South Africa's most dangerous threat

In a nice cap to my week (for other adventures, see the preceding post), my friend set his brother's face on fire.

Yes, he is ok, and no, it was not meant as a brotherly prank. I don't think. Or if it was, the guy really did a great job of feigning a guilty look afterwards.

After having a drink at the local Obs pub (Obs is Observatory, which is a hip/crime-ridden neighborhood) we were going to have a braai at my friend's house (he will remain mostly nameless, although probably anyone who knows him could figure it out - let's call them Bob and his brother James). So Bob and James go off to start the fire, and me and Julien stay to finish our drinks at the pub. Ten minutes later, we pitch up to Bob's place and are received with a frantic, "Alex, is your car nearby? We need to rush James to the hospital!"

"Holy Shit," says I, and race off to get my rental car, which I had luckily acquired that day. Thank God! Apparently what had happened was that Bob and James were lighting the braai and decided the fire needed a little help - in the form of methanol. Who could possibly predicted that such an innocuous idea could end with and explosion and a face caught on fire? Luckily, Bob has a fish pond in his back yard, and James leapt in and dunked his face. According to him later, he didn't even know what he was doing, just acted on instinct. Score one for instinct - otherwise he would have most definitely been seriously wounded. As it was, he had only 1st degree burns all over his face, which should heal without scarring. But holy crap, it was a scary drive to two different hospitals (the second one, of which no one knew the location, had a useless burns unit).

Probably the most inconveniencing thing was that James was leaving two days afterwards to travel back home, and his faced was wrapped up like King Tut. Would security give him a hard time? I haven't heard yet, but I'm going to place that one firmly in the "probably" category.