Chapter 2 - There and Back Again

At the end of our second last year at school - a meaningless distinction since three of us were already in imminent danger of being excluded from the school system due to irreconcilable differences - we decided to all take a hike in the wilderness and refine the fledgling spirit and nature of our group. We studied the continent - us four boys -and went about the business of finding a little paradise for our exploration. Eventually, after much thought, we focused our sights on the strip of land called the Transkei, which hugs the East Coast of South Africa. The 'coast of storms' and many a wrecked ship. A coast of cannibals, some say.

So we got our stuff together and worked out a plan of action. George, by this stage, had begun to slide steadily away from the 'Piss-up Club' thing and over onto the 'Jah is our main guy' side of astral operations. The more you smoked Pot back then, the more you realized how completely stupid alcohol is. For one thing: Dope is more fun. You can do a lot with dope. If you were stuck in a lighthouse for a week on some remote Scottish coast with only a copy of Tolkien to read, trust me, you would rather have a little section of the good weed than a bottle of Jack.

So George had really got into the stuff and once old Jah enters your life, he gets in good and stays there some time. Suddenly, he found the idea of spewing vomit across your bedroom wall after a night of heavy drinking somehow unappealing. The Jah people can be very judgmental about these things, contrary to the main selling point of their beautiful racket. He wanted to go to the Transkei because as everyone knows, the god of marijuana fell from the heavens and was buried in the Transkei so that we, the people of the Earth, could smoke the divine green coiling light of Mary Jane that grew raw from the soil in such great abundance.

I wanted to go for the fishing. I have an obsessive love of fishing that stems, I think, from the fact that fishing time with my dad represented the only moment of real joy and contact that I ever remember experiencing between us. I now see fish as thoughts and the water body as the lake of the subconscious through which I row my perception. I dream a lot about fish, swimming in the water below me and - despite the fact that I most like to pull them out of the water and eat them - I find them very calming. I thoroughly cherished the idea of eating from the land. I brought along three huge rods - rods you could erect a circus tent with - and all of their tackle. The irony of these rods, in all of its sublime beauty, would only in the near future be properly revealed.

The main thing I can say about our leaving Johannesburg - and taking into account those gigantic rods - is that we were really heavy. Four heavy little boys, their backpacks tormenting the miserable skeletal frames that dragged them along. They were like obscene slave-masters, shoving us around, driving us forth. We left the evil surrounds of our school and its web of arcane power to travel in a train to Durban where my uncle Case, who was a cook in some hotel that favoured the ‘buffet’ and ‘Danish Style’, entertained us. He reminded me of boiled chicken heads but we took full and uncensored advantage of the open tab to get ripping drunk.

Another series of coincidences involving cars and roads and we are at ‘The Cape Sun’, several hundred clicks South, a hotel which sits on the very border of the Transkei. If you stand in the water off the beach, it is very difficult to tell where South Africa ends and the 'Wild Coast' begins, excepting of course for the fact that the South African side of the divide has a very nice, civilized hotel on it. If you sit on the hotel deck and look just over there you can imagine it, the coast of dreams and infamous savagery. At the time that we decided to travel there, in 1990, the company was in the upheavals of a revolution and the Transkei government had been overthrown in a bloody coup.

Back in Durban we were warned against traveling there and in the hotel on its edge we were warned once again. We had however all committed so much to this idea that nothing would dampen our spirits. Our guardians had not really believed that we would even go through with this. We were in danger of losing our education and had nothing to go back too. None of us even had a job. We had to pull this trip off, for sure, pull it off good.

It was a challenge to our group. It was the union of us, the trial, judge, jury and execution of us. We listened nervously to the reports of violence that were coming from that land, a land of the black people and their killing weapons. Undaunted and unable to afford the enormous costs of the protective hotel, we packed our things the following morning and headed across the river and onto the wild beaches of the Transkei, land of violence, ill repute and potentially very good weed.

Six hours along the beach and the heaviness thing became a serious problem. Some of us were dragging along sixty kilograms of compressed peanuts and baked beans. We resolved to eat everything encased in metal on the very first night. That first night was not far off and we had decided to alight alongside the banks of a gloomy, foggy river, when we heard the sounds of manic laughter and guttural Afrikaans spewing forth into the night like. Then we saw torches and realized that these foul-mouthed boatmen were roaring drunk and had gone for a night-fish. On the far bank we saw a very comforting camp with a big fire blazing away into the soggy night.

