maybe shaking people out of their comfort zones. They were giving us tools for survival, giving us food and water when we needed it, and it was incredible. We stayed with Okavango people, we stayed with Himba people – they read our future for the next couple of weeks in the intestines of a goat. We were invited in by farmers, and we were driven past by tourists who didn’t want to help us fill our water bottle. It was all different layers of human beings and of course wildlife, and a lot of very hairy experiences. MYD: What were some of the hairy experiences? AØ-N: I don’t know if you’ve ever walked three kilometres in the dark surrounded by elephants? Every single place you turn there is an elephant, a big shadow. An elephant in the dark charged us and you cannot see anything. You just hear it moving around you and coming for you. We had to run low along the ground, hoping that we would stay out of its direction of smell. Things like that make you feel extremely alive. MYD: It’s such a beautiful story: the realisation that we coexist with nature, which can sometimes be a source of support and sometimes also be a source of great danger? AØ-N: For me the interesting thing about doing this walk with these two Ju/’Hoansi-San was that we struggle so much to coexist with mother nature, but for them, they struggle to coexist with everything that is so modern. So this was sort of our walk home together, trying to figure out how we can learn and live and coexist. /Kamaché, the younger San man, you could see the big imprint of history living in him as a young boy, how he almost wanted to walk invisibly past people. Then, as we walked, you saw the change in him as he realised that people were curious about him, because they really admire his people and what they represent. At the very end, he was standing and telling anybody – the Himbas, anybody – about himself and what a San person really is, and he was a completely different person. But most incredible was to be part of all their ‘first times’. First time seeing a tar road. First time leaving the village. First time seeing the ocean. And they were so scared of the ocean. It was the most beautiful thing – we held hands and we walked into the water together, and they were wondering if it was angry with us because it was making so much noise. There were just these really true moments where you also learnt to appreciate all the things we take for granted. MYD: Were you nervous of how you would live, without food, water or money? AØ-N: I wasn’t so nervous about the first part because that was walking through the old area, Bushmanland, which is their area where they know how to survive. There we lived on bush food and we could hunt because it’s their traditional area. But then outside of that, that’s when it got hard because suddenly it’s privately owned land. Suddenly you have to walk north, south, north, south. You can’t just cross west because there are fences, and it’s not so easy to just go and pick something, because what if it’s on the wrong side of the fence? Technically, that’s not yours. So then we felt really dependent on people and had to ask people for help. That’s a strange feeling, because we came from a place where
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