I am going to write on this day, the tenth anniversary of the event, about the most difficult field trip I ever experienced.

Now, let me warn you, not all of this is true. There is some exaggeration. A good pub story.

The plan was for Tim and me to travel separately to Botswana to measure speech transmission intelligibility in the newly constructed Sir Seretse Khama International Airport and meet the professional team for a new project.

Tim would fly up and I would drive and meet him.

So, I flew from Cape Town to Johannesburg and collected a hire car to drive to Gaborone, in Botswana.

I was just past Rustenburg when I realised that my suitcase was still at the car hire offices back at the airport. I was wearing shorts, an old shirt and slops (for comfortable travelling) and my formal clothes were back at the airport, 100 km away.

Oh dear!

Nevertheless, I decided I could buy some clothes in Swartruggens, 60 km ahead.

However, the store at Swartruggens didn’t have my size.

On to Zeerust. I got there just as the shops were closing. No luck!

So, I travelled on to the Botswana border. There was quite a queue.

I had filled out my entry form and handed it in.

Now, here’s an important matter: back when I was 16 I had to get an ID document, a card. Due to regulations, I was not allowed to use “Mackenzie-Hoy” as my surname since it had “too many letters”. So, on my ID and passport I am “Hoy”. On my arrivals form, however, I had filled out “Mackenzie-Hoy”.

The Botswana border lady looked at my form and handed it back. “Not right,” she said.

So, I took my passport, left the queue and filled out a new form. Back to the counter. She found another mistake. And another.

By my fifth form we had become old friends. From the border post I drove to the airport to find Tim.

At the airport it was too noisy to do the speech transmission intelligibility tests so we’d have to go back.

We decided to book into our hotel, but they had no booking for us.

Since it was the week of an African development conference, we could find no hotel accommodation.

We went back to the airport and did our tests. After a long search we found a B&B called ‘The Nest’. It had a fence made of corrugated iron.

There was a clear line of bullet holes through the iron. To my trained eye they were from an automatic rifle.

A nice young woman showed us to our rooms. My room had matching bullet holes through the window and, where the wall had been chipped, fresh plaster.

I asked her why they didn’t repair the window. “Oh,” she said, “they’d just come shoot again anyway”.

Tim and I rose early. My clothes were now a day old. I planned to buy new ones in town.

No chance, traffic too heavy. So, we traipsed off to the meeting with the professional team.

Typical African professionals, they were dressed to the nines. I looked like a castaway.

With exquisite tact nobody mentioned that I looked like an aging beachcomber posing as a professional engineer.

The meeting ended late and we decided to drive back to South Africa rather than risk The Nest.

In gathering dusk, we drove to Zeerust. We had booked ahead into the romantically named Abjaterskop Hotel which was outside Zeerust but we were desperately hungry and tired and dirty.

We stopped at a steak house in Zeerust. They only had burgers and on the wine list, only sweet rose wine. The burgers were horrible. We bought four bottles of wine, which were just as terrible.

At the hotel they ushered us into rooms whose ceilings were coated with mosquitos.

Tim and I used wet towels to clear most of them, drank the four bottles and fell asleep.

In the morning, mosquito bitten and hungover, the shower/bath didn’t function and we had to wash out of the basin.

Back at the airport I recovered my bags.

Business class to Cape Town never felt so good!