As a group we had all forced ourselves to avoid thinking about the tent problem, namely that we only had one and not only didn't know to work it, but it was designed presumably for two small monkeys, the type of tent you might well find in a lucky-packet or in your Christmas stocking. Whether it even had all its bits was another thought that had been forcibly removed from our conversations. Given these facts and the utter misery of the weather, we made great pains to attract the attentions of the boatmen and were eventually rewarded by them rowing over, looking very drunk and holding automatic weapons.

What we didn't know about them was that they were South African Special Forces killers, stationed on the border of the Transkei on 24 hours standby, who had both had the regular privilege of being able to shoot at live targets, normally at night, while drunk. Fortunately, they thought we were hilarious. It took them a long time to stop laughing and when they eventually did they rowed us over on the wildly unbalanced craft to sit by their fire. They spent the rest of the night telling us how violently stupid we were for contemplating a walk one minute down the beach. Then they happily set about making us homemade weapons to carry with us.

The next morning we left bristling with sharp sticks and fishhook grappling weapons and bamboo guns and without the worrisome additional weight of half of our food, which they had been only too glad to share. They gave us some great hints however, perhaps the most important of which is that while it was a country overrun by hungry little savages, it was also a country where the price of a tin of food could get you almost anything. The soldiers themselves had a whole army of the little Goat-herders just outside the camp who would perform even the most dubious services for these two heavily armed lunatics. It would prove to be a very useful tip.

As cold and miserable as the previous night had been, the day was mercilessly hot and the beach, which we had resolved to stick too, was like a giant magnifying glass. We were being seared as we walked. The beaches were long and completely uninhabited. At one point we met an old man with a crazy grin who enthusiastically gestured to a pot of crayfish that he wished to sell to us. In our heat-induced delirium we decided to turn him down, as at the very least we didn't want to include crawling lobsters to our list of difficulties. It was a good decision, as it turned out, because we discovered not long afterward that they were grown from seed at the bottom of the long drop toilets shared by the tribal people, where these aquatic cockroaches feasted delightedly on the accumulated human waste.

Eventually, we decided to camp under the shadow of a rocky outcrop, unsure of how far we had traveled, especially on account of lacking a map and no navigation equipment. Water, it turns out, is another very important and very rare substance on the wildest coast of Africa. The very few streams that trickle their sweet juice down to the sea are completely polluted by cow effluent further up stream and we couldn't bring ourselves to drink from them, even after we had attempted to boil it over a twig fire no better than a box of matches all piled up. To take our minds off our thirst we gobbled the last of the salty peanuts. Even more worryingly, George had seen not a sign of the promised fields of marijuana and he was starting to permanently lose his sense of humour.

There is something fundamentally different about the hunger that accumulates in a city boy. Food is like an all-pervading instant satisfaction program. You get hungry and you eat. It also goes well with sadness, irritation, boredom, joy and birthdays. You just reach out and you get it. In the bush it is more a question of timing. You eat at the eating time and when you are not eating you spend all your time trying to get food. Walking along the beach that day and we are experiencing the whole gamut of brilliant reasons for eating something and our minds are entirely possessed by the opulence of our civilized lifestyles, demanding not just simple food but complex sugars and proteins, things only a very advanced, automated civilization is capable of producing.

By nightfall we knew not how far we had traveled but we were thoroughly exhausted. Unfortunately, the point at which light and bodily strength gave out was a rocky bit of coast which blew cold winds and gave us as our only company sparse grass and big boulders. At some level there was a sense of relief because we still didn't have to try the tent out and discover its horrible truth. There was nowhere to anchor it. At around eight a light drizzle began to seep through the landscape. We still had some of the peanuts, but by this stage were having trouble swallowing them. George had a can of some food or other left and we lit into it with powerful hunger. After that we tried to get comfortable in the shade of a big, wet, rock.

The brightness of day and we trod optimistically onward. My legs and other exposed body parts had been so burned from the day before that they had swollen up like ripe, red melons and were painful to the touch. George had started to seriously consider the prospect that the marijuana legends may not have been true and he was not dealing with it well. As we walked, he became increasingly quiet and developed a far away look in his eyes as he constantly monitored the landscape that embraced the beach. It took him until early afternoon to decide that we had to travel inland and start a serious, coordinated search for the source of the marijuana rumor. At that point my legs were so swollen that I could hardly walk. I found it hard to believe that his words were actually originating in a brain.

