In the Beginning, My Life with Ndoto, Around Africa in a Forty Year Old Land Rover

If You are Willing to Live with Snakes and Hippos, Dreams do Come True

     “Remember,” Scott said seriously, “don’t get too excited about it. The asking price is way too high. Find flaws. Whatever you do, don’t say you love it.”

     “I know, I know. I’ll keep quiet while you do the negotiating,” I promised as we climbed out of Ndoto and greeted the man who had placed the For Sale ad. Then, I set eyes on the tent.

     “Oh my. It’s perfect!” I said aloud. “I love it.”

     Scott rolled his eyes and said through pursed lips, “Geez, Tris.”

     “I heard your old Landy coming up the road,” said the South African with the smug smile of one who owns a Toyota Land Cruiser. Or maybe he was smiling because I’d just clinched the deal for him. “Series III, right? They sure aren’t stealthy.”

     “No. But they’re strong.” I said defensively.

     “Of course they are.”

     As soon as he unzipped the rain fly, I climbed up the ladder and into the tent. I could hardly contain my satisfaction. It was the rooftop tent of my dreams.

     Scott forced a cough in order to muffle the sounds of contentment coming from inside the tent. I hung my head out the opening to watch Scott do what he does best while he circled what might be our bedroom for a year. He turned to the owner of the only second-hand Hannibal rooftop tent for sale in a five hundred kilometer radius and went into bargaining mode.

     “I don’t know if this one will work for us.” Scott said, pulling on his ear lobe. He did another lap. God, the man has patience. I flopped on my back and stretched out in the idyllic little tent. I sighed, imagining our first night sleeping in it.

     “I would have to modify the rack on our Landy to make the tent fit.” Scott continued, trying to talk over my bliss. “Why are you selling?” he added. Hey, yeah, why would someone sell such a perfect tent? I poked my head back out the opening.

     The owner looked at the ground. Then he looked at me and saw that it wouldn’t matter what he said.

     “Well, you see, my wife doesn’t like to have to climb down the ladder at night, you know, when she has to relieve her bladder. She’s afraid of snakes.”

     Wait a minute. Snakes weren’t in my dream. Snakes terrify me almost as much as hippos. After mosquitoes, which cause malaria, hippos are the most dangerous animals in Africa.

     “Plus,” the owner added chuckling, “she always thinks there’s a hippo lurking at the bottom of the ladder.”

     I backed out of the tent and climbed down the ladder. I hadn’t thought about the need to pee between sundown and sunrise with hippos and snakes.

     Scott and I walked a short distance away to discuss the realities of sleeping under canvas on the roof of our Land Rover in the wild for a year. I was still sold on the tent-on-the-roof concept and thought our journey would not be complete without it. He wanted to take time to consider other sleeping options. We both agreed that, unlike the previous owners of our Landy, we did not want to sleep inside the car.

     “Setting up a tent on the ground every night will just be a big hassle and take up so much space inside the car,” I said. “I have an idea. We’ll train our bladders. We’ll make a practice of not having any liquid after 6 PM so we won’t have to worry about getting up in the night. How about that?”

     We negotiated a suitable snake and hippo discount with the owner and bought the tent. Our dream, to explore Africa in an old Land Rover with a rooftop tent, was finally coming true.

They Were The Best of Times, etc...

About a month ago, after more than a year apart, we were finally reunited with Ndoto, our 1973 Series III Land Rover in Africa. We worried if she would be just the way we left her, or if she would be there at all. Emails sent to her minder/mechanic had gone unanswered of late. We began to say, “What will be, will be” and “If she’s gone, I hope that she’s having another grand adventure” and we made plans to fly back to Africa anyway. Though “plans” is stretching it. The time we should have spent thinking about an itinerary, much less planning one, were mostly taken over with readying our home for lease. How did we not notice that leak in the roof before? Or the dry rot on the deck that had to be removed, repaired, and resurfaced? Or that crack in the tank on the toilet? And why did the washer and dryer have to go kaput in the same week? In fact, there were lots of kaput things on the house. If we hadn’t noticed them, our German tenant would have I’m sure. I’m sure because I’m half German. It’s my Do it Right, or Don’t Do it at All side. The other side, the Irish part, usually wants to have a beer and think about it tomorrow like that O'Hara Irishwoman. So if we had leased our home to an Irishman or if I’d been in a more Irish mood leading up to our departure, I might have used epoxy on the toilet tank and been done with it. But I knew that wouldn’t be right because our tenant is German not Irish. At least this was the excuse I used to get Scott to do things that have long been on my wish list for the house. “I’m German. Believe me, we must buy the nice Kohler toilets and a new washer and dryer too, and paint the walls….” I also lobbied for a re-do of our bedroom closet but Scott put his foot down saying, “Look Scarlet, we’ll think about doing that when we return in ten months” which means we’ll have a beer instead which is actually fine by me. “Plus, they don’t seem that picky to me,” said Scott.

