The Honor Bar

We start off with a round of beers from the fridge and go over to the balcony railing to see what’s going on down at the watering hole below. A group of elephants and water buffalo are measuring respectable distance from each other so they can each enjoy the space. It’s surprisingly quiet in this moment. We stand there taking it in. Swig a beer and watch the animal hierarchies play out around the life source.

Suddenly behind us there’s a large man with a can of coke. Where’d he come from? He just looks on with us and doesn’t say anything at first. It’s the guy we met by the dead giraffe. He was driving the safari truck with tourists to see if the lions were still around. “Amazing isn’t it?” “Unreal, man.”

He’s about my height but twice as burly and ten times the manliness. He’s a beast. Arms and legs of solid adamantium. Stoic stance, one hand on the hip. Short salt and pepper Marine-style hair. He’s got the red, bloodshot eyes that indicate a life in the bush. Like KKs eyes from the Delta. He introduces himself as Deon. He lights up a smoke.

We collectively finish our beers during introductions. Honor Bar and whatnot, “Time for a scotch?” I head over to the wall “taps”. Deon takes a step in, “The good stuff is under the bar.” He uses his coke hand to point, “Just there.”

A quick investigation reveals a bottle of Glenlivet 12 year old single malt under the bar. Shheaaa ok. “Ya, that’s better. It’s ok?” “I did offer…” I like this guy. I mark them as doubles in the book and put our beers in too. Drisdelle has already got his beer in there. “Campsite #2. Small bottle of Castle lager.” Alright a couple of Martens Pils and Glenlivet x6. Peter’s out. “Oh who am I kidding.” Ok, Glenlivet x8.

We take our scotch back to the railing to see what’s happening now. Elephants and water buffalo still meandering about. Deon points to the surrounding area, “A pack of wild dogs has been on the hunt every night. Kudu and Impala mainly. Saw some kill a kid just last night.” “Damn. Is it always like this? So many crazy noises.” “Oh ya. It’ll be like this all night.”

He tells us that Thobolo’s Lodge opened in June of last year. Figured it was a good place with the watering hole off in the distance (not the one right in front of us). “That one at the back has been here thousands of years. Migrating animals always coming to it. We drew water for the lodge, but it’s brackish. Drilled for water just here and found an amazing amount. Then elephants started coming to where we pump and they’ve opened it up into this pan now.”

He describes how they just put down a bunch more concrete. Elephants are very choosey when it comes to water. They want fresh clean water. When they first started pumping water to the lodge, one elephant was lifting concrete and dropping it with it’s trunk. It cracked the concrete on the ground. Reached down and ripped out the pipe and drank the water. That’s what created this closer watering hole below us. They supplement it with a trough from the main one.

“Elephants fighting over the water busted through the fence and into the kitchen below. So we started pumping during the night too. Keep them at the pan, just there. Kind of worked out, really.” Ok, clearly this guy is a wealth of knowledge.

He asks what we’re going to do. We tell him that we’ll be doing the Chobe River thing tomorrow and maybe another day if it’s epic (he assures us that it is). Then we’ll be on to Kasane and Victoria Falls. Not sure what we’ll do yet after that. He says Kasane has giraffes, elephants, baboons and everything walking in the streets and malls. Wtf.

There’s a big herd of elephants between the two pools now. Thirty or so elephants of varying sizes. Multiple families. This place is magic. We pause our discussion to just watch them play and fight and live.

We re-up on scotch and continue our session on the balcony. Deon describes that he’s a 3rd generation ranger in his family. Literally born in Kruger National Park. Spent his whole childhood and formative years there. “That’s crazy. What was it like?” “It never gets old. Don’t even have to see the animals. You can just listen to them. It’s always changing. Never the same.”

He became a ranger for Kruger National Park. Having literally grown up inside, he knew the area like no other. He would take people on bush walks and tours there. Says they turned into legendary events. Got to the point where he used to get booked out a year in advance in Kruger.

“So why move to this place?” His mother’s brother owns the place. “He got cancer and passed away. Asked if I’d look after it. I love it here now. A nice change. And even more remote and more animals than Kruger.”

We tell him about the Olifanstrus Camp we stayed at in Namibia. Where we spotted a massive herd of elephants coming to the watering hole. This easily rivals it.

“Did they have red lights at night?” “Yeah totally.” “The red lights make the elephants more aggressive, actually. Doesn’t work for all animals. But, we had a bar with red lights here at first. Lasted one night and the elephants came and destroyed the whole thing.”

