Step Two: Watch as every local around your friends freaks
them out about things like flooding rivers, car problems, tsetse flies, and
wild animals. Find out the forecast for
the weekend is torrential downpours and give your friends an out.
Step Three: Become surprised when your friends don’t take
it. But do listen to them joke constantly
about cancelling or going home early.
Step Four: Remember two days before that everyone will need
malaria pills. Scramble to go to the
first available dr you can find for a prescription. Watch as she looks everything up in a medical
book on her desk. Try not to laugh out
loud when chit chatting with the dr turns into finding out that she was
actually a vet for twelve years before doing a two year “round” in a hospital
to become a doctor. Scramble to get to
the pharmacy and start all eight travelers on malaria pills immediately.
Step Five: Change your departure time at least three times,
dependent upon how timid or confident each family is feeling at the moment.
Step Six: Spend a day cooking and packing, getting extra
petrol, ice, coolers, and tow-ropes.
Step Seven: Drive 4
hours to the edge of Mana Pools, situated at the bottom of a mountain.
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| Here Jonas weathers the long car ride with a handful of dried meat known in Africa as biltong. |
Step Eight: Have the
woman at the gate tell you that you need a permit to have two vehicles in the
park. You must drive back up the mountain for said permit. (The permit is free,
but it would of course be too easy to just keep a pile of them on hand at the
gate.)
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| Sorry, Jonas. No riding on top of the car today. |
Step Nine: Drive
another hour and a half into the park. Pretend you are on The Dukes of
Hazard. Though the crossing rivers are
not bad, there are killer puddles and pools of deep water and mud in the middle
of the roads. Make sure to get stuck and
thank heaven for the tow rope. Stop at
least ten times to kick the cracking rims of your tires back on.
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| We are originally from rural Iowa, but somehow this is the first time we've ever had to do mud running. |
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| Here friend Dan wades in what smells like fermented juice and elephant urine to tow our car. |
Step Ten: Come upon a hippo kill on the only bridge into
camp. See hyenas and marabou stork and vultures,
taking their turn after the lions have left.
Drive through the party after taking pictures, as you must get to the
other side of the river. Sorry, hyenas.
Step Eleven: Arrive at the national parks lodge to check in. Come upon a human party, where beer is forced upon you after you provide the hosts with salt for their meat.
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| At the parks lodge we are greeted with elephant bones and jars of elephant fetuses. Ryan -of course- tries to buy some. |
Step Twelve: Arrive at your lodge. You think it is awesome, until you read the last entry in the guest book: SEVERE BED BUGS…
