A muddy New Year

Well, well, well. Happy New Year’s to all of you – let’s hope a fantastic 2007 lies ahead!

What did Santa put in your stockings? My stash comprised of three tea drinking-related gifts (sigh! Twinings, when will you take notice of me? I’m your best SA advertisement, after all), a Wine magazine subscription (yay! Finally!), some food goodies and an interesting selection of books, among other bizarre presents.

The post-Christmas days were spent in various parts of a very wet Mpumalanga. After a very, very food-filled Christmas and Boxing Day, I headed up to Barberton to visit doctor friends wrapping up their internship year at that town’s hospital where… we gorged ourselves silly on more food/alcohol to while away the hours that couldn’t be spent doing sunny-weather activities like hikes or sight-seeing.

The Gilb joined me there so we could move on to Sabie to meet up with his crew of friends for a New Year’s weekend of camping. Of course, two alarm bells were ringing in my head: one, his rabble of friends, as adorable as they are, are equally disorganized planners; and two, the rain did not seem to be letting up. Anyhow, we arrived at the camping place (Merry Pebbles) which was teeming with mostly Afrikaans, mostly fat families in tent setups that would rival any Jones’s ones. See the pic below for the average Joe’s tent setup:





As you can see, we’re talking hectic camping kit to make camping familes feel like they’re practically in their homes (and I don’t doubt that some of them were quite literally in their, ahem, mobile homes). Bringing a satellite dish on your camping holiday? Why not just check into a hotel and save yourselves the effort of pitching tents?

We named ourselves the amateur campers, which no doubt is the sniggering thought that crossed our every neighbour’s mind. Refer to the pic below for our camp setup:




We happened to pick a spot destined to become the muddiest on the site, and randomly arranged our tents around a central area which was to be our little lounge (alas, totally exposed to the elements). When the rain picked up, we were inspired to use our firewood (what good is it in wet weather, anyway?) for the better purpose of laying a haphazard wooden floor so that we could walk on soggy planks rather than muddy ground. When the rain got even heavier, we managed to dig up a tarpaulin to dangle from a nearby tree trunk to protect our scarce cutlery/crockery stash (particularly our cups, which were necessary to drink our copious volumes of alcohol from). Despite the rain, I must confess we did get some sight-seeing activity in: we went to the Sudwala caves (highly recommended, if you haven’t been) and Mac-Mac Pools (where I embarrassingly tried to force myself to jump from the mini waterfall into the pools below, much to the amusement of a crowd of onlookers coaxing me to take the mere 2m plunge, with me panicking because I couldn’t see into the murky water and was terrified I’d land on rocks. My pride eventually overcame my terror, however, and I was so cheered on by the strangers that I even managed a second plunge). We also managed to get two rounds of floating down the ice-cold Sabie river in rubber tubes (drunk, interfering with fishermen’s attempts to extract fish from the water, and repeatedly uttering terrifying profanities accidentally in front of conservative old folk and innocent fragile little children) before the heavens ripped apart to release depressingly constant heavy showers on our parade. Our attempt on New Year’s Eve to make a potjie was thus thwarted, so we grudgingly accepted defeat (all our neighbours were staring at us from the comfort of their cozy, dry gazebo tents, the nosy bastards), got dressed for a partytjie in the town, had an early dinner at Spur (the only place that would take us without a prior booking at this advanced stage of the New Year’s Eve festivities), then made our way to the sports bar that was rumoured to be the best place to celebrate the occasion. We danced like crazy people to the terrible Sokkie treffers the dj insisted on playing, and the Gilb even relented and taught me how to sokkie (I even managed to follow his lead for a bit). So we celebrated the turning of the year in style with mulleted lonely old people, pregnant teenagers, sweaty overweight couples and aggro Buffalo-shoed pool players. A genuinely great evening that was marred only by the discovery, when we got back to the campsite, that the Gilb’s and my tent was not actually that waterproof, so we landed up sleeping (if you can actually call it that) in his car, then getting up surprisingly early to pack up hastily and get the fuck out of the miserably muddy site and back to the land of the comfortably dry.

And so here I am, back in the land of the comfortably dry, and already wishing I could trade the work day for the mud…