Naomi Stories

It was a beautiful, sunny day, the kind where the air smells fresh and crisp, as I walked down the rocky streets of Egypt.

“HEY!”

I spun around to see my friend yelling from across the road.
“I bet you can’t sail 6,500 kilometres and back!”

I stared at him, confused. Was he trying to get me eaten by hippos? Or drowned in the endless, swirling depths of the Nile?

“I bet I could,” I answered, though inside, I wanted to dig a hole, hide forever, and pretend this conversation had never happened.

Yet somehow, five minutes later, there I was standing on a homemade barge, preparing to sail through eleven countries and return alive. When I stepped onto the rusty old ark, it groaned like it hadn’t been touched in a hundred years. I wanted to jump off and run home, but I’d made a promise. A BIG one. And promises matter.

At first, I thought everything would go perfectly. Of course, that’s exactly when a herd of angry hippos burst out of the water and charged straight at me!

“Do hippos even eat people?” I wondered aloud, too scared to look back.

I yanked the sail rope, and the boat lurched forward. But the hippos sped up too! Were they trying to race me… or chase me? Either way, they were right on my tail.
I turned right. They turned right.
I turned left. They turned left.
I turned right again And this time they swerved left, suddenly more interested in another poor sailor drifting by. I wished him the best of luck. He would need it.

Hours passed. Then I realised I needed to pee. Desperately. I COULD pee in the Nile… but that felt like an insult to Hapi, the Egyptian god who protects the river. So I bravely decided to hold it. (It was the hardest part of the whole adventure.)

A while later, the sky darkened and a mighty storm struck. Thunder boomed, lightning flashed, and my boat rocked wildly, left, right, right, left, like it was dancing badly at a party. I felt seasick for a moment, but I forced myself to push through.

After all the chaos, the storms, the hippos, and the bladder emergency, I finally made it back to my home island.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I CANNOT sail 6,500 kilometres.
(Also known as: the River Nile.)