The Travel Diva

A mindless wandering

Camping for instance, I’ve done once in my life. Okay, twice if you count the time when I was five and my late-father put up a tent in the back yard then told me I could not come back into the house because I’ll get shot if I startled him or my mother. You see, back in the then wilds of Africa, my parents slept with a shot-gun on either side of the bed. Thandi, our house-keeper's daughter, and I lay whimpering all night listening to the bush-sounds. Our shrieks of terror did manage to frighten off a large animal that came sniffing around the tent in the quiet black hours just before dawn. Later our tracker told us it was a buffalo - one of the most dangerous animals in Africa.

The other time was in Mozambique when my then young son, Ashley, (turning 19 in a few days, whilst I’m in Monaco) and I were travelling to Malawi. I was woken by an unfamiliar sound and instinctively sat up into a spider the diameter of a saucer, dangling off the ceiling of our two-man tent. I screamed and brought my hands up to shield my face from the monstrous arachnid, then saw three luminous green slugs on the back of my hand. I began clambering out of my sleeping bag when I saw the faces of wild beast staring at us through the tent’s window flaps. Ashley and I were hysterical at this point and couldn't get out of the tent fast enough. When we settled down to a panic, I slowly became aware that there were people standing around us... and that I was butt naked.

I find the woods unnerving. The air always seems thicker in there, more stifling, the noise different. Some people go into the woods and never come out again, which is what nearly happened last week, when a local (American) friend and I went for our early morning constitutional and headed off into the surrounding farmlands.

“I have a very good sense of direction,” said Joy. “I can find my way around without a map,” which was rather comforting to know as I couldn’t fight my way out of a wet paper packet without a GPS.

We were so busy talking that we didn’t notice the direction we had taken and before we knew it, we were deep in a forest, with no idea of how to get out. We walked this way, then that way, over a fence and through jungle-like thickets. I had run out of Coke-Lite, I needed to pee and panic was frantically nipping at my heels. Then the flies found us. Bored with their aromatic cow pats they homed in on us (evidently the smell of fear is more appealing). If a fly wants to be up your nose or in your ear, there is no discouraging it.

Joy was somewhat bemused at me lost inside my own little buzzing cloud of woe, waving at my head in an increasingly hopeless and desultory manner, blowing constantly out of my mouth and nose, shaking my head in a kind of furious dementia, occasionally slapping myself with startling violence.

“Found it!” Joy announced. She had jogged on ahead to establish our whereabouts. I stumbled out of the bush near my home in the delirious stagger of someone wandering in off the desert in an adventure movie, sweat-streaked, hair akin to wind-blown pubis, mumbling uncharitable thoughts, and frothing little nose rings of Coke-Lite.

I joined the gym that very day. No more wandering in the woods for me, even those in my back yard.

posted by Cindy-Lou Dale @ Friday, August 03, 2007