Carol’s Column

There’s nothing quite like camping

I'D FORGOTTEN all the joys of camping.

The sand, dirt and dust everywhere. The musty smell of an aged tent packed away in a storeroom for over a year.

The burnt baked beans on blackened toast with shrivelled eggs and grit.

The fat-congealed, fire-blackened pans, the campfires with smoke that always gets into your eyes, nostrils and everything else.

But most of all, I'd forgotten the nights. Tossing and turning on a bumpy, lumpy mattress on uneven ground.

Yes, I'd forgotten the joys of camping.

My spouse announced several months ago that he was going overseas round about July. I did a quick mental calculation and worked out that while he was swanning around the hotspots of Europe, I'd be incarcerated in a house full of school-holidaying children.

Horrors, what could be worse?

Being incarcerated for a week with four children in a tent at Chobe.

“Let's go away for a week,” I'd announced to the kids.

“Where?” Good question. Where can one go with four children when you're flat broke and besides, everything is booked out for the peak season July hols.

“Let's go up to Chobe,” I suggested. “The road's now tar all the way, so we don't need a four-wheel drive. We can camp on the edge of the Chobe, perhaps even get a little boat somewhere and do a spot of tiger fishing.”

Kids can be very resourceful when they want to be.

Within two days they'd organised the camping gear, a small boat from a mate who had a cousin in northern Botswana. The tin trunk was packed and all I had to do was buy food.

Mind you — camping food is not difficult. Baked beans, condensed milk and marie biscuits go a long way.

Chobe, nestling in the north eastern-most nook of Botswana, bordering the Caprivi strip and Zimbabwe and almost Zambia (if you stretch your head a little and look upstream), is a long way away. So we decided to leave at 2am in the morning and drive through the following day, arriving there at about 5am in the afternoon.

One of the facts of camping is that, other than the food, you have to take the same amount of equipment whether you're going for a day or a year.

Our ancient Kombi groaned and the chassis of the trailer it was hauling almost hit the ground.

Nevertheless, we started off auspiciously with a blow-out of a trailer wheel 30km north of Warmbaths.

The spare wheel didn't fit the trailer — the holes were too small. Have you ever filed holes in a spare wheel rim at 5am?

There are better things to do in life.

We eventually crossed the border into Botswana at about 9.30am.

“Ma, did you notice how happy the South Africans were to see us go?” remarked my second son.

“Can you blame them?” I muttered disconsolately as I surveyed our motley vehicle and its lopsided trailer.

It takes the normal traveller 12 hours to get to Chobe from Johannesburg.

It took us a mere 19 hours.

But the following day at Serondella, we found the best campsite on the Chobe river under huge trees full of kingfishers, thrushes, robins, baboons, vervet monkeys and one solitary, magnificent fish eagle.

When baboons are excited, they make a sound very much like 'wahoo'. The Lazar family obviously stimulated their intellect because they 'wahooed' around us from dawn to dusk.

At nightfall, there'd be a little baboon screeching and much low rumbling and growling.

Then began the total onslaught on our tent. They'd attack it with self-made pellets expelled from their rear openings.

We learnt early to fasten and bolt everything down. Indeed, today, there is a baboon running around in the Chobe bush wearing Ralph's crimson Greenside High School T-shirt and eating our packet of sugar.

We took to the Chobe in our borrowed boat like Egyptian geese take to water and the tigerfish fled to the great Zambezi river just around the corner.

In a week, all we caught were birds nests, reeds and one skeleton of a long-expired barbel.

There's nothing like the great outdoors, say people enthusiastically. True.

For where other than in the unspoilt bush of Africa can you have the opportunity to bake bread in a hole next to the campfire? Fight invading army ants to the death? Remain relatively unwashed for a week? Have six punctures and get spiked by a thornbush?

But the final straw happened on the last day when, my flour dwindling, I added bananas to the dough and created a masterpiece of a banana loaf.

Round and golden, with a crisp crust and tender-to-the-bite inside, it looked superb.

Proudly, I laid the table for lunch — one has to keep up appearances, even in the bush — and placed my bread on the table. Where it reigned supreme.

Then turned to scrabble in the tin trunk for another delicacy such as corned beef or marmite.

When I looked back, the bread had vanished. And there, sitting on a branch above the table, sat the largest, ugliest baboon I'd ever seen. Tucked securely under his armpit, was my delicious banana bread.

As I watched, he took a large bite out of the bread and then actually grinned at me.

I know it is ridiculous to get emotional over a loaf of bread, but I burst into tears.

There is only one time in my life that I have ever cried more and that happened this week.

They were tears of joy at the sight of our house with hot and cold running water, electric lights and beds without lumps.

Such is life. Thank heavens.

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