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It was a mega early start for the nature walkers this morning, I didn't really have to get up, but the sunrise basically woke me up. George wanted to go on the nature walk, so he asked me if I could have breakfast ready for when they all got back. No worries, I said.
I went back to bed for about an hour and then got up and began to cook breakfast over the camp fire, assisted by Alana who also had no intention of going on the walk. I was really thirsty, and realized the only thing that was cold was the booze. I went and got one of my Rum and cokes…..at 7:30am. We managed to make beans, scrambled eggs, fried tomatoes and toast. Plus a boiled egg for Nic who is lactose intolerant. I also managed to burn myself on one of the pots and kept having to run over to the esky and dunk my hand in the freezing cold water.
I had breakfast ready for 9am, my guess was pretty spot on and the group got back in perfect time. They all thanked me for breakfast and George said, Good job Kris. It was actually really good to be left with a bit of responsibility this morning. I've been feeling like a bit of a spare wheel on this training trip. I'm not in a chores group on the duty roster with the passengers, nor am I actually the tour leader and in charge of anything, so I'm usually left not knowing what to do with myself and feeling uncomfortable that everyone else has something to do and I don't. You do not sit on your ass and an overlander,
We laid around camp on our towels and sleeping mats in the sun, I had a Jack Daniels and coke and a cigar and listened to some heavy metal on my iPhone. You're the man Kris, said Alana with a laugh. Damn right, I joked. George bummed a puff of my cigar.
For the rest of the afternoon we played around in the water, we swam, played games and even had a go at poling the mokoros ourselves. Scotty was by far the best, Callum fell off a lot and me, well, I wasn't too bad except for the half an hour it took me to turn around against the current because I wouldn't let anyone else help me.
At 3pm it was time for our sunset Mokoro cruise, we got into the dugout canoes and off we went again poling through the reeds. We stopped for a bit of swimming about half way through and then another nature walk, which myself and about half the group declined. We stayed in the Mokoros playing trivia games until the others got back. We watched an amazing sunset, unfortunately, the polers didn't stop in a great spot, but I didn't point this out as none of the group (including George) had done this before, of course I had with Dragoman and it was the most spectacular sunset I had ever seen.
We got back to camp at about 7pm and began to cook dinner, which was bangers and mash. After dinner the polers put on a show for us and began to sing, they also did this really funny frog dance, which made us all crack up. For their last number they sang, Beautiful Africa, the same song that our polers had sung two years ago. I still knew all the words and it made me a bit nostalgic. If I had been on that trip, tomorrow night would have been the talent quest, with Yngvar playing the part of the crazy, Norwegian bilingual hippo.
After the polers had finished we sang for them. We got up and danced around the fire and we did a medly of the chorus of popular songs, including American Pie, The Gamble, Summer of '69, Brown Eyed Girl and Yellow Submarine. When we had finished the awesome medley, people started filtering off to bed. George, Callum, Tara, Trian and I stayed up drinking, unfortunately so did Ruben, our head poler who was a bit of a d*** and kept stealing our booze and George's cigarettes.
We drank until there was nothing left in the esky, Callum at one point insisted there must be something left in the eksy. For some reason this made me laugh, a lot, must have been the alcohol. He reminded me of a jackal raiding the rubbish bins at Etosha, the way he was going about it. Finally, after we had absolutely zero booze left (and no one else had either!) We all went to bed.
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