1st Bush Camp Night
First nights sleep in a tent since Feb 2022 in South Africa.
I have a new tent now as the old one was getting a bit of a hassle to erect and was really too big. It’s a Marmot Limelight 2P tent, the 2022 version. It has good reviews and I got a great deal at a local camping shop in Dublin. Last night was my first time testing it out although I did test erect it in my living home. It was pretty easy and spacious inside.
I was asleep by 9.30pm and slept like a log until about 2.30am when some guys decided to race their drag cars up the dunes, which are a few hundred metres in height. These cars are extremely noisy and woke us all up. I would call them gobshites except that that would be rude. Suffice it to say that their intelligence was probably inversely proportional to the testosterone in their bloodstreams. Mind you, others used earthier epitaphs with words containing the letter F abounding.
Anyway, after about an hour, I got back to sleep again.
I was awoken again by the sound of the call to prayer. There was a mosque just next to where we were camping and the sound was very loud. The call to prayer happens five times a day and, although I didn’t understand what was being said, it has a strangely familiar haunting beauty to it. It seems the first call to prayer is the longest.
When it was over, I went back to sleep again. My alarm was set for 6an but people moving around in nearby tents woke me up so I got up at about 5.50am and started stowing my camping gear away.
It’s interesting how soon the muscle memories of camping surfaced.
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