‘Ladies and Gentlemen, a moment if you will. Chef Oliver will now explain tonight’s dinner menu, prepared from the freshest of local market ingredients.’
As Sabi Sabi Earth Lodge’s Chef Oliver launched another of his extraordinary lists of culinary nouns—jus, consommé, shimeji, compote, nicoise, veloute, patty—I was reminded of something that had worried me the moment I wolfed down my first vanilla and Amarula panna cotta at high tea: how was I going to burn it all off? How, moreover, did the rangers, who are just as susceptible to the risk of gluttony as the guests, manage to fit into their little khaki shorts at the end of their six week work cycles?
Our ranger, a former Dutch spinning instructor called Jaap, who could easily still be in his spandex and headset prime, gave one of those infuriating answers that people in show-room condition tend to give: ‘I just eat until I’m full, and then I stop.’
I personally stopped at ‘brownies and berry compote’, walked back to the room like a badly chafed Michelin man, and continued to worry about the near inevitability of what my wife and I had already termed ‘bush bum’, as in ‘we went to the bush, and returned with a bad case of bush bum’. I might add here, by way of explaining the physiological obsessions that have leached into this blog that we’re both supposedly in training for marathons, she for her second Comrades, me for my second Two Oceans. According to our schedules, on a day on which I had eggs Benedict for breakfast with pancakes, a wee lamb burger for lunch and a beef fillet for dinner, washed down with a bottle of Beyerskloof Reserve Pinotage, I was supposed to have run 21 kms and my wife a full marathon. The likelihood of completing either of these distances in a reserve in which the morning game drive had unearthed a leopard and a pride of lions is of course near to nil, and academic too, because one is not even allowed to walk the twenty metres from room to lodge without an escort.
However, we soon found that anything the heart desires can be arranged at Earth Lodge. So at 05h30 on Saturday we were chauffeured to the edge of the reserve and dropped outside the gate, whereupon we started running down the fence line, or rather we stomped through its volumes of sand for an hour and a half like two off-piste amateurs with holey snow shoes. It’s not something I’d do again, the lowveld heat more than anything would militate against it, and although we were not the only plodders on the road that afternoon, the question of how to dodge the scourge of ‘bush bum’ remains an open-ended one.
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