Savuti
A Place of Legends, Dust, and Devastating Disappointment
By Peter Rau
When you hear the word Savuti, something stirs deep inside you.
Visions rise up: hard-core Africa, dramatic skies, stunning sunrises bleeding into impossible sunsets. You can almost hear it — faintly, somewhere in the back of your mind — the opening bars of The Lion King.
You smell the dry dust. The elephant dung. The distinctive, resinous scent of Mopani bush. Everything about the word speaks of wildness, of raw untamed Africa, of a place that does not care about your comfort or your schedule.
Now say it out loud. Not like that. Properly. In a low, gruff voice. From the chest.
Savuti.
There. You feel it, don't you?
The word conjures a very specific image: a tall, deeply tanned man. Weathered hat, dark with sweat. Dirty khakis. Driving an old Land Rover or a battle-scarred Land Cruiser with a hundred thousand kilometres of bush road behind it.
A man so at one with the African wild that he uses a puffadder as his belt.
That is Savuti. That is the legend.
One evening, my brother-in-law — who was touring with us in this very place, this cathedral of raw Africa — headed off to the ablution block for a shower.
And from within those walls, in the hallowed dust of Savuti, the following words were heard, drifting out into the African night:"Johnny, don't you perhaps have a foot scrubber? The one my wife gave me is a bit too coarse."
Eish.
Happy travelling. — Peter Rau