Deon clearly has a thing for elephants. Observed them for years, I suppose. “Elephants have the most interesting social structure. Watching them makes me think they’re more intelligent than we are.”

I go back inside to pour another round of scotch. This has turned into a truly fantastic evening. Just hovering over the watering hole, watching the animals and pounding scotch while Deon drops meteor after meteor of insider information. And I now realize he’s not drinking at all. But totally on our wavelength and ready to snicker along with our antics. Feels like a rare event.

I go over to the living room area and pick up the classical guitar that’s over there. I sit on the couch and try it out. Yeah, but I can’t see the animals from here. I bring it to the balcony and grab a stool slightly away from everyone (I’ll readily admit that guitars at ‘parties’ can be fucking annoying). It’s horribly out of tune. Mark comes over and tells me Deon says the elephants find the guitar soothing.

There are 2 large elephants walking around the pool. Alright let’s see. By the time I get the harmonics right on the tuning they’ve started walking away. Well that’s fair. No one likes the tuning ‘song’. Aaaaaand now that I’ve tuned the high strings the low ones are out. Ok good try. I’d rather drink and observe then try to play a classical in the dark anyways.

I get back to the group and Deon is in the middle of a story.

The Leopard Story

Drisdelle and Peter are enthralled. What’s happening? About 15 years ago his friend was taking guests out on a game drive (I didn’t catch where this was). There are designated areas in the park to let guests out. The friend went out on a bridge to have a smoke while everyone relieved themselves. Guests noticed he was gone for a long time so they went to the radio in the truck and called it in. Another ranger from the camp came out to see what happened. His friend was found at the bottom of the bridge, neck broken and a leopard eating his stomach out…

“The nice thing about leopards is you won’t even notice you’re dead. They go for the neck and back to break it. Instant kill. Lions and cheetahs go for neck and mouth. Much worse. Dogs and hyenas tear animals apart while they’re still alive.” Not sure what the boys said to bring this thread of info on, but… what?! “There’s a pride of 22 wild dogs here that specialize in taking down elephants. Medium sized ones. It takes them a while to take them down but it feeds them for a week.”

Mark drops an honest but proper doozy with, “Are poachers a problem in this area?” There’s a side glance from Deon that seems to say ‘Is this a real fucking question?’ before he takes a pull off his cigarette and rips the question apart.

Poachers in Chobe

Deon proceeds to lay out a smattering of quick facts straight off the top of his head:

• They see poachers near the lodge about twice a week.
• All the rhinos here are gone. They’ve been shot and the rest run back across the borders to Zambia and Namibia
• 95% of people in Kasane prison are Zimbabwean caught with possession of Ivory trying to cross the border
• We’re losing one rhino every 8 hours in the Southern Africa region
• In one area, they shot a cow and it’s young and she was pregnant.
  • That’s 3 generations done with just a few bullets.
• Losing over a thousand rhinos a year
• There’s too much money on poaching rhino for them to survive.
  • Then there’s lots of scamming save the rhino organizations that raise money and never put it back into anything
  • There are some good ones though. Lawrence Anthony, the Elephant Whisperer. He had one or 2 excellent organizations
• In December of last year there were only 4.5k white rhino and 3k black rhino
  • We won’t have Rhino in the next 10 years
  • Elephants will be next

Then he lays out an interesting idea on how to protect the rhinos. Impoverished communities get pushed into poaching because it’s so profitable. But what if they rehabilitated rhinos and dehorned them. Harvest the rhino horn. It’s worth 75K usd per kilo with one horn. This can drastically help out the community. The horn grows back again in 3 years and they can harvest it again. No poachers come because they know that there is no horn on the rhino.

“But, the government says they’ll put sanctions against them. Ban from selling rhino. Very sorry sighted. It’s an organized war. It doesn’t stop.”

He tells another story:
They heard shots in Kruger. Park services was nearby. They found this odd that they were so close but didn’t know about the poachers, so they investigated. Caught one of the poachers. “Like all pigs, they squeal when you catch them.” This led them to the guy they found in Kruger from the park services that was nearby the incident. He was the top ranger for the past 5 years. He flew the drones that tracked the rhinos so he knows where all of them are. And the vet working there for years was the ring leader. Had millions in ivory stashed under his house…

I get us another round of drinks to help stomach the depressing fact that the war on poaching seems insurmountable. Deon is on to another can of Coke. He’s looking out into the distant dark past the other watering hole, “There’s another herd coming.” “What’s with all you bush guys having razor sharp eyes?” “I just look for shapes that are moving. Seen enough moving shapes to know which is which.” Sure enough. More elephants are on the way.

