Breakfast with bees

Of the 10 days taken up by the trip, only three were actually spent in the park. The other seven were consumed by the adventure of getting there, which involved a return journey perched on top of all the park rangers' furniture piled in the back of a truck as they headed back to Khartoum at the end of the dry season.

Squeezed into the rear of the truck were all their sheep. “Those sheep are standing on top of each other. They'll trample each other to death,” I remember thinking before telling myself that the men had made this journey many times before and must know better than me what they were doing. But then we had a puncture and it turned out that the jack needed to remove the tire had snapped in two. The vehicle meant to be escorting us was by then already halfway to the capital. There was nothing to do but unload the truck and settle down by the roadside to wait for rescue.

At this point it was discovered that several sheep had, indeed, been trampled to death. “At least we'll be able to have mutton stew,” I comforted myself. Except that we couldn't, because the sheep had not been killed Islamically and so their flesh was haram (forbidden).

In Dinder, I saw amazing things, including carmine bee-eaters, birds of such a brilliant redness that they looked like rubies flashing across the parched yellow landscape. There was a watering hole around which eagles congregated in their hundreds. There was a wonderful safari that had to be undertaken on foot because there was no petrol to fuel the Land Rover. And there was the shock of watching a ranger leap from a vehicle and hold a gun to the head of a shepherd foolish enough to have brought his flock into the park to graze on land reserved for the wildlife.

But what I remember most vividly from that visit was the misery of having to share a shower with every wasp from miles around. Water was so scarce and such a luxury that it was unimaginable that they wouldn't swarm in to take a sip. Somehow I managed to wash without being stung by any of them, a miracle I remembered with a rueful chuckle last week when merely walking past a mulberry tree that had shed its fruit led to a brushed encounter with a wasp and the inevitable stab of pain as it released its sting into my big toe.

Actually, the pain was not as bad as the itching that followed it. In the eczane (pharmacy), I stood in line for an anti-histamine cream behind a tourist who was rolling up his trouser-leg to show the pharmacist. “A wasp sting,” he mimed dramatically.

Yes, it's wasp season here at the moment, and all last week I battled to eat an egg-and-toast breakfast outdoors while all around me the yellow dangers buzzed and threatened. “Burn coffee grains -- they hate the smoke,” said one friend. “Try ammonia -- they hate that, too,” said another.

Hmm, and just how enjoyable would a breakfast surrounded by smoke and ammonia fumes be, I ask myself?

Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.