In a savage act of irony we came around a coast and realized that we were trapped and would have to track inland in order to get back to the coast. George said nothing but I could see an insane vindication ripple through him and I knew that he was integrating this change into the plot of his working mythology. The Gods were guiding him and as a matter of fact guided us slap bang into a huge swamp of rhino grass or whatever you call it, like a million long, green knives that spear upward in every conceivable direction, sometimes so aggressive that they even spear through each other. My swollen legs opened like balloons of pus, lacerated by a thousand vicious paper cuts. After that it was a true struggle for survival hacking our way back to the coast. Renewed by a spiritual energy however, George went almost double the distance as he backtracked toward remote signs of civilization looking for a priest … or a dealer.

By darkness we were finished and were seriously considering eating the instant soup, no matter what it represented. We hurried along into the gathering darkness, collected water at a stream and by the last light of day saw a big open plain of sand to pitch the tent, just to the other side of a relatively modest river which emptied into the ocean. By the time we arrived at its banks however it was looking a lot more formidable and fast flowing. George jumped in straight away, leaving his pack behind and swimming across. Presumably, he was going to sling a fifty-foot rope across with a grappling hook and tie it to a tree so that he could haul our kit across. He even called Ian across to help him, who stupidly did so. By the time his dive was finished he was almost out at sea and it was by sheer skinny tenacity only that he made it across.

It was only as he stood wet and shivering without any kit on the other side of the now raging river and rising tide, that George must have considered his rashness and the advantages of rope. In the sinking darkness we could do nothing. But the universe is not without its sense of poetic irony. Directly across from Rene and I climbed up a cliff face and found a beautiful warm cave like a bushman villa overlooking river property and a huge pile of dried twigs with which we lit a very merry fire and made ourselves a nice cup of soup. In a final flourish Rene dug out his little walkman and external speakers and played the soft sounds of Phoebe Snow into the night, There we sat on that ledge, fishing, drinking hot soup, resting against our warm pillows, listening to some tunes and directly opposite us Ian and the barely sane George were huddled on a big flat piece of sand in a torrential downpour.

Some time after dawn we arose and swam across to the other boys with our packs dragging along beside us. 'They'll just have to dry', I thought, in the warm East-coast Sun. The sun however remained only exactly long enough to release its most deadly UV rays before leaping back behind a bank of cloud that let rip over our heads, rendering everything we owned profoundly wet. This was the start of a grand piece of dark comedy at the very culmination of this dejected rainy day. We walked along the beach until darkness and rain stopped us.

Then came the opening piece of the theatre, the unfolding of the tent. Sandy beach, lots of grip, lots of … um, rain. We hauled it out of George's rucksack. George always carried the heavy things. He had a certain stoic dwarfishness and stubborn constitution about him, despite his angelic countenance. So we hauled it out and scrambled over each like hyena's in the rushing wet darkness to try and link it all up until finally it stood, barely, and we could truly appreciate its size, it's Lilliputian grandeur. George crawled in quick and almost filled the whole thing.

Oh, what a laugh it was! We were like Indian gurus in there, all wrapped up wet and tight and twisted. And you couldn't touch the sides because then the water from the outside inverts through the cloth and showers down your back; A difference only in degree perhaps, but certainly a difference. It was a most miserable moment indeed when, in a flash of divine inspiration, I remembered a cigar I had brought along secretly for a special celebration when things looked rough. I hauled it out from its waterproof container and lit it up. In seconds, bellows of cloying, pea-thick choking fumes inundated the tent.

In the pressure of the rain and the night it was like somebody had let rip on a tear gas grenade, so disgusting it was. Contrary to the entire spirit and intention of the gesture, the tiny group had exploded into internecine violence. Rene was so very, very angry with me it was unbelievable. George, responding to the primeval vibration of the rising lizard brain instincts', jumped up in a cannon of fury and completely dismembered the tent like a killer whale tearing out of a circus balloon. He simultaneously bent the tent poles completely out of recognition. It turned out to be quite a night.

The next day we were forced to hug deep into the rocky coast and basically had to climb along miles of cliff-faces, just above the raging ocean of Neptune, which slammed into the cliffs with geographic testosterone. Not for the first time, the fishing rods became an issue. Being three metres tall apiece, they were difficult to navigate while climbing sheer, wet cliff faces. We had tied them to the sides of our packs - had George and Ian, being the designated rod carriers - and we were seriously beginning to endanger ourselves.

