Carol’s Column

The "Joys" of Camping

What could be more pleasurable than being alone in the wide-open pollution-free, ozone impregnated outdoors? The great African sun beating down relentlessly on the worn piece of canvass masquerading as a tent, giving you second-degree sunburn and the thick smoke of a struggling camp fire, choking everyone and everything in sight.

The plaintive cry of a furry-chested husband wailing across the endless land.

"Dammit, what do you mean the fridge isn't working and there are no cold beers?"

Such indeed, are the pleasures of camping.

Over the years we have camped in the most exotic parts of South Africa. Places where no right-minded person would think of stopping for a two-minute coffee break, let alone a two-week holiday.

The more remote, the better, the more inaccessible, the more desirable, and even our tent has a distinctive and unique quality.

No fancy effeminate effort this, comprising convenient light aluminium spring frame and saucy colourful lightweight canvass with interleading rooms and cunningly-designed shape.

No, ours is a more solid affair named Horace, a stout-hearted well-faded khaki ex-army cottage tent with tree-trunk tent poles and an artistic bell shape. It sleeps 54 and takes three days to erect. As heavy as eight bags of cement, it needs six people to lift it from car to ground and vice versa.

Yearly my spouse would have this urge to escape to the bush and so we'd pack our trusty ancient tank until the prop-shaft scraped the ground and set out to the wilds of Africa to places as thrilling as Savuti, Kariba or Warmbaths where lions leap, warthogs snuffle and the gnarled locals braai boerewors with its skin intact to keep it juicy and succulent.

Each night we'd stop just as the sun had dropped over the edge of the world and abandoned us to darkness. This was always due to the fact that we'd lost our way on remote desert plains or abandoned mountain tracks. By the romantic light of a flickering torch with flat batteries, we'd pitch our tent in a friendly spot.

Such as under a wizened sausage tree inhabited by diarrhoeatic baboons, in a thicket of thorn bushes, in a cemetery or in the manure paddock of a kraal. And, on one more memorable occasion at Mapelane in Natal, we went to sleep after unsuspectingly camping in a dry river bed at midnight, only to wake up at dawn in the middle of a raging torrent when the skies burst and the rains came down in flood.

There are so many things to recommend camping. Sand-impregnated scrambled eggs on burnt toast, sitting around a smokey camp fire choking on the pungent fumes of stinkblaar. Washing blackened, greasy pots in iced water and baking bread to a crisp in a hole in the ground.

What can be nicer than disappearing into the bush armed with a spade and roll of toilet paper, and being too terrified to position yourself anywhere lest you get taken by a lion while in bodily evacuation mode, and instead developing chronic constipation for the following two weeks?

What can be more adventurous than enjoying a warm beer from a fridge that still isn't working properly, while the smoke of the campfire reddens your eyes and your throat clogs up from the dust.

Indeed, there is nothing that competes with the pleasure of a sound-filled bush night, hyenas screeching, elephants trumpeting and the steady drip of your radiator leaking, because you holed it on a hidden tree stump.

And what could be more fun than trying to slumber in a sleeping bag that is smaller than a coffin on a hard lumpy ground, on which even an earthworm feels unwelcome.

I'll tell you what is more fun:

Lying at a five-star hotel next to a turquoise and sparkling pool, sipping an iced champagne cocktail, while seven white-coated waiters hover hopefully in the background waiting to attend your every whimper. (Agreed – A.G.)

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