On the Rocks: Sundowners in Elastic Time

TLF Travel Consultant Jordy Lievers-Eaton is always up for happy hour. On the Rocks is her ode to all things shaken, stirred, and sipped.

On arrival into tiny Chiredzi Buffalo Range, in rural Zimbabwe, we learned to be attuned to the color of the earth. The Malilangwe Reserve, home to Singita Pamushana lodge, has three distinct soil types, which means that over the course of a game drive the entire palette and atmosphere can change as you’re alternately surrounded by carpets of brick red, carbon black, and tawny sand. It stretches past the baobab trees and provides a stage for dramatically striped zebras, or camouflage and respite for panting hyenas, resting in a mud bath to escape the day’s building heat. The shift is complete and immediate; one moment the ground radiates with the warmth of rust and clay, and the next, everything is khaki.

On our third and final evening in Zim, we bounced and sped through miles of dust-colored bush as the sunset blazed with increasing saturation behind the silhouetted acacias. After navigating the Land Rover down a vertical riverbed, our guide pulled the parking break and set out tins of snacks – crisps, biltong, mixed nuts, candied fruits – on the hood of the vehicle. He looked to each of us in turn. “G&T?” he asked, though it wasn’t a question. A bottle of Musgrave pink gin appeared from the boot; limes were sliced with a pocket knife. As we stood with our sundowners in the elasticity of that moment when day becomes night, a shape indistinguishable except for its size appeared from the stand of trees across the shallow water. As it loomed toward us – for its movement cannot be described in anything other than the terminology of dreams – our garrulous guide Mark said quietly, “Get into the vehicles.” Ice clinked in our glasses as though shaken by our heartbeats; in seven game drives, all lasting many hours, we had never been told to pack it in.

The bull elephant stopped ten feet from our vehicle and just stood there, in the type of darkness that requires a constant squint, that triggers an unbroken internal patter of question and reassurance that what’s in front of you is real. And then he moved, along to the left side of the vehicle, where I sat on the door, trying not to breathe and trying not to forget. I could smell the tonic and the lime and the gin and the elephant. I could hear the ice and the trees and the birds and his breath. Time swelled up like a parachute just catching the air, like we were living at the peak of an inhale, for twenty minutes that might have been ten seconds and might have been a year. It was the loudest silence and the most oppressive expansiveness and we were suspended there, held aloft by uncertainty and wonder and fear and trust. And then he dissolved into the dark – because suddenly it was night – and we remembered our sundowners, sweating in our hands, and we raised a toast, to revelatory joy and to Zimbabwe.

Singita’s Game Drive G&T

Ingredients

2 oz gin
3 oz tonic water
A handful of ice cubes
2 lime wedges

Method

1. Squeeze one of the lime wedges into the bottom of a highball glass then drop in the wedge
2. Pour in the gin
3. Fill the glass most of the way with ice then stir for a few seconds
4. Top with tonic water and the second lime wedge (not squeezed)

Best enjoyed in the expansiveness of the African Bush (but tasty on your couch as well.)

Note: A classic gin and tonic can be spiced up with all sorts of interesting ingredients, like lavender flowers, grapefruit zest, slices of cucumber, a twist of black pepper, or a sprig of rosemary.