“I didn’t say they were picky.” And they aren’t. They are very nice and their 2-year-old son loves elephants as much as I do.

In between trips to Home Depot or Kelly Moore Paint, we took care of business. We had the usual,"We can't really afford to be gone for ten months. But we can't afford not to go. Life is short" discussion. We also spent some time updating our wills. There’s nothing like an impending flight to Africa that spurs us on to think about the future—if not for ourselves, then for our heirs.

And then there was our wild thing, our cat Pika. We had to find a home for Pika for the ten months we planned to be away. Generous friends and neighbors offered to take her, but they had cats or dogs or both, and Pika is like Greta Garbo in that she vants to be alone. Enter my best friend since first grade Bonnie Fine Johnson (growing up, if she responded, “I’m okay” I’d always say, “No you’re not. You’re Fine! Hahaha!”) Bonnie and her husband had recently lost their cat Simba. “Can’t we take her?” she asked. This was a perfect solution. Except for one thing. Bonnie lives 6 hours away and Pika only tolerates car rides of up to 30 seconds. Suffice to say, I lost a lot of sleep worrying about how I would get Pika to Susanville. I asked friends for advice and they said, “Sedate her.” I asked the vet and she said, “Sedate her.” But Pika gets morose on sedation so I knew that wasn’t going to be any better than her yowling and barfing for 6 hours in her zebra stripped kitty carrier.

I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before, but the night before Pika and I were to make the journey to Bonnie’s I tried a different set of search terms on the Internet. It turns out “Traveling long distances in a car with a wigged out cat” elicited the answer I needed. I scrolled through the results and all answers were the same. “Kitty Calm.” “Use Kitty Calm.” “Kitty Calm saved our marriage.”

First thing next morning I was at Petco buying a spray bottle of Kitty Calm. A short but assertive blast into her carrier and onto her favorite blankie ten minutes before departure was all it took. I put her in the carrier and she assumed a position that remained unchanged for the entire journey. The stuff is magic. Or perhaps it was the soothing British accent used by the reader of Circling the Sun, the book on tape that we listened to without pause the entire way. When I pick her up in ten months I’m going to pop Circling the Sun into the CD player again, but without an assist from Kitty Calm and I will report back the results.

Pika, I am happy to report, is being loved and spoiled by Bonnie and her husband Scott and is becoming more Garbo-esque by the day.

In addition to house repairs, and a long drive with Greta, something else took up the time we should have spent planning an itinerary. Scott was flying. He was doing a lot of flying. He was so close to earning a private pilot license from the FAA, something he has been trying to achieve off and on since he was sixteen, and he wanted to finish all his requirements before we left. I knew he would pass. Everyone we know had no doubts he would pass. But he exhibited an uncommon lack of confidence in the two months leading up to the examinations. Adding to the stress was that Scott didn’t want to book Africa flights until he passed the exams. “Just focus on your flying and we’ll book the tickets once you have passed your tests,” I said not really meaning it but trying to be supportive. Friends and family began offering spare beds beginning September 1^st when our tenants would move in and I thought about a road trip back to Susanville to see Pika. On August 27^th,  four days before our tenants moved in, Scott came from the airfield and said, “I’m going to go ahead and book the flights to Africa. If I don’t pass the test, I’ll just do it when we get back.”

But of course on August 31^st at 5P.M., the day before our departure to Africa, he did pass.
Let this be a lesson to you kids. Don’t ever give up on your dreams. But don't drink all the champagne in one night.

