South Africa……It’s bucket list stuff. 6 star safari lodge, breathtakingly swanky outdoor en suite showers which give the local wildlife an eyeful every morning, game drives at dawn and sunset with the accompanying heart-starter coffees or sun-downer cocktails. Wild tribal parties in the Boma and memory card after memory card filled with once in a lifetime photos taken during the search for the ‘Big Five’. (Incidentally no one can ever remember the fifth…everyone gets the elephant, the rhino the leopard and the lion but what of the poor Cape buffalo – they’re always forgotten)
And there’s obviously something about finding yourself in the wilds of Africa (albeit pretty luxurious ‘wilds’) which brings out the Tarzan in every man.
This was apparent at 3.30am one morning when I was woken from a deep sleep by the unmistakable sound stylings of the wild man himself shattering the pre dawn silence and echoing across the plains. Come on…you know it well…..AaaaaaehahegahaAAAAAehehaehhahaha
Johnny Weissmuller sadly passed away in 1984 so after careful consideration I decided it could only be one of my group. Correction, ‘some’ of my group. There was definitely more than one culprit and the sounds were emanating from several different directions and showed no sign of abating.
Mindful of the fact that in the films, whenever Tarzan did his warble thingy, a vast variety of wildlife tended to come running tout suite, I decided to investigate – just in case I had to divert a herd of charging elephants away from the breakfast area. There’s nothing that disrupts a group more than having to wait to be seated first thing in the morning.
I jumped out of bed. I armed myself with a pair of flip flops (it is a completely unknown fact that they are 100% effective against charging elephants – but I’m a professional, it’s my business to know these things) and set for battle I stumbled out onto the veranda of my ‘hut’.
I squinted out into the darkness in all directions. Obviously, what with me not actually being a meerkat I failed to sense any useful information at all and turned around to walk back into my hut – nose first straight into the patio door which I was too half asleep to remember closing.
It really hurt.
Really
After a few minutes of pathetic moaning and rocking back and forth whilst clutching at my face I noticed that the Tarzan cry had abruptly stopped so even though I spent the rest of the night prodding tentatively at the white hot ball of heat which had previously been my nose, at least I could do it in relative silence.
Over breakfast the next morning (the area thankfully unscathed by elephant charge I might add) I refused to answer why the middle of my face looked like a baboon’s bottom until I’d gotten the gory details of the Tarzan story.
It turns out that experience of the outdoor showers had inspired all the chaps to have a Tarzan Cry competition and it had been scheduled for 5.30am that very morning.
However, a few select members of our group (they swore that they’d been guarding the camp perimeter against the local wildlife but I happen to know the closest they’d gotten to animals that night was the zebra skin rug on the floor of the bar in the main lodge) had been en route to their huts at 3.30am and ‘accidentally’ let off a shout.
That set off a chain reaction throughout the huts as the male population, thinking that they’d overslept, stumbled out of bed and into their outdoor en suites to do their vocal bit until their wives and girlfriends had restored order and sent them back to bed.
The moral of this story is threefold. Firstly, leave the wake up calls to your iPhone, secondly flip flops might in theory protect you against an elephant stampede but they’re definitely useless against a patio glass door and finally nobody remembers you when you come in fifth. Bet you’ve forgotten already…….
There's a Group in my Suitcase! 