Dusi of a race can change lives

The umthombothi and fever trees lend their names to the feature horse races this weekend.

I don't know if it is by design, but these trees will have figured significantly in the lives of thousands of athletes in the days leading up to Sunday's meeting at Greyville in Durban.

Just down the road from Greyville lies Blue Lagoon, where the Umgeni River meets the Indian Ocean and where the finish of the Dusi Canoe Marathon will be tomorrow.

Once upon a time I completed a few Dusis so I know what the thorns of a fever tree can do to a tired man as he blunders through thick bush with a canoe on his shoulder, having been forced to portage around raging rapids to preserve life and limb.

I remember Guinea Fowl, Ngumeni Hill and Burma Road as lyrical sounding places where the lovely pale-green boughs of Acacia xanthophloea get too close to the portaging trail for comfort and blood flows.

Of course, there are plenty of other things to worry about on the three days of the Dusi - like drowning, breaking bones, exhaustion, getting bilharzia and "wrapping" a flimsy fibreglass craft around a rock and having to hitchhike to the finish in some embarrassment. It's stressful - and just magnificent.

There's also the umthombothi tree to think about. It produces the "jumping beans" we laughed at as kids - the fruit being inhabited by tiny moth larvae which wriggle about and cause the seeds to hop into the air. But it's the toxic milky sap of the umthombothi you need to watch out for as it causes a nasty skin irritation.

I remember a place called the Saddles where these trees grew in abundance and one had to be nimble of foot to avoid brushing up against the oozing latex - while being careful not to twist an ankle or tread on a venom-spitting imfezi.

The Dusi is a lot more than a race. It's an adventure, a close encounter with nature, a test of courage and fortitude and, dare I say it, a life-changing experience.

Wilderness legend Ian Player got it going in 1951, having dreamt of the river journey while he was soldiering in Italy in World War 2. He organised the first race and was the only one of eight starters to eventually crawl ashore at Blue Lagoon - after six days and a multitude of scrapes, including snakebite.

"Once you have canoed the Dusi, your life cannot be the same again," Player said.

Another great man of the race was Graeme Pope-Ellis, "the Dusi king", who completed it 46 times, with 15 wins.

This dedicated, modest man, nicknamed Farmer and later the Pope, attended the same school as me and built me my first canoe. He wrote of the marathon's capacity for "self-actualisation" and added: "The experience you take away from completing a Dusi is one of transcendence."

Watching 1400 crazy people careering down the Msundusi and Mgeni rivers today I feel nothing but envy.

Royal Zulu Guard is an appropriate bet in the Fever Tree Handicap, seeing as the tree's branches are used to keep hippos out of tilled fields. For the umThombothi Stakes, it's Candy Moon.

Maybe my winnings will be invested in a nice canoe.