Back to our medium-heavy, medium-political convo. We tell Deon about coming into Botswana and all the terrible roads. Someone had told us (maybe Tombob?) that the Chinese build out the roads and maintain them just long enough to come in and clear cut a forest, or whatever. Take the local resources and get out. Meanwhile they also introduce alcohol and gambling to the community of people that they’re using for labor. People who’ve never had these things before. So they get their money back this way too. When the resources are dried up they just leave. And the place is worse off than before they got there. Basically, a modern take on colonialism.

Deon is nodding his head the whole time. “The Chinese are pouring money into tarring roads and building ports. They have money and it makes it difficult to fight them. So the infrastructure in Mozambique is from China…” He tells us of a Mozambique trip with the BBC. They had to pay at every turn to get through. They had a lead on an informant willing to talk. It was the foreign minister dealing in rhino horn. He said on tv he wouldn’t stop because he’s making more from that than his job. “The corruption is everywhere. It’s all about money. The Chinese come in and back a community and of course they’re going to support them.”

“Lion bones is a new thing in Asian culture. Grind down their bones and drink them and it supposedly gives you strength. Fueled off of superstition. It’s stupid. Hunting and killing lions for some mythical potion. Well some lions got a disease and so they bred them to feed the Chinese.” “Wow, that’s dark. In an effort to curb this? Or kill the people doing it?” “Yes. Both. But the Chinese turned around and said the farmed ones aren’t the same as the wild ones. So they went back to hunting lions.”

“They started poisoning the horns of live rhinos too. Same idea. But, they were taken to the human rights organization and charged for knowingly poisoning humans.” “Wow. Ya, we don’t really hear about this stuff.”

“Did you read the signs out front?” “Nah, it was dark when we came in.” “Have a look tomorrow. Any people from countries involved in the training and poaching of our animals is not welcome at this lodge.” “So is it mainly Asia driving the poaching thing?” “Yeah. Actually, Taiwan is also a big problem. People are wearing pangolin scale vests and rhino horn jewelry. Totally just a status thing. Makes for a big market though.” “That’s it, I’m dumping Queenie.” Drisdelle snickers. Deon is confused, “What’s that?” “Oh she’s my… ya, never mind.”

Mark is there to dig me out, “So how do you raise awareness of all this stuff?” “There are people doing things, it’s true. Prince Harry, Charles and William are actually doing things. Surprisingly. And Jackie Chan as well. We need more people openly doing though. Their idols of the Asian society are the ones we need to target. Sing songs about it or just keep the conversation open. Unfortunately the triads will kill them for that.” “Jesus, really?” “Yes, that’s true. Too much money to be made.”

The Most Interesting Man in the World

Deon steps away to take a leak or maybe get another drink. Mark and I are still reeling from the fire hose of info that just hit us. “Well this is crazy. I suppose there’s a way to incorporate GIS into the conservancy stuff that Deon is talking about.” “Definitely. We should hook him up with some story maps.” “Actually. We should make this our jobs.” There’s a half laugh. But, there’s also a good nugget of truth in there. It’d be worthwhile being on the analytical side of the software instead of the development side for a change.

Deon is back with a coke and a smoke. “There. Another herd coming in.” We look out, “Where? Don’t see em.” He points straight out with his smoke hand, “6 o’clock.” Does that mean we’re at 12 o’clock? How do the o’clocks work? Mark’s got his binoculars out, “How the hell are you seeing that? That’s crazy.” 

Within minutes, hundreds of water buffalo are coming in. “This balcony is the best.” “You can stand here all day. I’d say it’s better at night though. Here look at this.” Deon pulls out his phone. He’s got a video queued up. “There’s a leopard in the area you’re driving tomorrow that is really conniving.”

He shows us a video of a safari truck along the Chobe river. It’s being filmed from another truck beside it. They’ve stopped to look at some impala by the river. A leopard stealthily sneaks under the truck with people just sitting in it. Then it makes a run at one of the impalas by the river. Just misses it and the herd bolts away. “Look at that!” “That’s insane.” “He’s so disgusted that he didn’t get the Impala haha.”

