This one is from the archives, from my four years of driving up and down the length of Africa. No reason to post it, other than it recalls happy memories when the world seemed a safer place.
Back in the early 1970s, the public camping site in the Amboseli National Park, Kenya, was delightfully isolated and a ten minute drive from the safari lodge where the rich folks stayed. True, the mosquitos could be a problem but the real villains were the baboons.
I remember on one particular trip, we returned from a game drive to find that the crafty blighters had unzipped the tents, and gone through our luggage. They had bitten off the ends of many of my 35mm film cassettes (unexposed luckily) and then pulled out the film and left a trail of canisters leading away into the undergrowth.
My efforts to salvage the undamaged films came to a halt in the bushes when I came face to face with a large snake that had taken a shine to my Ektachrome film.
Not content with nicking the films, the baboons had ripped the plastic lids off our supplies – and pissed in the sugar. I hate baboons.
Apart from those annoyances, Amboseli was a dramatic place. If the clouds co-operated, the view of Kilimanjaro rising above the plains was pure magic.