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Day 4
Leaving at 7am again, Basil and I go to his office, via the Lyons office (tea company), to strike a deal. At the office I download my email and find that although the internet connection is not good, I can get on ICQ, which is actually more than I can do at home. I spend the rest of the day at the office, observing proceedures and chatting to Pam and Joyce. At the end of the day Basil gives me a guided tour of the complex, and then we drive home. Dinner is take away pizza while watching “The House on Haunted Hill”.
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Day 3
What a busy day. I am awake at 6am, and leave with Basil by 7 for his office a short distance away in Harare. Here I am introduced to Pam, his personal assistant, and get to see some photos he has taken of Reaper’s operations over the past few years. With cheques signed and business generally attended to, we depart again for the rural town of Rusape, where Reapers own a petrol filling station. The trip takes about an hour, and when we arrive I am surprised to see attendants at each pump, before realising that self-service stations are simply not present in Zimbabwe. I am introduced to Davina, the station manager who gives me a tour while Basil conducts a meeting. “I hear that you have to fill up the cars yourself in England?!” she observes.
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Day 2
Getting off the plane is quite a relief, but I’m not looking forward to immigration and customs. The queue for the immigration desk lasts about 30 minutes, and when I get there the official says simply “You need to put address here”, pointing to the place on the form where Basil’s address should go. Unfortunately, I’ve no idea where he lives. The official retained my passport while I went to find Basil and get his address. This achieved, I faced an agonising wait for my baggage.
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Day 1
I certainly haven’t got any better at this sleeping on planes lark. Can’t understand how anybody can sleep when you can’t possibly lie down flat and the noise of the engines reverberates around your head. I’m looking around the cabin, and almost everyone is asleep. The powers that be won’t let me use my laptop, I’m dying for a drink and I’ve begun to read my book without taking in the words on the page. I have entered the zombie state.
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One day prior to departure
Today started rather well. On friday I went to an interview at the National Air Traffic Service for an information systems job, and this morning the personnel lady called to tell me I’d got it. Obviously my new suit had the desired effect. That means I can leve knowing I have a job lined up when I return. After receiving this news I went to buy some presents for Basil, his wife, and his personal assistant Pam. I’ve got a pocket-watch style desk clock for Basil, and some fragranced soaps for the women. Hope they like them.
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Seven days prior to departure
Finally the mystery surrounding my trip to Zimbabwe has been cleared, at least partially, with the arrival of a travel itinerary and a brief email from Basil about what I’m to be expected to do. The story begins about three months ago (March 2001), when a business contact in Zimbabwe asked me if I would like to spend some time with his company. I had never met him, and our only connection was through my mother, so I thought it remarkably trusting of him to assume I would be of any use to his business.
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Day 42
I can now officially say that I’ve slept in an airport. And as airports go, Singapore isn’t a bad choice. The annoying thing was that the really nice comfy chairs (the ones in that lounge I mentioned ages ago) were in the transit area, which you can’t get to without checking in. And you can’t check in until two hours prior to departure. So we went to the food court and had some snacks, and watched BBC world on the TVs overhead. They also had a pool table so we played a few games on that too. This left us with about four hours to kill until the earliest we could possibly be allowed to check in. I found a kid’s play area, one of the ones with soft rubber on the floor, and slept there – David chose to ‘roam the airport’.
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Day 41
Check out time at our hostel is officially 9am, so having woken up at 9:06am, I packed leisurely, accepting the inevitable late-checkout fee. As it turned out, I avoided the fee anyway, so that was lucky.
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Day 40
On waking up, I discovered that I had just under 40 mosquito bites. David and John were both virtually unscathed, so I came to the inescapable conclusion that I must be very tasty indeed. We had to be up at 5:00am, so that we could leave by 6. Thus the entire getting up and having breakfast was conducted, very unnaturally, in the darkness. We switched to a four wheel drive bus (borderline truck, actually) for the trip to Jim Jim and Twin Falls Waterfalls. Jim Jim Falls is accessible via a walking track, and only in the dry season. In the wet season, believe it or not, the only way to get there is by helicopter. Another feature of Jim Jim peculiar to the dry season, is that it is dry – the waterfall is not in flow. Despite this, it is still an amazing sight, especially at this time of the morning.
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Day 39
The Kakadu is for Darwin what the Great Barrier Reef is for Cairns – a must see. We departed early, taking an annoying amount of time to pick up everyone else booked on the tour, and then headed off to the park. We were in a small bus, with a group of 17, none of whom said anything at all, as far as I could make out, for the 1½ hour drive to our first stop. This was simply because our tour guide failed to introduce everybody.