The question to consider most carefully in these situations is the actual point of having the rods in the first place. Everyone would know by looking at us that we would barely survive anyway - unless we had serious white man intervention - and that the rods would make no difference whatsoever. Even if you knew how to fish, you would still need bait and the local black folk - for some utterly bizarre reason known only to themselves - do not fish from the sea, instead preferring to raise the sea in their own toilets.

I had a lot of opposition to those rods and the twenty kilograms of fishing tackle that by necessity must follow them around, which temporarily had been placed in Rene's backpack. The boys just didn't believe in fishing in the first place. They had never read 'the old man and the sea'. They had never known the glory of raising the body of God from the sea and eating into it to survive. Eventually, we compromised and I ended up with both the rod and the tackle, while George struggled on with the other rod.

That afternoon we were blown away to discover a nest of Super Yuppies, the kind of people that look like they have been cut out from brochures from Ski resorts and kept photos of their yachts in their wallets. They had somehow airlifted this little beach cottage and dropped it on the beach in the middle of nowhere and were all standing around with big flashing 4 x 4 smiles and gin and tonics in their hands, greeting us pleasantly like we were not four lost teenagers at death's very door. The head lady took us around to the servant's entrance and fed us a nice big old Christian pot of rice and spaghetti and wished us good luck on our trip. When we returned the bowls, now glazed with our greasy, middle class paw prints, she smiled and kindly told us that we could keep them.

Luck must have been on our sides because from then on the whole mystical experience began to degenerate into the Cop cabaña. Not too far afterward, we discovered a five star lodge, nestled into a forest by the way side. We marched on up there and started by buying every chocolate we could, to nourish our starved bodies. Then we hit the bar and started drinking. To come out of that starving, wet hell and be vomited into the cocktail lounge of a five star hotel was beyond belief. We played the residents' darts for drinks. It was almost paradise.

Under cover of darkness we crawled around the hotel blind drunk in the darkness looking for a place to sleep. Eventually we discovered this nice big patch of soft African grass, spread our sleeping bags like tongues into the stuff and jumped into them for a good nights rest after a day well lived to sleep a comfortable night, dreaming the aqueous dreams of Bourbon and Beer. It was barely ten minutes after we woke up that we discovered the horrible truth. We had somehow discovered the fabled lost breeding grounds of the Red Transkei Tick. We sat there like red jellybeans in horrid fascination.

Rene immediately began ripping opening the medical case and taking a massive overdose of tick bite tablets. All of them, in fact, which was bad luck for us, as things would turn out. Then he proceeded to burn the little horrors off with a burning cigarette, cauterizing the wounds. I trashed myself clean with the other boys and we all had a good old hung-over argument as we marched away from the hotel and toward our final destination, which we were promised lay only a short walk away. A short Transkei walk, as the saying goes.

We traveled across a large plain of sand and eventually encountered another river, though this time it was calm and well behaved. I immediately recognized the smell and sight of the place, Mzikaba. I had come here with my family ten years before when the country had still been civilized and controlled by the fascist white Afrikaner government. We had traveled down here in a Mercedes and a big caravan camper. Both vans had lost their exhaust pipes by the time they arrived and we were in a merry old pickle trying to escape from there.

There was a surprising amount of people there, despite the regional conflict that was reportedly unfolding around us. Die hard fishermen I'll bet. Fishing folk, like myself are a hardy breed. We came into the camp and immediately encountered an armed Transkei soldier, who checked us over. He had this great trick that he showed to us after we had made friendship movements toward him. Being pretty sad looking ourselves, we found that the peasants related easily to us. He had a string tied to his wrist that wound down to a serious looking revolver that sat on his hip. With one smooth movement he could yank the cord and the revolver would snap into his hand, smooth as you please.

During the conversation with this now amiable fellow - this armed post adolescent goatherd - George started to get very skittish. I think he scented the far off call of the God of Marijuana on this man and he had begun to sink into this sort of Shark-like primitive feeding frenzy. His jaws started snapping open and shut in anticipation. It is always difficult asking for contraband substances from government military officials in foreign countries. In a few - mostly African - they say, 'sure man' and take you to the reefer merchant. In others - mostly everywhere else and half of Africa - they just turn around and shoot you in the head. This was a risk George was clearly willing to take.

