Before I say goodbye, here’s a little Afcon story that must be told ...

I’VE had some good, bad and bizarre moments during my eight years at the Cape Times. So, before I say goodbye, I would just like to share a little story with you about one of my experiences during the 2015 African Cup of Nations.

Covering football on the continent is not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach. It’s more like an adventure waiting to happen before every deadline.

My last assignment as a senior football writer for Independent Media was covering the 2015 Afcon in Equatorial Guinea, and I had to serve the morning and the afternoon papers on that trip.

A few weeks before I departed for Equatorial Guinea, my colleagues and I started a WhatsApp group called “Mongomo Nightmare”.

The name was largely based on the fact that we were struggling to find any sort of accommodation in Mongomo, while covering Bafana Bafana.

There are basically only a handful of hotels in this sparsely-populated town, which only a few years ago was actually more like a village.

It was a bit of a nightmare getting there, as it took me roughly 45 hours since leaving my house in Paarl to get to our initial lodging. That included four flights and a visit to three different countries.

The worst trip, though, was the final 260km drive from Equatorial Guinea’s biggest city of Bata to Mongomo. The road was quite smooth, but we had to produce our passports every 20km at the roadblocks. And by then it was already after midnight, and we were tired, smelly and hungry.

We got to our guesthouse at about 3am, and I just fell onto the bed and passed out. However, when I woke up, I realised that the place we had organised wasn’t quite as nice. It wasn’t bad, but we didn’t have Wi-Fi, which was essential to getting our stories to South Africa, and breakfast was not included.

Luckily for us, a few rooms opened up at the hotel across the street and we booked in. The rooms are actually worse than what we had, but we had Wi-Fi and breakfast was sorted.

An added bonus is that this hotel, which belongs to the first lady of the country, doubles up as a bakery. The bread was world class, and it did a great job of masking the fact that there are only four items on the menu at the restaurant.

The trip went relatively smoothly by Afcon standards, until the second last day of the tour.

I got up at 4am that morning to file for the afternoon papers, but soon realised that the Wi-Fi was down and I wouldn’t be able to send my story from my hotel. The hotel where Bafana were staying, about 7km down the road, was my best bet to try and make the 6am deadline.

As I walked down the stairs, my colleague and good friend Velile Mbuli also made his way to the door. He too had decided to go to the Bafana hotel to use the Wi-Fi. So we walked in total darkness, with just the lights of the presidential compound, which makes Nkandla look like a spaza shop, to keep us company. We never encountered a single soul on that road on the way there.

When we got to the hotel, we sent our stories and headed back. But, as we got to the main road, there were three white dogs in the middle of the road. So we sat next to the side of the road and waited a few minutes for them to go do what dogs do at 5.30am.

But these dogs didn’t move, in fact it seemed like they were waiting for us. Unfortunately, We had to start moving because we had an early morning press conference. So we decided to take on these dogs – laptop in one hand and a rock in the other. However, they suddenly just vanished right in front of our eyes. I got such a chill down my spine I almost dislocated my shoulder. I have never been as scared in my life like I was that morning.

Velile and I are both big boys, but we finished the last 5km of that walk back to the hotel like Wayde van Niekerk down the 400m home straight.

I had some whisky in my room to calm our nerves, but, to this day I’m not quite sure if those were real dogs or, errr, ghosts.

All I know is, it’s been fun. Thanks for all the emails and messages over the years. I wasn’t able to reply to all of them, but I really appreciated the feedback – yes, even the negative ones, Les Botha! Cheers!