PETERHOUSE NOSTALGIA

... MEMORIES ...

THE 1984 KALAHARI EXPEDITION

Dear All

I promised I would tell you all about the trip to the Kalahari so I'd better get on with it before I forget; it's even now beginning to seem quite a long time ago although we got back two weeks ago exactly!

PJG gets into organisational overdrive

The whole things really began as least as a far back as half term (Peter Ginn started planning last October) when the pigeon hole began to fill up with page after page of Kalahari Expedition 1984 bumph - 'General Notes' - 'Exchange Control Forms' - 'Lists of Duty Groups and Activities' 'RULES' (!!!) - 'Travel Orders', maps, chits to fill out for the number of cold drinks you were planning to consume over the two weeks ....a recipe for Anthill Bread, the directions for the first 50 kms of the journey etc etc etc and we all (staff) had two evening get-togethers which mainly consisted of P J Ginn telling anecdotes of What Happened on the 1962 Expedition - or the 1976 one, or 1980 and so on.

Dramatis personae

The 'staff' consisted of Peter Ginn the leader, John Greenacre the senior master, bachelor, eccentric, likes his Little Glass of Something most of the time, and has been on almost every school expedition that Peter Ginn has run. Then there was a bachelor master from Ruzawi -28ish - called Pete Roberts, a vast great fellow crammed into little shorts, who played Pantomime Dame in the Christmas Pantomime, beard beer belly, the lot, but an amazingly quiet and very shy man. One parent also came, Bob Nilson who farms land adjoining Peterhouse (his wife and daughter declined!) but his son was one of the youngest boys. He was big and his party piece was to chew glass. He had come on the expedition in order to be with his son and to get to know him better and enjoy it all with him - and missed the rest of his family. He was also generous and helpful. Then there was Linda Tyas, the 21-year old teacher of Biology from Grimsby (and Newnham College, Cambridge, out here for a year) and June and Richard Marriott who you already know, more or less! June's two sons Jonathan and Jason were there as was their cousin Justin just out from England and fish-belly-white!

There were 24 boys altogether, 3 sixth formers, 3 5th formers and all the rest were little boys, 13 and 14.

Getting the vehicles ready

So now you've got us all pictured, let me get going on the vehicles which isn't so easy as I haven't got a clue what any of them were. We were given a group of six boys each (4 vehicles); they were called Groups A, B C and D and each had a 'leader' - a senior chap, and they stuck to their groups more or less for the whole two weeks, as you will see. Our 'Travelling Order' was all worked out and masterminded by PJG, and we were first as we had the only Land-Rover with windows all round! About a week before setting off our cars were all taken up to the school workshops were the boys overhauled them, and built in our case a large wooden board that entirely covered the back seats making a good storage space underneath and a flat though rather raised floor for the passengers; mattresses went on these, and the odd pillow and knapsack and bag of biscuits and tape recorder ... and they really got quite cosy!

Term ended at lunch time on 9 August and the entire team began packing the seven ton lorry that also came with us, driven by Basil the school driver and Yewsini his mate. We took everything, including enough water for three days. Those boys really worked their hearts out getting barrels and stuff up onto the lorry, crates of food, two fridges, all the petrol and diesel, all the tents, two bird hides in sections, two eight foot table tops, then all our cars were also packed up. After us in the driving order cam Richard and June in a borrowed yellow Land-Rover with cab and tarpaulin canopy, then Bob Nilson in a fawn and white van thing, with driver's cab also separate, Pete Roberts went with him, and then came John Greenacre in a brand new Toyota Land Cruiser with Peter Ginn.

Getting going

ETD was 4 a m Going to a party (black tie) at the Rector's Lodge didn't help one's leaping up like a lark but we weren't late; we took Linda with us, and she spent the night with us here so we'd all be in the right place at the right time - clad in our tracksuits in the early chill (mine very proudly shining and new!) we drove to the Admin Block, peered at each other, collected our appointed 6 boys and a trailer for each vehicle containing the sleeping bags plus kit of each passenger, and off we set.

It was quite funny being in the lead, because I had my bulging file with all the Hand-outs in it (terribly efficient) and a torch, but of course when the driver said "Left or Right here ??? with his foot poised over the brakes and 3 Land-Rovers plus a 7 ton lorry thundering on behind ... panic! Linda held the torch and I got out the relevant bit of paper and began to read it out "place salt in the flour and mix well ... whoops, wrong side of paper!!!!

