While wilderness recharges souls made weary by modern lifestyles, the bush can be fatally uncompromising for the unwary.

My friends John and Lorraine Bullen, who had done several overland safaris with me in Botswana as well as a fishing trip in the Okavango, went on safari on their own in Botswana in a remote area of the Chobe National Park not long after John had turned eighty and Lorraine was just a few years younger.

John’s surname suited him for he was truly a bull of a man, a farmer from the Lydenburg area in South Africa where a lifetime of hard physical work had kept him strong even as he aged, while Lorraine was a delightful farmer’s wife in the bubbly, generous grandmother mould. Yet she had an underlying strength that allowed her to not only accompany her husband on rugged trips, but to thoroughly enjoy them.

They had planned to camp at Nogatsaa, a place they had first visited with me in 1985 as clients of mine but they found to their consternation that private camping was no longer permitted at this pan because it has been taken over by the military as an anti-poaching camp, which is sad as it is a prime tourism site. John and Lorraine’s memories would have gone back to the time when we had sat on camping chairs and watched hundreds of elephants drinking at the waterhole before many of them milled around us, munching on grass a few metres away from where we were seated. It was a magical experience and there is no wonder that they wanted to return some twenty years later.

Instead of being advised to camp at one of the official campsites in the region, they were directed to distant Savuti, via the Ngwezumba river road, by a Botswana Defence Force (BDF) anti-poaching patrol. The track that follows the dry riverbed is one that I first explored in the early 1980’s and was the route that I had taken the  Bullens on during that 1985 safari. When I first noticed it on a map, I asked the game scouts what sort of condition it was in and the reply that I universally got was ‘it is ungraded’.  I roughly translated that to mean ‘we don’t have a clue’ so, intrigued, I drove it at the next opportunity and was rewarded with the best game viewing that I have ever experienced. Thirteen rhinos, at least a thousand elephants and a similar number of buffalo, two large herds of eland and three different prides of lions were among the smorgasbord of game that had collected around the Ngwezumba dam. The dam, which was really an earth weir built across the Ngwezumba riverbed held the only permanent water in a vast area. Sadly, the earth dam was washed away by a flash flood and the game in the area has subsequently dwindled.

That track from Nogatsaa to Savuti, which took around five hours to drive, was always a road less travelled. On one trip I built a small stick construction in the middle of the road that any passing vehicle would have flattened, but it was still standing when I next came back three months later.

Since the closure of camping in the Nogatsaa area, it has become a very indistinct trail which is easy to lose, and this is what happened to the Bullens when they inadvertently took an old disused route that branched off from the correct one just north of Zwei Zwei pan. There is a dry riverbed that you need to cross which looks beguilingly innocuous, but which is the most treacherous crossing that I have come across in all of Botswana. I had made the same mistake some years before when I too had followed that same obscure elephant trail and become bogged in the identical treacherous grainy river sand which somehow sucks vehicles in. With the aid of a high-lift jack and a couple of hours of hard toil I had managed to extricate my vehicle but the Bullens, who presumably did not have the advantage of a high-lift jack, spent two days vainly battling to dig themselves out and finally gave up. I can imagine how desperately the two elderly folk struggled in the oppressive heat, plagued by hugely irritating mopane flies – stingless bees which swarm around you, flying into eyes, ears and nostrils. If you kill one, and I can assure you that there will be nothing more uppermost in your mind, the defensive pheromones that it releases call in all its friends to make your existence even more miserable.

After two desperate days with little progress and no hope of extricating themselves, John decided to walk the thirty-seven kilometres to Savuti that his GPS told him was the straight-line distance. He prepared well for the task ahead, taking with him an axe, water, compass, GPS and some food and set out into some of the most unforgiving, featureless terrain in Botswana. He faced around thirty kilometres of endless stunted mopane before he would break into open country with scattered hills and numerous game drive roads, where someone was sure to come across him.

This stunted mopane scrub is between a metre to two metres in height and is virtually the only tree species in that huge area. It offers no shade, no long-distance vision and, importantly, is so densely packed that it is impossible to walk much further than a couple of metres without having to walk around a stand of trees. This would have turned the thirty-seven kilometres into an effective distance of perhaps twice that much, while a heatwave with scorching winds made the conditions hellish. Furthermore, it would have likely been physically impossible for a strong young man to carry sufficient water in that environment. An octogenarian, however fit for his age, would have balked at carrying that kind of weight, so his water supply from the outset would, almost certainly, have been insufficient for those extreme conditions.

Four days after he had set off, a Dutch couple, who had also taken the wrong road, happened upon the stranded vehicle and rescued Lorraine. Once they had reached Savuti and realised that John had not yet made it, an alarm was sent out. An intense search for him was launched by the BDF, police and the Wildlife Department. Every available resource, including the police helicopter with state-of-the-art surveillance equipment, was employed as over one hundred men combed the area in a grid pattern formation. Specialist trackers were also brought in from Maun but after more than a week of intense searching (and nearly two weeks since John started walking) not a single sign of him had been found. Two raging bush fires, several windstorms, subsequent animal movements in the thick Kalahari sand, high temperatures and that remorseless terrain conspired to wipe away all trace of him.

Where he met his end will probably never be known.

We can only speculate about how John succumbed in those severe conditions. Perhaps he blundered into a family of elephants who were panicked by his presence and attacked. Only poachers would normally be in such an area so the elephants would have felt threatened. Maybe a hungry hyaena or a lone, nomadic lion came across him while he was sleeping. It could be that with the constant changes of direction forced upon John, his GPS batteries ran flat leaving him in a terrain that can be likened to bobbing on an ocean where everything seems the same wherever you look and sticking to one direction is all but impossible, so he could easily have walked in a large circle. It could also be that the heatwave and strong drying winds, combined with the lack of shade, caused him to finish his water far earlier than anticipated and delirium could have soon set in. He could also easily have tripped over a root and injured a leg, rendering him helpless – or he could have trodden on a poisonous snake. It could conceivably have been a combination of any of these or a range of other perils.

Fate sometimes plays a cruel hand but seldom more so than on this occasion because I was on safari in this very area at the time and had stopped for sundowners ten minutes short of where John started to walk the next day. It was a cruel twist of fate. If only he had found the main track, which was less than a hundred metres south of where they were stuck and chosen to follow it rather than strike out directly for Savuti, he would have wandered into our camp before we had gone to bed.

Things went tragically wrong which meant sadly that fatal decisions were made by my friends. We will discuss what might have been in future blogs.