We show Deon the leopard that we saw on the road earlier in the day. “That’s a female. You can tell by the face. Much more defined in the face. That leopard is 2.5-3 years old.” “You ever have a run in with a leopard?” “I raised a leopard once.” “What the hell?” “Ya, raised a cheetah too. Here look.” 

The Cheetah Story

He’s got pictures of a cheetah that he raised on his phone. He’s swiping through them. Beautiful cat. “I taught it how to run by tying a string of cans to my motorcycle and having it chase them. Didn’t take long before it was overtaking me on the bike.”

The cheetah used to sleep with him in his bed. Licking his face. It purs when he comes close. He can take meat away and it’s fine. She was the runt of the litter. It was left behind. Because it’s endangered they are allowed to intervene. Deon has a special permit. The cat is at home in South Africa with a friend right now. He misses his cheetah. This guy is incredible.

Peter starts to relate his house cats to the cheetah. “Aaaahhh. It’s not the same thing, dude. Raising Otterpop.” I’ve got my hands out like weighted scales. One down, one way up, “Raising a cheetah.” Deon politely comes to his defense, “The big cats are still just cats though. Lots of similarities. I bread some caracals once and released them back into the wild. They acted like big house cats.”

Deon takes another break and steps away. Peter and Jamie take the opportunity to call it a night as well. Jamie’s got his eyes on the prize, “Need to get an early start tomorrow for Chobe.” He is slated to drive tomorrow. “Ya you’re right. You guys should definitely go to bed. Me and Mark are gonna kill that bottle though haha.” “Figured.”

Mark and I tally up another couple of doubles in the ol’ honor book. Back to the balcony and I’m looking at Mark with my eyebrows up on the moon. “Soooooo… This is the most interesting man in the world, right?” “He’s amazing. Raised a cheetah? And a leopard? And the level of info that he’s dropping. It’s crazy.” “Ya, this Thobolos thing is working out aaaaaalright.”

Deon continues to regale us with insane stories as we drain the honor bar of scotch. A huge python with angular shapes sticking out of it while it moves along because it ate an impala whole. A guy who rolled over on a blister beetle and it bit his cheek. Had to fly him out cuz his face was melting. Blister down to there. “Africa is all about luck.”

Mark and I are getting drunk enough to drop color commentary on just about everything right now. Deon is cracking up over it and soon we’re all wiping happy tears from our eyes and uncontrollably man-giggling about all the stupid shit we’re saying. Soon we’re on to honey badgers. “Honey Badgers are crazy. They will approach a kill and Lions will back off.” “Honey badger don’t care.” Deon’s laughing but has no idea what we’re talking about.

The Honey Badger Story

Deon tells us about being called to get a honey badger out of a kitchen in a nearby camp. Someone left a door open and a honey badger came in so he went around back and opened the other door. He came running in yelling thinking it would be scared of the noise and run out the opposite door. Honey badger don’t care. Instead it ran straight at him to attack and Deon had to jump up on a braai stand. The honey badger kept trying to get up but it couldn’t quite reach. He really wanted to mangle Deon though. So it was using mops and brooms trying to build bridges up to get to him. Deon had to keep kicking them down. “Tenacious little bastard. If it gets up here I’m fucked!” He was stuck up on that braii defending himself for hours until the honey badger finally got bored and lumbered off. Sounds terrible, but also we can’t help but laugh at it.

“There are two things to be scared of. Buffalos and honey badgers. Elephants will face you and flare their ears but you can intimidate them. Hyenas are the most cowardice of all things. Make a lot of noise and run them off. Never run in Africa. Unless it’s a honey badger. Run from Buffalo too, actually. Climb a tree. Lions are not interested. Make a noise. They’re cowardly. Naturally scared.” “What about leopards?” “Leopards are always solitary. And stealthy. And very deadly. You’ll have to fight them.” “Soooo… there are three things to be scared of?” We break out in nervous laughter. “Yes.” He counts on his fingers as he says them, “Leopards, buffalo…” He smiles at us, “And definitely fucking honey badgers.” We’re howling.

The Water Buffalo Story

Mark and I continue to polish our livers with scotch and Deon tells another story of a 4 day bush walk he took some tourists on. 8 – 10 people. He’d somehow missed spotting a herd of water buffalos. The group was passing across some plains and the herd was coming towards them from the side all of the sudden. There were too many and nowhere to hide or time to get away. “I felt terrible about this. Got a lot of flak and bad reviews for this one…”

He told everyone that if they wanted to survive, they’d have to sit down on the ground, put their head between their knees and not make a sound. He’s doing the motions and showing us the position. “I told them to hold their breath as long as they could and don’t look up. Soon the hooves of the herd were all around us. Stomping down beside us. Dust coming up around us.”

