We were standing in the middle of the jungle, and the woman wearing the five-carat emerald ring was definitely not happy.
Our tiny plane had just landed in a remote part of Botswana. It was a six-seater: the woman,
her husband and their pre-teen son and daughter accounted for four of them. And within a few minutes of landing they made it clear that this little jungle camp failed utterly to live up to their expectations. Even though their son had been dying to see some tigers, they wanted to leave — preferably right now.
The camp manager, Gideon, a slim young Botswanan in perfectly pressed khakis, regretted that the next plane wasn’t due until the day after tomorrow.
Well, couldn’t he phone for another one?
He explained with exquisite courtesy that the camp had just two radio calls per day: one in the morning, one at night. But that evening he’d see what he could do.
Their expressions grew grimmer, their voices louder. The other guests at the lunch table gradually fell quiet, gazed up at the monkeys in the trees and carefully avoided meeting each other’s eyes.
Then she dropped the bombshell. It was about lunch. Her son, she explained, ate only kosher food; her daughter was a vegetarian.
You need to understand that at these remote camps, absolutely everything had to be ordered in advance and flown in, or brought by truck — a journey that took a couple of days. The place only held about a dozen guests, so for obvious reasons there was no a la carte menu, but the food was plentiful, varied and delicious.
In spite of the degree of difficulty, we had everything required for civilised life, from cold beer and condiments to hot water and toilet paper. The accommodation was simple, but perfectly comfortable.
The camp might even have been able to deal with some dietary requirements, if they’d been given a bit of notice. (But kosher food in the middle of the bush was never a realistic expectation.)
So it was painfully clear that our new guests (Canadian, as it happened) had spent a great deal of money flying halfway around the planet to a destination they knew absolutely nothing about. What did they think they were going to find? Perhaps the price had led them to expect a luxury resort. This all happened long before the age of Google, but still, most people would have done some research; clearly, they hadn’t.
To their great relief — and ours, and above all the staff’s — they managed to get a flight out two days later. We were in the middle of the wetlands in a mokoro when their small plane took off. As it soared overhead we looked up, and so did the guide, who knew the name of every bird on the continent, but otherwise had almost no English. I took a chance on a two-word joke he might understand, and gestured upward. “Gideon’s friends,” I said. A broad grin spread across his face and he laughed so hard I thought we’d all fall out of the canoe.
TRAVEL ADVISORY: Do your homework. Just because someone tells you a destination is fabulous doesn’t mean it’s your kind of fabulous.
(And, by the way: it’s a terrible idea to wear emeralds in the bush. They’re notoriously fragile. One good whack on the side of the Land Rover and you could end up with a handful of green gravel. Leave the bling behind.
Also, there are no tigers in Africa.)