By the next turning place it was broad daylight, the sun having come up in just about 3 minutes like it seems to here. The boys all slept. Dorrit had packed up a bog brown paper bag each containing enough picnic for breakfast and lunch, and although we stopped for an official breakfast- eating, we didn't bother again as they all just chewed away as and when they wanted, and when we stopped at garages (the petrol and diesel we carried was only for Botswana) they all bought fizzy drinks and ice lollies and bags of stuff.

The trip

We seemed to stop about every hour - petrol, going behind bushes, something leaking and the odd puncture! The form was for us never to lose sight of the chap behind, and so on down the line. Every time someone had a Rattle, or a Drip, all into a garage, bonnet up and 5 male heads disappeared under it at once!! J W Greenacre sat serenely in his Land Cruiser and had a cigar. Several of the boys were excellent mechanics living on farms, and a lot could drive as you only have to be 16. It was so funny at one garage; June, Linda and I asked for the key to the ladies only to be told that it was Out of order. Never mind, she said, you may use the gents. That's very kind , we told her, but there are at the moment 32 gents standing in a row outside it!!!!

We got rather held up going over the border when they suddenly produced a Form that Peter Ginn hadn't anticipated, and he anticipated most things! This had to be filled in by Everyone - and do you think any of the boys had a pen? There were 35 of us leaning on the trailers on the by now hot sun, with about 8 pens between us - and two of them mine she says proudly, except it was rather painful to watch my Parker being manhandled by a chap who was using it upside down !!! Quite a big no-man's land 7 or 8 miles, and then another delay getting us in to Botswana; PJG had got Possible Stopping Places earmarked all over the place, but once past the border we had to reach his Francistown friend and fellow ornithologist who had very daringly offered us his garden! By the time we got there it was already dark, and the 7 ton lorry got stuck half in and half out of the gate.

Orapa

Next day's journey to the place we were going to camp was only a 5 hour one, but involved getting into Orapa at one end and out at the other, and as it's a diamond mining town owned by De Beers and entirely fenced in, we had to have more passes issued and time-consuming red-tape. The town was small; two big shops, two small shops, bank, GPO, baker and a vast great hospital owned by De Beers but serving half Botswana. It was very flat, and very hot, and the landscape was all grey. Grey sand where you would expect it to be earth, bare grey trees, hardly any of them taller than Bishie, with one or two old grey leaves hanging on here and there. Our wheels carved tracks through the sand, and if you screwed up your eyes and altered the colour it was just like a typical English Christmas Card!!

PJG says Important Things while JWG concentrates on the essentials

At Orapa PJG sprang out and said Important Things to Mike Barter, his "contact" who had fixed up our camping place, who was also the dentist, and a Peterhouse Old Boy! J W Greenacre took himself into the Bottle Store and came out with a great number of bottles of Whisky, making everyone else very envious because they hadn't got any Botswana 'poola'!!

Mopipi Bays Club

30 miles outside the Orapa barricades we came to a huge dam (Mopipi) with a marvellous African mud-hut village along one shore and down on the south side was the 'Mopipi Bays Club' consisting of as far as I ever saw, a tap, and some loos!!! There was a marvellous signboard beside the dam saying "Please do not tease the Hippos; beware of the Crocs!!!"

The Camp site

The place we camped in was 2 miles on from there, it was an empty pan - the trees, most Mopani - were taller and some were even green on top, it was really just a large clearing in the scrubby old Christmas Card, and I was awfully pleased with the look of it. Setting up the camp was awful : so hot, and no one except PJG knew what to do. Lots of the boys had headaches by this time, and I had administered nearly all my headache pills before the first aid box was off-loaded!! 'Heat-Fatigue' tablets were init when we got it open, and everyone had a few of those and felt better! More or less all at the same time two large fire trenches were dug, 5 loo-trenches, 6 showers were hung and surrounded by tarpaulin, the 'kitchen' tent went up and the 'Office' tent, and the great awning that went over the 24 boys' beds, and 6 staff tents, ours was our dear old friend who is still in perfect condition even after 20 years good use! The generator was set up, and the fridges attached to their gas cylinders, and eventually that night we had the first of 14 suppers of packet soup, tinned meat, tinned vegetables, and tinned fruit salad!

The routine

We stayed there for 12 days and nights; how it worked was like this. The boys were still formed into groups A, B, C and D; one of them was 'Duty Group'. They were on duty from 4 pm to 4 pm and had to stay in the camp "two of them visible at all times" We never quite found out why, but still. they had to do all the work; early morning tea at 6.30, breakfast at 7.00, sweeping the camp and the tents, disinfecting the loos, baking 12 loaves of bread, making the lunch, chopping the fire wood, heating the shower water, making the tea, cooking the supper - jolly hard work. June was i/c food, and pointed out what they had to use, and both of us loitered and advised until they got the hang of it (which some of them never did.)