We got shown to a campsite in the falling light while George disappeared with the guard. The radiant light of the divine priestess had truly smiled on us this night. Not only had we discovered that it was Christmas Eve and not only did the weather break into absolute perfection, but George returned, alive, with a big old reefer. And our luck did not end there. We met a fellow camper who gave us a run-down on the local fishing action and quality advice on how to get bait. Fishermen are something else. Every one of them with a different story, a different interpretation of the sea, its creatures and how to haul them out and kill them.

We raced down to a rocky promontory in the last of the light with our two rods and our kit and our hunting blades, baying like Indians on the hunt. The bait trick was just great. Just above the line of the retreating surf as the tide goes out, you will find little sponge like protrusions on the rock that you need to stab and cut open. In the center of the tough, fibrous shell lives the stinkiest thing in town, called redbait. This mollusk type creature makes excellent bait, hangs on your hooks like a dream and should never be left near human habitation overnight.

Within ten minutes of those hooks hitting the water, the fish were banging on us, cavorting in the rough moonlit ocean like fries in hot oil. A race of electricity ran through us. I could feel it, like mild electrical impulses snaking along our nerves and I knew they were feeling it. They were getting it. They understood, for a suspended moment, moonlit moment, what it meant to be in struggle with a life, with an unknown set of rules; to have used ingenuity to lure and capture something which is devoted to its own survival; to have gone into the wilderness of the soul and created food.

The moon was so unbelievably full and profound that it dominated the landscaped, etched out each shadow, played along the contours of our faces, carving ancient, wiser masks for us. The marijuana joint was supreme. With effortless grace it elevated us to a grander world of light and meaning. The fishes we caught are called 'Streepies', an Afrikaans word that describes the black tiger stripes that run down their silver flanks. We collected the bigger ones for our dinners and traveled back to our campsite where we sat by the fire and listened again to the Phoebe Snow tape. It was truly gorgeous.

We arose to Christmas day filled with unutterable joy and abandon. Immediately we ran down to the river and began to explore upstream, where the river gradually narrowed as it entered lush canyons, the plant growth itself like waterfalls tumbling down the sheer blue-black faces. We managed to walk a long way from beach to tiny beach, the muddy sand filled with a filigree of crab pin prints as they skated like ghosts across the surface and into the water. Long, colorful birds darted along the cliff faces and called out with unfamiliar cries. Everything we saw seemed to be beckoning. This trip was a journey into our selves and the land merely a grand metaphor.

On the very final beach we stopped as the coast became continuous, flat cliff. We looked around and realized that we were in the most private place that we had ever experienced, whether individually, or as a group. Nothing or nobody could see us. The beach was ours. George and I pulled out our ceremonial equipment from our packs. Over time the nature of the ceremonial equipment had changed. When we were first a group together no real ceremony had been necessary, other than drinking fast and passing out. Now the group had moved to a new level and I needed more ceremony.

The ninja thing was a big contender for ceremonial priority. We had all enjoyed weaponry and wiped out our fair share of the neighbourhood animals. We were all slightly esoteric and most especially we all wished that we had the power and physical prowess to leap about and defend our skinny white asses. The Ninja philosophy and art seemed to me to embrace all of these qualities and attributes. They were mysterious and secretive and powerful and were the stuff of legend that walked tantalizingly hand in hand with historical truth. My mother had sowed George and me ninja suits which were our present ceremonial gear. The other guys just wore loose pants and black vests.

All that afternoon, we stood and moved about slowly in martial arts maneuvers. We were training for all eventualities. We were hardening our bodies, through relentless exercise and exposure to the elements in one of the wildest places in Africa. We stood there for Christmas and for the entire world, us Tai-Chi teenagers. Then we walked back slowly, filled with the breath of the Marijuana deity and our newfound bond of training and secrecy. We had airlifted that old water tower from Yeoville and planted it right here, on the beach, in the middle of nowhere - A new place for our kind to meet.

Getting back in the lazy afternoon, we pondered the direction of our night. It was, after all, Christmas day. We decided eventually to split up and organize for the evening's activities. Rene and Ian went back to the camp to organize some Christmas grub while George and I decided to head across the river with a bucket and empty the bar of the five-star hotel with our every available cent. We promised to meet at sunset by the river mouth and George and I waded through the river with our bucket dragging along behind us.

