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Richard Waters[/caption]
“There are two absolutes I think I’ve learnt in the last decade-and-a-half of wandering the planet: people are generally decent no matter colour or creed, it is difficult circumstances that corrupt; and wild animals - however cute-looking - are animals.”
Sinking in a croc-infested river, Borneo
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Nile Crocodile and Wildebeest by Masai Mara, Kenya.[/caption]
Borneo is the world’s third largest island and with its primal forests, one of the wildest; especially in the Indonesian portion of Kalimantan. I found myself sharing a boat with a guide, and two very English gents; one a gallery owner the other a doctor and botanist. As we made our way back down a winding ink-black river having visited an ex headhunting village, our boat snagged on a hidden log and began to take in water. It’s twilight and those bulbous roots dangling over the water are starting to look like severed heads, just as the forest on either side of us is lighting up with a feral audience of eyes. Despite the presence of crocodiles, we’re forced to paddle to the side while the guide tries to patch up our boat. Back on the water half an hour later we strike a rock and the boat goes down.
Musthing Elephants, Africa
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African Bull Elephant in Tanzania[/caption]
Male elephants produce a surge of testosterone which they secrete in a brown ooze. It makes them unpredictable and grumpy. One night I’m camping by the Shire River in Malawi, the groans of hippos nearby, the scuffle of warthogs outside on the lawn. My friend shakes me awake but whispers to be quiet. My head is by the thin gauze window and outside in the light of a burning taper is an elephant’s tusk almost as large as me belonging to the most garagantuan beast I’ve ever seen. He’s burst through the wall in search of fruit, which the monkeys in the fig tree right above are obligingly throwing down at him. By the look of the dark stuff down his neck I can tell he’s musthing. Those ears are not for show they can hear a great deal more than us and I’m literally inches away, trying not to breathe lest I surprise him and he tears down my cabin like so much wet cardboard.
Bandits, Mexico
The Pan-American highway which begins in Colombia and passes through Central America is at its most dangerous in Mexico. Cue a night of being stopped by bandits (never get out of your vehicle - like me, which resulted in being beaten with a rifle butt), then half an hour later my friend and I were stuck in a jungle crossfire between police and guerrillas on a lonely mountain top; then finally, (believe it or not but straight after the police waved us through) being stalked by a mystery car with blazing headlights and revving engine playing cat and mouse with us as the van’s radiator was steaming, the engine overheating, and a yawning abyss a few feet from the road. We were saved by a dry riverbed with a herd of cows on it, behind which we hid the campervan from our pursuer.