We had so much champagne (thank you Howells for the bubbly) that we forgot about all the things remaining on our punch list. The next morning, as our tenants were moving in, we were still packing our bags. Our tenant Christian was incredibly understanding and I got to show his little boy Roger the rusty live-size baby elephant named Clover that sits in the corner of the backyard.

And Ndoto?  Clarry at Bushmaster in Hoedspruit wasn’t ignoring our emails, he was busy working on Ndoto! She had been well very taken care of and was running better than ever.
"You know, you are over invested in this old Landy," Clarry said to Scott.
"Yes, I know that but my wife loves this car," and he looked over at me already sitting in the co-pilot seat. "I'm so happy I could cry," I said as we left.

Scott and I drove into Kruger Park and to Timbavati. We drove in and out of Hoedspruit. We got to meet a sweet little girl named Sanne and see some of our Southern Hemisphere friends.

The evening we picked up Ndoto I installed a brand new memory foam mattress to her rooftop tent then made the bed with soft new sheets and plush duvet. “We’re home,” I said to Scott as he poured the first Gin and Tonic of our new adventure. Ndoto sat tall on her rebuilt chassis and murmured quietly on her new pistons. The steering was tighter, but we no longer had to downshift to second to climb hills. It was all so wonderfully perfect. For two weeks everything was going so well. We couldn’t believe our luck.

                                

Then, on our way back into the Kruger Park, this happened:

Back in Hoedspruit, Clarry and his Indy 500 Pit Crew, leaning into Ndoto like a team of ER surgeons, had the engine apart faster than you can say, "How much does it cost to repair a cracked block?"

But since Clarry is a miracle worker, I think she’ll soon be as good as a 43-year-old Landy can be and get us where we want to go.

Tris

 Kruger Park, South Africa, in a Land Rover Discovery loaner.

Next: “I Will Speak Well of You Constable, on Facebook and Everywhere!”

The Speed Trap

In Tanzania, there is no speed limit – except in villages or along speed traps, where the speed limit is 50 kilometers per hour. Speed traps are the worst. At the bottom of a long descent policemen and women dressed in miraculously white uniforms and smart looking hats stand and wait like predators on the hunt. When they see our foreign Landy, our foreign plates, and our foreign faces they pounce gleefully on the prey. We meet on the shoulder

“This is a one-zero-niney!” (Series lll 109) “Very strong!” they say. “I learned to drive in this vehicle!”

“It’s 40 years old,” I say.

“Eish! Forty?! But it is STRONG!” Then, “Where do you come from?” and we never know if they are asking our country or where we spent the previous night. We usually answer incorrectly. But because we drive a car that reminds them of their youth, they smile and say, “Safari Jema. Proceed!”

Sometimes just for the heck of it, they ask for a “gifty” and when they do I give them a look that says, you aren’t corrupt, are you? so far, it works. “Proceed!” they say with a laugh as if they weren’t really asking for a bribe at all. Just joshing, ha ha!

Some days we get stopped at every police check along our route – 5 or 6 times a day.  One policeman, after expressing, as they all do, how strong Ndoto is said, “I like this car very much! I think I will come in the night when you aren’t looking and take it!”  “Ha-ha!” we say hoping he is just joshing. Another looked longingly at Ndoto and whispered, “I want. I dream…” Only one policeman in the eleven months we’ve been driving in Africa shook his head in disappointment, “This car is obsolete,” he stated with a tsk. The two policemen with him, loyal to Strong Old Landys, continued to argue the point with their unappreciative, much younger colleague as we drove slowly away.

Sometimes they check the working order of our turn signals, brake lights and such which is why Scott jiggles the fuse box below the steering column before each police check. One policeman asked us to engage the backup lights. “Back-up lights?! Ha-ha!” said Scott looking over at me in a panic. Do we even have back-up lights? “This car is older than your father!” said Scott. “It was made long before back-up lights were invented.”

“Proceed,” said the policeman with a smile – perhaps recalling a time his father, or grandfather, reminisced about the virtues of Old Landys, “…strong vehicles! But you know, they have no back-up lights…”

The first time we were stopped in a speed trap was in Kenya. There was a bevy of trucks, buses, and police clustered at the bottom of a hill. Up went the arms. Halt! As we pulled over a policewoman came to the window saying, “You have been caught over speeding.” Isn’t speeding enough? What is over-speeding? I wanted to ask. “The fine is $120,” she continued, “and I know you can afford it.”