We arrived up at the hotel pretty late and made the commitment to satiate our thirsts before returning, which we did. Then these four black characters came over to us and challenged us to a game of darts, if you can believe it. They agreed to play for money. A very funny bunch indeed, local diplomats as it turns out and very willing to spend their ill-gotten paychecks with the young white boys. We got so blind drunk that we barely made it to the river after dark and saw our friends on the far side of what was now a raging torrent. I could not hear them but managed to throw a bottle of scotch across before turning around with George to walk back into the hills to find a nice, quiet place to sit down and work on our future hangovers.

We had not walked five steps when suddenly the sky vanished and angry clouds exploded across the heavens, very quickly spilling into big, wet raindrops that fell at first sulkily and then moodily and eventually righteously. We were soaked in moments, stumbling through the muddy dark with our bucket of booze clambering along in tow. We completely lost our way but eventually somehow ended up back at the fancy hotel like a pair of drowned poodles.

The hotel itself was a little mansion with eight beautifully appointed rooms crafted with cloths and silks and knick-knacks pilfered from colonized countries worldwide. It was a joke that screamed into the face of all probability, this little colonial cotton-picking mansion in the middle of one of the most dangerous anti-colonial countries on Earth. When the revolution came this place was going to burn to the ground, its flaming demise reflected in the eyes of the on-looking savages, upon the sweat of whose backs it had been crafted.

The hotel would have none of us either. The matron who greeted us at the back door had either never had children or had never been a child but she would rather have seen us die in the rain than soil her coal-shed. We hung out there on the stoep shivering, sadly sharing a bottle of whiskey, for it was raining hard and we were tired of sleeping in the rain. Then this guy walked out and it became a riotous assembly, for he was Indian and funny to the point of pain. His expressions were hysterical and his voice like a nightingale after the cross matron.

'It is not advisable for you to be consecrating together in the rain at this hour' said he - just add accent - and we fell over ourselves laughing. It was such a delicious irony really. Here were George and I, colonial throwbacks of the grand British Empire, which had thoroughly stomped colonialism on to the Indian races and bludgeoned them into subjugation and serial poverty and he was staying at the posh hotel while we were out in the brain, sozzled with booze, without a roof over our heads.

Eventually he left and some hour or so before midnight on that Christmas day, we pondered the fates and choices that lay before us. Mostly we wanted to sleep and we were truly outraged by the bad Samaritan behaviour of the hotel staff. For George the solution was simple. We were going to have to break in. I was just terrified at the idea, as I have never been the great taker of risk and considering the political temperament of this place, rash criminality seemed a bit shortsighted.

The rage grew in me too though and by the end of the bottle of JD, I had committed to this nefarious plot. We pulled open the window of one of the outside rooms and slithered through it like crocodiles onto the shaggy white carpets, like eels in fact, all slimy and dirty and wet. We slithered up onto the bed and into the sheets, leaving a trail of polluted scales within the silken folds. My heart was beating like a deranged woodpecker on a piece of petrified wood.

We set his watch alarm for 5:30 but either George messed it up or we didn't hear it and we awoke to hear the sounds of the cleaners opening up all the empty room doors to air them out or something. We jumped out of the silken soiled sheets so fast that it was as if we had been teleported. Then we teleported through the window and down the hill and onto the beach. The exhilaration raced through us with pumping bellows of power. Now we were free. We had gone in and escaped alive. We still had booze and we had the whole of boxers' day to celebrate with our friends.

That was a fine day indeed. We just lay around and did as we pleased, drinking and smoking and just taking a nap or going fishing or whatever. A grand, grand day and the weather holding out just beautifully, the proverbial roof of stars tucking us in for a good nights rest. The next day was dismal, a gray sky and dampness creeping across the land and into our bones, stiff muscles and alcohol sizzled minds. We had spent almost all of our cash on booze and there was a unanimous feeling that home was beckoning and should not be ignored.

With packs lightened by lack of food but somehow heavier than ever before we trudged forward into weather that would not abate in misery for the entire return trip. A couple of hours later and we found the nest of the Super Yuppies, empty and unguarded. George did not hesitate to scamper around the back looking for an open window while I hissed at him fiercely to leave the house alone. Any minute I expected a hail of goat herder bullets to split the deathly silence of the day.

Eventually, I walked around to the back and discovered him already in the kitchen, the fridge open and his head buried in it, chomping indiscriminately, his head thrashing left and right like a sawfish moving through a shoal of sardines. Sheepishly, I accepted an offering of left over lamb lunch but warned him on pain of death not to steal anything else. It was only an hour later that I noticed the Christmas present sticking out of his backpack and I nearly throttled him. Bad karma was the last thing I needed right then. It turned out that it was a box of French chocolates - Delicious French chocolates.