Meanwhile, pendant ce temps ... Group B (let's say) was on Bird Banding. This meant going out to some likely spot where the leaves were greenish, or near a well, or close top the dam, where plenty of birds seemed to be flying around, and put up nets. These were like huge volley-ball nets, with a light metal pole at each end with guy-ropes, and the net was like raspberry net i e you couldn't see it until you were all entangled up in it, and this is what happened to the birds!!

Tits and Little Brown Jobs

Every couple of hours the bird banders would return to the Camp with their catches in little bank money-bags ( a few going cheep, cheep most angrily!) and these were taken to the Office Tent for banding. It was really one of the most interesting aspects of the whole trip; PJG is a recognised ornithologist, and has a Banding Number of a computer in Johannesburg. You have to identify the bird - PJG can tell you at a glance and what's more he'll give you it's Robert's number (Roberts Book of African Birds) You then weigh the bird, measure its beak and wing a, record the whole thing in triplicate, clip the wing onto the leggie, and take them all back to set them free where they were caught. We became quite expert at spotting the "orange vented tit babbler" but never stopped thinking it was funny! We only caught one that we had already ringed a few days before. The most exciting was the small Falcon, the brightest was a scarlet breasted shrike, and the smallest was the Penduline Tit and in the main they were LBJ - Little Brown Job.

Photography

Group C will at this time be doing Photography. They used all PJG's equipment, having had plenty of lessons about it at Peterhouse before setting off. Hides were put up in all sorts of places where they had found nests - one about 30 feet up peering into a Fish Eagle's nest, several on the beach (there was a lot of 'beach' because the dam was rather empty!) near sand-plovers' nests and I don't really know what else because I only got to do the Photography session once, when I sat for an hour in my hide just before sun-set waiting for my Chestnut Banded Sand- Plover to have 'the light in her eyes' so I could press the button!!! Later on they borrowed a boat and built a hide on it, and got one of the little boys (Connor, who was quite impervious to crocs and not-to-be teased hippos) to push it out to the island so they could photograph the flamingoes and pelicans. "No croc in his right mind would even lick Connor" said J W Greenacre calmly.

Ecology

The last group had to do 'Ecology';. They did a bit of shrimping in the shallows and discovered there was ';nothing' in the water and dug down a few holes to find that there was 'nothing much' lower down as either!!! In fact it was super to be on a day's Ecology, because we just went to somewhere nice, and the boys fished or lay in the sun, or pushed each other in the water, or went to sleep. We all then said how "terribly interesting" it had been on our return to camp!

Further essentials

So that was how we spent the days, with a day shopping in Orapa, two groups at a time. We did not have very much travel allowance, having already been to Durban this year, but we bought some raisins and porridge oats and Marmite - and Whisky!! The essentials. And sardines and Rowntree's Fruit Gums. Funny the sort of things people crave for when they live in Zimbabwe.

The trip to the diamond mine

The other break in the routine was a trip round the diamond mine; this was organised for us by one of the Chief Mining Engineers, who was another Peterhouse Old Boy. Not everyone went - some boys had seen enough diamond mines already - but about 24 of us did, and we all sat in the back of the 7 ton lorry to save taking lots of cars and wasting fuel. At least Bishie didn't, because he sat in the cab and chatted to Basil. I had to tie my sunhat on with string like on Fuarloch fishing trips. it was fascinating seeing over the mine, it is all opencast so we didn't have to go down any holes, and we were driven in between the various Points of Interest in a De Beers bus, all wearing plastic crash helmets - I suppose a diamond might have flown through the air and hit us on the head? The driver was the closest we saw to a Kalahari Bushman; he was yellow and small and different, with a big bottom like bushmen are supposed to have. We saw the earth and rocks being scrapped off a dried up lake and driven to giant crushers that squish it down to large gravel size; we weren't allowed into the place where radar detects the diamonds and they are blown out of the gravel and shot away through a different conveyor belt to be stored, but we were allowed through the High Security Area RED zone (!) doors into the sorting rooms where long white gloves are actually let into the glass cases, so you put your hands in and sort them with tweezers, but you can't get any out because you are on the wrong side of the gloves. We arrived during their tea break so of course the Peterhouse boys had their sticky hands into the gloves in a trice and were tweezering away merrily with X million dollars worth of shineys by the time the guards came back.

