Whatever You Do, Don't Run: True Tales Of A Botswana Safari Guide - Softcover

Allison, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0762745657 ISBN 13: 9780762745654

Verlag: Lyons Press, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

A hilarious, highly original collection of essays based on the Botswana truism: “only food runs!”

In the tradition of Bill Bryson, a new writer brings us the lively adventures and biting wit of an African safari guide. Peter Allison gives us the guide’s-eye view of living in the bush, confronting the world’s fiercest terrain of wild animals and, most challenging of all, managing herds of gaping tourists. Passionate for the animals of the Kalahari, Allison works as a top safari guide in the wildlife-rich Okavango Delta. As he serves the whims of his wealthy clients, he often has to stop the impulse to run as far away from them as he can, as these tourists are sometimes more dangerous than a pride of lions.
No one could make up these outrageous-but-true tales: the young woman who rejected the recommended safari-friendly khaki to wear a more “fashionable” hot pink ensemble; the lost tourist who happened to be drunk, half-naked, and a member of the British royal family; establishing a real friendship with the continent’s most vicious animal; the Japanese tourist who requested a repeat performance of Allison’s being charged by a lion so he could videotape it; and spending a crazy night in the wild after blowing a tire on a tour bus, revealing that Allison has as much good-natured scorn for himself.
The author’s humor is exceeded only by his love and respect for the animals, and his goal is to limit any negative exposure to humans by planning trips that are minimally invasive—unfortunately it doesn’t always work out that way!

Peter Allison is originally from Sydney, Australia. His safaris have been featured in National Geographic, Conde Nast Traveler, and on television programs such as Jack Hanna’s Animal Adventures. He travels frequently to speaking appearances, and splits most of his time between Botswana, Sydney, and San Francisco.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter Allison is a safari guide who has spent much of the last twelve years leading wildlife-viewing and ecotourism trips in Africa, mostly Botswana. Born and raised in Sydney, Australia, he has a self-deprecating sense of humor that makes him an ideal narrator for a book about the challenges and elusive joys of dealing with tourists in the African bush.

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Welcome to the African bush, where the animals are fierce, the tourists can be wild, and only the food runs!

 

Whatever You Do, Don’t Run is a hilarious collection of true tales from top ­safari guide Peter Allison. In a place where the wrong behavior could get you eaten, Allison has survived face-to-face encounters with big cats, angry ­elephants, and the world’s most unpredictable animals—herds of untamed tourists and foolhardy guides whose outrageous antics sometimes make them even more dangerous than a pride of hungry lions!

Join Allison as he faces down charging lions—twice; searches for a drunk, half-naked tourist who happens to be a member of the British royal family; drives a Land Rover full of tourists into a lagoon full of hippos; and adopts the most ­vicious animal in Africa as his “pet.” Full of lively humor and a genuine love and respect for Botswana and its rich wildlife, Whatever You Do, Don’t Run takes you to where the wild things are and introduces you to a place where every day is a new adventure!

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Whatever You Do, Don't Run

True Tales of a Botswana Safari GuideBy Peter Allison

THE LYONS PRESS

Copyright © 2007 Peter Allison
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7627-4565-4

Contents

Acknowledgments..................................xIntroduction.....................................xiWhatever You Do, Don't Run.......................1The Lesson.......................................7How I Got My Name................................11The Great Mouse Plague...........................17Deliverance......................................29Buffalo School...................................33Learning to Walk Again...........................37Princesses and Jacks.............................45Pets.............................................53The Drowning.....................................69The Chase........................................87The World's Worst Bathroom.......................95Scars............................................97Khama: A Love Story..............................105Beau Goes Back to Nature.........................115Mona Lisa........................................119Bird Nerds.......................................123The Fool and the Snake...........................135Lost.............................................141The Conversation.................................157A Guide Dies.....................................161A Night in the Madgkadigkadi.....................173Ya-ya and Tsetse.................................189A Friend in Hand.................................195Bad Actors.......................................207Bale and the Snake...............................217Encounters with Salvador.........................225Big Mistake......................................239Epilogue.........................................245About the Author.................................247

Chapter One

Whatever You Do, Don't Run

The first place in Africa that employed me was a camp called Idube. The people who came there, like the people who came to every camp where I have ever worked, loved a thrill, something different. So we took them out to dinner.

