Two thousand and two and the year carried on in the same vein, with the opportunity for more adventure presenting itself in early May.

I had been asked to help make a documentary for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) together with the African Youth Alliance, an organisation that had been set up in four countries across Africa, to help educate and spread AIDS awareness information among young adults in each of the participating countries; Botswana, Ghana, Tanzania & Zanzibar, Uganda and South Africa. It was a fascinating project and a very rewarding one, perhaps one of the most I’d been part of up until that point, but it was also a very long one, totalling nearly six months away from home.

As is customary on such a job, there was a lot of travel involved to get us to and from the numerous locations in each of the countries, often by less than conventional or confidence inspiring means. Hours spent stuffed in the back of various four wheeled drive vehicles or VW buses out in the bush, and dozens of connecting flights too, meant I regularly found myself strapped in to tiny, cramped airplanes, some of which felt like they could have been thrown together from the spare parts bin in someone’s shed – not exactly what you want from an aircraft, but that was often the only option to get to less populated destinations further off the beaten track. It was definitely an adventure and having travelled a fair bit already by then, even with the often sketchy transport, it was quite exciting and one I was still clearly up for.

Challenging temperatures and busy schedules made for fairly intense working conditions, but I wasn’t there on holiday and was acutely aware that whatever was being thrown our way, was more than likely, infinitely more bearable than the living conditions that most, if not all of our willing local contributors had to endure on a daily basis. That said, we weren’t required to work weekends and often, for the sake of our less resilient western constitutions, were asked, if not required to take it easy.

So, what to do with a weekend off in a far-flung country. I already had a very well established template for an idea which generally involved water, a boat and a rod, and wherever possible tried to put together a plan based on those three key ingredients. My lengthy stay in Botswana had already seen me genning up on my options there, and one that really piqued my interest, was a few days in the Okavango Delta. I’m not sure how much I knew about the Delta before arriving in Botswana, maybe no more than what you could glean from casting one eye on a BBC wildlife documentary, perhaps not even that, but it sounded pretty amazing and more importantly, there was real potential to wet a line and catch something exotic. I had set my sights on maybe a Tigerfish, but in truth, anything would do.

Travel from my hotel in Gabarone to Maun on the edge of the Delta was organised and from there I was able to hop on a light aircraft to an airstrip not far from the camp I’d managed to book.

The Okavango Delta is a truly wondrous place. Covering between 600,000 and up to 2 million hectares, depending on the seasonal flood, or sixteen thousand square kilometres, it is the world’s largest inland delta and is home to a truly dazzling variety of flora and fauna. The statistics are really quite something; 500 bird species, 128 mammal species, approximately 150 reptiles and amphibious species and with over 70 fish species, I thought perhaps just one on the end of my line would do.