There is something about going back that saps the energy. It’s like you’ve already achieved the goal and from here on in it’s just tired, hungry work. It becomes a slog. Unknown to us, the early whisperings of tick bite fever was making itself felt. By midday we were absolutely finished, my cracked sunburned legs throbbing with the monotonous pace. When we could not take any more, we sat down and rested on a high ridge some way inland.

It was there that this bunch of kids – acting goat herders – came around the corner, all laughing and singing with their perfect white teeth and bellicose smiles. Or so they automatically seemed to me, being wrapped around the faces of what was purportedly the other side. I thought to myself: These kids are probably real hungry, probably only a meal away from savagery. I watched them approach with a cautious readiness to my gaunt frame.

It was then that I remembered the immortal words of the two reconnaissance soldiers: ‘this may be a land of very hungry savages but it’s also a hungry of very hungry savages’; and in a flash I understood the wisdom of this casual statement. Our remaining scraps of food were whipped out of our bags and ten minutes later we continued walking with each of the kids sharing one of our heavy packs and thus we continued for the remainder of the afternoon. To this day I find it absolutely astonishing that a ten-year-old child handled what I could not accomplish - quite easily - in return a few crumbs of food.

The following evening, absolutely famished and drained of all energy, we crept into the forest a bit to find a place to sleep. We had spotted signs of human habitation, or rather a burned out building that had once housed humans of some description. It gave us a bit of a bad feeling and we remembered the words and dire warnings of everybody we had met, not least the trained assassins we had encountered along the way.

So we did what all boys must do in these circumstances. We trod around in the bush loudly, calling to each other in broad voices. Sometimes we even called out in Afrikaans – or Shambok Dutch as I called it – in case there were any natives lurking nearby, waiting to pounce out with spears. It was said that they feared the Afrikaans language something fierce, unlike English, which often produced only mild, embarrassed laughter from the enemy. Then we whipped out our hunting knives and made a big show of throwing them into a big, old tree trunk.

Needless to say, we were robbed in the night. Despite all our ninja instincts and our very clever trick of placing all of our valuables in the sleeping bag to create a pillow, they just whipped our stuff away out from under our very heads, their quiet little knives slitting through the fabric. It was a horrifying thought to wake up to. Visions of those quiet knives crossing over my jugular veins haunted me. George – who retained yet his blade – could not be held back and went down to the beach to track them. Unbelievably, he found two of the packs a few minutes away, hidden in the bushes. To my undying delight, one of them contained my writing files, which had achieved a sort of cult value for me.

What we didn’t find however was our shoes. In the face of this calamity we set out, sore and mind numbingly hungry, our feet scalding on the hot stones and sensitive to every tiny, sharp rock. George was cursing so loudly and furiously that I thought he would murder the first goat herder we came across. We had decided to try and complete the last phase of the journey home – a comfortable two days walk – in one go, and did not stop for a rest.

I clearly remember that dizzying day, like the slow motion replay of every starving desert scene I had ever witnessed. It pressed on us, the ferocity of the challenge. Slowly but surely we began to lose hope, or I did at least and George wasn’t doing any better, wilting in fact, his savage Italian ferocity fizzling out like the colour yellow spread too thin. At first we tried to help each other, but eventually Rene and Ian, perhaps tasting the copper tang of their own mortalities, just switched onto automatic, leaving us trailing behind them in an ever-widening gap.

At some point I collapsed and fainted, my face hitting the dirt with the chunky promise of a bruise. George had done the same, some way before or after. There we lay through the baking day with parched lips and bulging eyes, our stomach’s twisting with hunger. I must have lain there for hours before getting up and stumbling onward into the growing night. It seemed like days passed and then the lights of the hotel swam again into view. Even as I crumbled to the ground, I saw Rene and Ian, who were having a fine little tête-à-tête on the verandah, waiting without a care, their hands hooked around some very fine Martini’s, plotting our return course across the barefoot miles that separated us from home.

We had accomplished a journey through the real world, there and back again, against almost insurmountable obstacles, but soon we would begin another journey, a journey of much great danger and almost infinite distance. I like to think that we had experienced a crash course in preparation for the gate, and beyond it, paths that would ultimately reveal our astonishing fate.