There was an amazing nerve centre that we went into ; it had a desk in the middle with close circuit television and all round the walls were lights and things that showed you every single piece of machinery in the whole mine, and what was working and what wasn't.

Scorpions and other friends

Other little events included the wood cutters finding quite a large snake one evening in their woodpile, and Connor (of course!) tearing out of his shower when the cry of snake went up, and with one hand clutching his towel round his middle, he caught it with the other, by the tail and whirled it round his head like a lasso!

Another chap was sawing down a hollow Mopani tree to take back to Springvale as a breeding box for birds in the new conservation area and found it already inhabited by a land iguana which must have been over two feet from end to end. he quite merrily picked it up and brought it back for all of us to see. there were quite a lot scorpions, but I never noticed one that wasn't kindly held under my nose by some small boy who thought that I'd be interested!

I really forgot to worry about creepy crawlies once we got there although I was glad our tent had a sewn-in bottom; the boys just curled up in the sand when they felt sleepy and no one was bitten or stung by anything - they also kept their sunhats on without being told to, and went to bed early without a set time. Poor things; in fact I think that they were exhausted!

We got our drinking water from a stand pipe in Mopipi Village and collected it in three huge drums. For other water we went to Mopipi Bays Club with a water wagon towed behind one of the land-Rovers; gosh it stank too! Even the drinking water was salty and smelly and you could taste it through the tea and coffee - but not the soup! I think it was amazing that there was not one upset tummy among the entire lot of us.

Spring Hare hunting with JWG

There were several evenings when after supper instead of having a third whisky John Greenacre said "Who's for Spring Hare hunting?"

I went out on the first expedition. One boy sat on the roof of the Toyota with a brilliant light. As we drove along he swept it over the ground until; it caught the eyes of a Spring Hare - then we gave chase .... in the car!! Old Greenie with his 3 day beard and clamped cigar, crouching over the wheel just following the hare wherever it went, including through thorn bushes and almost down a ant bear hole. Then, as soon as it stopped running he would jam on his brakes which was the signal for the boys in the back to leap out of the back of the truck and run like maniacs after the poor terrified hare. It was so funny and they never got near catching on. Of course we got completely lot as there were not roads and no lights, but someone recognised the Southern Cross so we got back again in the end, after dazzling a black-backed jackal in our light which the boys did not go after.

The rat in the fridge

Really I haven't explained how much wild life there was around; we saw two lovely hippos several times in the dam, and there were goats, donkeys and ostriches trundling about all over the place. In one of our fridges was a dead rat, a prized possession of one of our Naturalists; we asked PJG if it was really necessary for us to have a dead rat in the fridge - he said, "Goodness yes, it wouldn't keep for a day out of the fridge in this heat" So June and I moved the cheese. It was later joined by two birds - more of our friends the Tit babblers. Cheese was the every-other-day lunch excitement; one slice of bread, one slice of spam, half a tomato (until they ran out) and either a tiny bit of Edam or a handful of raisins - on alternate days!

Packing up

Then it was time to start the preparation for the journey home. The boys dug a large inspection pit and drove the vehicles over it and did all sorts of mends and tighten ups. We had to get Journey Food together, and Journey Water. We even loaded our fire wood for the night on the way home. It was all such a rush because the border shuts at 5 pm and most of the day it didn't much look as if we would make it in time - we had so many punctures and as it was mainly dirt roads in that part we stopped every 20 kms to check the others were following (they couldn't come close because of the dust) and tighten up the trailer's wheels.

At each stop there was no shade - I sat up against the wheels of the Land-Rover in the 18 ins of shade that they gave out! The boys just snoozed, or got out and changed wheels, depending on what was called for. We reached the border 15 minutes before it closed! We stayed the night at Plumtree school which is ten minutes from the border and had bedrooms and baths - and our old friend the packet soup, tinned meat, tinned veg. and no tinned fruit because it had run out!

It was about eight hours back from there with a very welcome visit to Bulawayo where PJG bought us all hot pies to keep for lunch but everyone ate them straight away. It was 6 pm on the dot as we pulled up to the Admin. Block at Peterhouse. The boys unloaded all the stuff and then we sent to PJG's house where his wife had made supper for everybody, and PJG made awards for Distinction and Merit - i e who had leapt about most keenly on the trip!!! It seemed unfair as they were all so marvellously good, every one of them.

And then we Went Home.

Written by a Peterhouse staff wife
From the 1984 magazine

7 September 1984