We’ve ridden African elephants and done the evening game drive. In between I’ve had the full-body Swedish massage from a Zulu woman who used the point of her elbow and the side of her knee and was panting slightly throughout. Now we are six of us around a dinner table in a replica Zulu meeting hut. The waiters are Pedi.
With each course a different wine is poured. My neighbour vulgarly asks the cost of the first, a silky red, and is told that it isn’t on the wine list. However, a bottle from the same vineyard, of an inferior vintage, can be had for the equivalent of £400. I’m studiously trying to keep up with these various wines and remember which is which. But I’m reserving my greater seriousness for the succession of Tequila Sunrises being placed in front of me in glasses about a foot tall.
There was a Tequila Sunrise among an imaginative selection of drinks on the welcome-back-to-camp tray after the afternoon game drive. I was attracted by the trippy colours and the ridiculous size of the glass. Later, when we assembled on the decking beside the crocodile pool for pre-dinner drinks, I told the Pedi waiter I’d like another one of those colourful jobs.
These Pedi waiters are stalwart chaps. When I said I was a lifelong admirer of their formidable illegitimate warrior-king Sekhukhune, they couldn’t have been more pleased. Since then they’ve treated me like a brother. I’ve carried my unfinished Tequila Sunrise to the dinner table and moments after I’ve drained it, one of them is bending at my shoulder, whispering respectfully in my ear about having another one. There isn’t a trace of irony or derision in his manner. My unhesitating assent gladdens him, and he keeps them coming all evening.
Near the end, for afters, the sommelier announces Napoleon Bonaparte’s favourite wine, a potent little number from the historic wine-growing district of Constantia. I’m not overly keen on wine, no matter how expensive, but I’m with Napoleon on this one. It’s yellow, sweet and numbs the nut nicely. The Pedi waiter totes the bottle around the table, carefully tipping it into our smallest wine glass. I sling mine back in one as soon as he stops pouring. Proud of me, he immediately pours me another. The general manager is with Napoleon on this one, too. A discreet, fanatical nod from him and the waiters are wrestling the cork out of a second, then a third bottle. By the time coffee is being mooted, I might not be thinking about invading Botswana, but I’m certainly ready to hit the nearest town, if there is one.
The game reserve covers 30,000 hectares and shares fences with other game reserves. But during last night’s game drive I’d noticed a sprinkling of lights on the horizon, enough lights perhaps to warrant a bar. I mention it now to the assembly, and the general manager rallies immediately to the standard. Yes, there is a town, he says. It is about half an hour away by safari truck. A mere spit. And in the town there is indeed a bar, which should be quite lively, it being both a Saturday night and National Cleavage Day. He’d be more than happy to drive us there, he says. We should go.
The town is a small Afrikaner dorp called Vaalwater, he adds. The literal translation of Vaalwater is ‘murky water’. The bar will probably be packed with Afrikaner farm boys and girls getting properly drunk and doing that one-armed waltz that they do. So be warned, he says, the ambience might be more agricultural than some of us are used to.
As far as I am concerned, I cannot think of anything in this world that I would rather do at this moment than drive for half an hour across the veld, under midnight stars, to a bar choc-full of Afrikaner farm boys and girls, all smashed out of their minds on a Saturday night and waltzing as their forefathers used to do. I rise to my feet. Take us to Murky Water’s most self-consciously Boer bar on this your National Cleavage Day, I say to the general manager, and our lives will be complete.
The eventual line-up for the trip to town is the general manager in the driving seat, me, and one of the Pedi waiters, sleepy now, who slips down from the truck on the outskirts and vanishes into the darkness. Vaalwater’s bar is emblazoned with light and inside all is exactly as the general manager had predicted. Not a black, an old or even a partially sober face. I shoulder my way politely through the imprecise dancing and a woman behind the bar ambles over to take my order. The expression is neither welcoming nor hostile. ‘Laager, please, darling,’ I tell her.
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