year old welwitschia plant, a seal colony with 300,000 inhabitants, more elephants, giraffe, rhino, gemsbok, kayaking close to hippo, lions on a recent kill with four cubs, cheetah, the Etosha Pan and of course Victoria Falls in full flood. The highlight though was surely climbing a sand dune in the middle of no-where for sun rise and listening ever so carefully … for nothing. No running water, no birds, animals, urbanisation. Pure silence. When was the last time that you heard absolutely nothing?

But for me it was a chance to be in the land of one of the greatest leaders of the 20th Century, despite being in jail for more than quarter of a century. A man who bet Jim Bolger a case of local wine that South Africa would win the 1995 Rugby World Cup, but three years later referred to him as the Australian Prime Minister! I leave you with a quote from his book which is pertinent to every tramper in every country.

"I have walked that long road to freedom. I have tried not to falter: I have made missteps along the way. But I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. I have taken a moment to rest. To steel a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance that I have come. But I can rest only for a moment, for with freedom comes responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not ended." Nelson Mandela Long Walk To Freedom, concluding paragraph.

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