“Speeding? Impossible!” Scott and I said in unison. So she brought the radar gun and showed us a photo of Ndoto doing 64 in a 50.

“Oh. Pole sana.” I said admitting guilt. “We are very sorry. We didn’t see the sign. We didn’t know our car could go that fast. Ha-ha! But isn’t she strong?”

Another Policewoman, Susan, came to my window barely noticing Ndoto fitness. “You have three options. I can arrest you and take you to jail now. Or you can pay the fine for which I will give you a receipt. Then you may appear in court at 8am tomorrow in (town two hours back on heavily potholed road the way we had come), where you will plead guilty, appeal, and have the fine reduced. Or you can pay the fine to me now and you can proceed.”

Naively thinking the options she stated were the only options, I began to plead my case on the spot. “We are stupid muzungu. We just left Uganda; we’ve only been in Kenya 5 hours! We didn’t see the sign. Can’t you let us off with a warning? No? Can’t we appeal in a court in a town in the direction we are heading, like Eldoret or Lamu?”

“No, this is not possible,” said Susan.

As I continued to beg for leniency, even professing, “We are not speeders” in the same way I would say, “We are not heroin addicts,” Susan began to get tears in her eyes.

She tried to find something extraordinary or likeable about us. “What are you doing in Africa?” She said. “Are you doctors?  Missionaries?”

“No,” I answered. “We are nobody.” Desperate to come up with anything that made us remotely worthwhile I added, “but in Uganda we visited a friend who is a doctor,” which was true.

Susan tilted her head, considering this new information. “Is she like me, or is she muzungu, like you.”

“She’s muzungu,” I answered. “But she is a doctor to Ugandans and she dates Ugandans, so she’s practically a Ugandan,” I added.

This made Susan laugh. Fifteen minutes passed while Susan and I played verbal table tennis.

Then Scott, trying out a tactic we had never discussed or agreed on (not that we had ever discussed any police check protocol) joined us at my window. He took out his wallet, pulled out a $100 and a $20, and handed it to Susan. “Here. We’ll just pay the fine and be on our way. This is all the money I have until we visit a bank in Eldoret,” he added.

“What?!” both Susan and I exclaimed. Susan glanced at the bills and got more tears in her eyes.

“Do you mean to say,” said Susan separating the bills and holding them on each side of her ample chest, “that further up the road, if you step on someone’s egg, you will be in trouble?”

Having no idea what it meant to step on someone’s egg but sensing possible victory I locked eyes with Susan. With all the seriousness I could muster I said quietly, “That is exactly what we mean, Susan.”

Susan sighed dramatically. “What if I make my own decision?” Without waiting for an answer she handed the $100 back to Scott and pressed the $20 to her bosom. “I will keep this,” she said.

“Oh thank you Susan!” I said as she strolled away. Then, because we had been through so much together, I leaned out the window and shouted, “Let’s keep in touch!”

“That was half scary, half infuriating,” I said as we drove away. “I couldn’t believe it when you handed her $120! If you had just given me a little more time I think I could have got us out of there without paying a dime.”

Scott looked over at me tearing up just as Susan had. I suddenly realized what had made Susan cry. Pity. Never in Susan’s wildest dreams would anyone actually hand over the usurious fine requested. It brought tears to her eyes that we, the stupidest muzungus she had ever encountered, were so unfamiliar with bribe negotiations that we were willing to hand over a king’s ransom of $120 cash money. No one does that.

“Didn’t you realize what was going on?” Scott asked. “She was waiting for us to offer a bribe! She never intended to arrest us, or to collect the entire $120.”

“Wha..? Huh? But you gave her that hundred dollar bill!”

“I’ve been trying to get rid of that hundred since we left Cape Town. It’s pre 1996. No one in Africa will take it. She saw the date. That’s the only reason she gave it back to me.”

I silently studied Scott seeing him with new eyes. “Clever man,” I said.

We later learned that to step on someone’s egg means to hit someone’s goat or cow or sheep, or to get into some other kind of trouble only money could solve.  I’ve used the phrase often when we are stopped for speeding since meeting Susan.

“Pole sana officer. If we pay you the fine we will have no money. Then if we step on someone’s egg further up the road, we will surely be in big trouble.” I wait.

“Proceed!”