Carol’s Column

Sunset call for camping's elite

Ah Africa, this Africa. 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 canvas 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 of its own.

No fancy effeminate effort this, no convenient light aluminium spring frame and saucy colourful lightweight canvas with interleading rooms.

No, ours is a more solid affair named Bently, 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.

Yearly my husband would express an 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 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 about camping. Sand-impregnated scrambled eggs on burnt toast, sitting around a smoky camp fire choking on the pungent fumes of stinkblaar. 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. 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 is more fun than trying to slumber in a sleeping bag that is smaller than a coffin on hard lumpy ground on which even an earthworm feels unwelcome.

I'll tell you what is more fun. Lying at a 10-star hotel next to a turquoise and sparkling pool, sipping an iced champagne cocktail while 23 white-coated waiters hover hopefully in the background waiting to attend your every whimper.

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