A friend said to me recently that I should probably write down some of my Barefoot Bushman adventures of old, after all it is through these stories of the past that I adopted this name. My feeling to date had been to write about more current events and recent adventures, but then I realised that if I didn't write down where I had come from, these memories and tales may be lost and may as well never have happened. Besides, you need to know where you have been to understand where you are heading. Given that I am on the doorstep of major change as I pack up my life in Sydney and move on, I figured now would be an appropriate time to start.
So, where did the Barefoot Bushman all begin. Well I guess it started when I touched down at Jo'burg International airport in November 2004 having just spent three years living and working in Edinburgh, Scotland. I held the post of National Media Officer for a company called the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (www.rspb.org.uk/scotland) managing to combine my pasison for the outdoors with my journalism experience, it was my first taste of PR. My plan had always been, however, to head back to the Dark Continent where I was born and satisfy a dream that I had held on to since my school days. A dream of working at a game park as a guide.
Touching down in South Africa I was filled with an incredible sense of fulfillment. It was the beginning of a life long dream realised and the end of wondering 'what if'. It was like a door that had been locked until now had suddenly been barged open and what lay beyond was adventure of untold scale. I knew that from here on there would be limitless opportunity, danger and excitment, and that was just the airport!
I had very little in the way of a plan, just an invitation to work at a lodge called Leroo La Tau in Botswana. A lodge on the banks of the Boteti River, not that water flows there very often any more. It's a lodge my eldest brother helped to build, and a place where my mothers ashes are now scattered. Through this connection, I had been invited to come and work at the lodge, an opportunity too good to pass up. But it would be some weeks before I made it to Leroo La Tau.
I had just left a Scottish winter and arrived to an African summer. The sun finding parts of my now pasty white face to warm that hadn't felt such a glow in years. Having just stepped away from a full time job, I didn't feel like walking straight back into one, no matter how different it was to being behind a desk. Before heading north across the South Africa / Botswana border, I needed to scratch a few tourist itches, to 'ooh' and 'ahh' at Mama Africa's landscapes and creatures. I needed to explore and get lost before I could then set out to find myself again.
A few days in Johannesburg was enough to come to terms with the fact that my life had begun. A few days of gin and tonic on the balcony in the afternoon to watch the four o'clock storm roll in. A few days in a gated community, it was time to 'go bush'. The family friends I was staying with have time share at a lodge in the Pilanesburg National Park, a crater on the border of Botswana that boasts the Big Five (lion, leopard, buffalo, rhino and elephant). A quick phone call to a car rental company, and for little more than the price of a nice three course meal in the UK, I had a car for four days to explore this land that time forgot.
TO BE CONTINUED...
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