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Today’s daily prompt from Word Press made me chuckle:
“Have you ever been camping?”
Why yes. Just once.
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Of all the daft things I’ve done, it was no doubt the most ill-advised, the least safe.
But it was adventurous and while I did not enjoy it, I inevitably learned from it.
Once, I’d taken a short trip in a camper and it too was an adventure, but of a very different sort and I never counted it as “camping”.
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Camping involves a tent. Or even – not a tent, as I was to discover.
My travel buddy Tim had spent several months travelling overland across Africa, so he had the thing down pat . At the end of 1979, he discovered an opportunity to travel to Southern Sudan where he hoped to visit the Nuba people that he’d come to know about through the photographs of Leni Riefenstahl.
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It sounded very interesting and I’d loved the stories of Tim’s Africa trip, so sure, I was game.
It was a trip fraught with complications and discomfort, all of which I have written about before, see the link below.
It certainly had its moments!
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It is my feeling that if you decide to try something new, you should go for it. No venturing a toe gingerly in to the shallows.
To begin camping in Southern Sudan was definitely jumping in at the deep end. After the first two nights, we didn’t even bother fiddling about with tents.
We were just too damn tired.
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I had travelled to remote places and stayed in my share of grotty hotels, but riding for two weeks in the back of a Bedford truck across a hot, flat, dusty plain for what in the end seemed like no purpose, well it, was different!
A prolonged delay in Khartoum left us having to make a mad dash back in order to catch a once-a-week flight to Zurich, so we never saw the Nuba.
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As there were no roads to follow, it was more of a slow, painful crawl across rutted terrain, each day being visited by Big Fly that stung mightily whoever it landed on.
Thorns, sand fleas, hyenas…
“What does a hyena do if it finds you?”
I’d one night nervously asked one of the camping professionals…
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“Oh, my dear – it eats you!” said Sheila.
Whereupon I decided I was travelling with lunatics.
We were hot, tired and dirty and as good as lost in the middle of nowhere and for a couple of days I was not awfully happy, then suddenly I must have had a mental shift.
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Perhaps it was that we were getting near the end, or that the terrain had changed and seemed less hostile. The sky at night was something to behold.
Perhaps I had just got used to the whole experience, settled in to it, as one tends to do.
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While I did not enjoy that trip, I have always been grateful to have experienced it.
When I’d shopped for suitable foot gear, I had fretted that the choices were ugly! It’s hard to admit, but I’d been concerned about my fingernails not being painted and my hair being a mess!
Camping in Sudan soon cured that.
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Comparatively speaking, it was not a hard experience. It was less than three weeks and the discomfort was not terrible, but it was also not what people generally regard as a holiday.
Holidays are good restoratives.
Adventures are educational.
The latter are much longer-lasting and valuable.
Thank you, Carolyn, for bringing entertainment with your post about the adventures of camping. Your thought that you were camping with lunatics made me laugh! I did a camping one in my life, and never again. I am glad that you survived to tell the story!
Joanna
It was good to re-read your adventures in the back of a Bedford and on the air terminal floor!
Yeah, it seems that I am stopping by your blog at just the right time! Camping in 1979 looked a lot different than it does today! And I still think you guys were very brave to go camping in Sudan — something we certainly won’t be able to do today. But as you said: What an adventure (I really enjoyed those posts of yours).
I have no doubt that the camping trip was an ‘experience’, but it is not one I would ever want to take. Non-nomadic humans build permanent shelters for a reason. And hotels exist for the same reason. 😊
Best wishes, Pete.