Mark’s wide-eyed, “Fucking christ, this sounds terrifying.” “Yes. It was. A girl started crying. She couldn’t help it. And I couldn’t do or say anything about it. Just had to sit there sweating and hope the buffalo don’t turn on her and gore or trample her.” “Oh. My. Gaaaawd!” “We huddled there curled up on the ground for nearly an hour as they passed. Scrunched up. Silent as we could. Some had pissed and shit themselves in fear. We were filthy and tired already from the previous days’ hikes. We lived through it, thankfully. I had to take a small break after that one.” “Ya, I imagine. That’s absolutely insane.”

Some more elephants are down at the watering hole now. This night honestly couldn’t have worked out any better. Killer camp dinner. Honor Bar. Animals around a watering hole to watch. Bonkers stories from the most interesting man in the world. The Chobe 500 might have sucked today but this right here is hard to top.

Mark’s contemplating another drink, “How we doing on the ol’ honor bar?” “Looks like we’re almost done this bottle of Glenlivet. I’ve got us tallied up at 16 shots.” “Finish it off and call it a night?” “Sounds good. We should really get to Chobe River early as we can.” “That’s what I was thinking too.”

Even more elephants show up to the watering hole. We’re swishing scotch around in our glasses watching on.

The Elephant Story

Deon launches into another brain melter. He describes a scene where there was an elephant that would hang around camp. Used to pick up giant logs and carry them around. A big, sturdy bull. Great, strong elephant. Unfortunately, it wandered onto some tracks and got hit by a train and died. That evening Deon heard a rattling at the gate. It’s the female mate. She’s just banging her head against the gate, over and over. “The saddest thing I’ve ever seen. Just banging her head on the fence.”

Deon went down to her. The rest of the herd scattered. He started talking with her. “I got as close to the gate as comfortable and kept telling her, ‘I know about your mate. I’m sorry. It is sad.’ and consoling her.” He’s tearing up slightly as he says all this, “She was in a bad way. Confused and sad. We called her Becky.”

Becky came back 3 days in a row. Same thing. Banging her head on the fence. And Deon would go down each time and talk to her and try to calm her down. Then he didn’t see her again and was always wondering what happened to her.

A year later, Deon was taking a tour group out, packing up the vehicles, and heard something crashing through the trees. Everyone in the truck! He turns around and there’s a female elephant looking like she wants to charge. Whoa whoa, girl. Easy. Calm down now. The elephant sees Deon and relaxes. Wait… it’s Becky the elephant.

Deon approaches Becky and she reaches out to him with her trunk. She pulls him into her and puts his arm in her mouth. Then she uses her back leg and pushes a baby elephant towards him. The baby lifts it’s little trunk and smells all around Deon. Does a circle around him. And Becky just keeps holding Deon there with her trunk and her mouth, letting the baby get to know him. Introducing the baby to the man that had treated her so kindly when the father passed away.

The baby starts to suckle and so Becky lets Deon go. He drops to his knees underneath her simply shocked over the whole experience. Afterwards, she went off into the bush. He just knelt down in the sand and cried. He never saw her again.

Mark and I are speechless. Actually, we’re crying. Deon is crying. We’re all crying. Sniffling, laughing and crying. “Well thanks, Deon. Now we’ve got three blubbering idiots on the patio here.” We start laughing again. Mark can’t believe it, “Man, what a story.” “It was intense. Elephants are so powerful.” “That story was powerful. Gonna need the rest of that scotch now.”

We wind things down after the emotional journey of all these crazy stories. Finally Mark and I do decide to call it a night. Feels like we could do this all night but we have to hit up the Chobe River tomorrow and should probably get an early start. We bid Deon good night and get back to Belinda. Thankfully, we don’t run into any animals along the way.

We’re by the truck brushing scotch off our teeth and the two of us just keep shaking our heads and quietly saying things like “Unreal. Just unreal” and “That shit is nuts.” “Peter and Jamie missed out. Those stories were crazy.” We take the ladder up to Belinda’s attic and get settled in. I just hear Mark in the darkness echo the sentiment from before, “Yep. That’s the most interesting man in the world.”