Not far from our main camp we had a small setup, Inventively called the Bush Camp. It included a teepee over a toilet and a clearing where a fire could be built. Around this, chairs and tables were set, ready for the delighted guests who would be brought in the dark for their meal. Firelight is romantic and makes everyone look beautiful, just as it did for the Bush Camp. With lanterns lit and a beaming staff, the place looked perfect. But during the day it was only a sorry patch of earth, and the teepee was filled with spiders. The guests loved it, and the nights were cheap for the camp's owners, so they insisted we run them at least once a week.

The staff didn't like these dinner nights in the bush. Setting up meant that the usual quiet time, when all the Guests were out of camp, was suddenly filled with frantic activity. The one spare Land Rover, a decrepit and spluttering machine called the Skorokoro (which means "too old to work" in Shangaan), would be loaded with firewood, lanterns, and a chef named Wusani, whose bulk always made the aging suspension creak ominously. Wusani particularly disliked these bush dinners, as one afternoon after being dropped off she was unpleasantly surprised. Shortly after she lit the cooking fire, a lion roared, according to her description, "closer to me than a baby is to its mother." Lions often walked in the soft sand of the dry riverbed that flowed beside the Bush Camp, to enjoy the shade or maybe to startle an antelope that had been lulled to sleep by the cool and tranquility of the surrounds. This lion was not hunting, or it would not have roared, but that didn't make it any less terrifying for Wusani.

When the Skorokoro and its driver returned that day with the tables and chairs, they found Wusani improbably perched on the outermost branches of a long-dead tree. When told it was safe to come down, she would not, because she could not. Adrenaline had fueled the climb, and now she only had the strength to cling on and beg for a ladder that the camp did not possess.

Finally gravity's pull resolved the issue. Despite Her substantial weight and the height she fell from, Wusani was saved from serious harm-perhaps by her ample padding. But she would never stay at the Bush Camp by herself again, and she warned me against it when I started working at Idube.

My job for bush dinners was simpler than Wusani's. I had to transport sufficient amounts of alcohol to the Bush Camp to last the night. I hadn't been working at the camp long, and as barman I was probably the most lowly staff member after the "gardener," who watered the lawns that the warthogs promptly dug up. This gave me last priority when it came to loading the Skorokoro.

"Bugger it," I thought one afternoon when I had already helped load tables, chairs, cloths, salads, and cutlery to the exclusion of the booze. "I'll carry it there."

Animals were the last things on my mind as I loaded up a wheelbarrow with spirits and mixers. All I wanted was to get my job done. Besides, I'd been learning from the guides and felt that I was getting to be reasonably bush smart. With the cockiness of a nineteen-year-old, I felt I could handle anything that Africa threw at me. Whenever an animal encounter of The sort I was about to have was discussed, the advice was always the same: "Whatever you do, don't run." This was the solemn counsel of the three guides who worked at the camp. "Food runs," added Alpheus, the tracker, his rough face split by an enormous grin. "And there is nothing here that you can outrun anyway."

After grunting and sweating my way along the sandy tracks that the Land Rovers used, I dropped off my first load and trudged back. All that I needed to take to the Bush Camp now was a case of beer. Filled with bravado, I decided to ditch the wheelbarrow and carry the drinks instead. I hadn't considered how heavy twenty-four cans of beer gets when you are slogging through soft sand for almost a mile. Only a quarter of the way into my journey, I decided to change routes and take a shortcut along the riverbed.

At one point I stopped to shake a small pebble from my shoe. Quartz, I concluded, because it was the only rock type I knew. I rested, gently putting the beer down and stretching. Branches met overhead, offering cool shade and a sense of peace that mingled with the constant undercurrent of excitement that comes from walking in the bush. In one of the branches, a type of bird named the grey lourie called, a long drawn out rasp that sounds like a hag telling you to go away. "Ka-weeeeeeeeeeee." It is not an emphatic sound, but it is irritatingly insistent. Later I would learn that this is just one of the many birds that give an alarm call when it sees a predator. The tricky part is figuring out whether it is saying it because of you (after all, humans are Africa's most abundant predator) or because of something larger and fiercer.

I put my shoe back on, hopping around to do so; picked up the beer; and rounded a fallen log. This startled two massive male lions that had been waiting for whatever clumsy creature was making all the noise, probably expecting a buffalo.

They may have leapt to their feet, they may have flown. I don't know because it was so fast I didn't see. The time it took for them to get from where they were to where I stood was too short for my life to flash before my eyes. Instead...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Lyons Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0762745657
• ISBN 13: 9780762745654
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 264
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV, GPSR Europäische Union; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande