NOT SO HAPPY CAMPER
WHILE ADMITTEDLY IT’S HARD TO BEAT A NIGHT UNDER LEAKY CANVAS OR COMMUNAL SHOWERS IN THONGS, GLAMPING IS THE GREATEST OF CAMPING CONTRADICTIONS
One cannot help but ponder one’s looming dotage when one spots an ad for a Caravan and Camping Expo and thinks to oneself: “Yes, this sounds the very thing for one at one’s stage of one’s life.” By the way, when I say “one”, I don’t mean me. It seems only yesterday that the Informers were backpacking through Asia, trawling the midnight haunts of New York, London and Paris, and counting off the Big Five in Africa. Turns out it wasn’t yesterday at all, but yesteryear. Now, instead of forays to Everest, the Galapagos, the Sahara and the Poles, we are planning a midweek jaunt towing a hired caravan to a campsite not too far from home and just outside somewhere duller than Ed Sheeran.
Informer has friends who swear by caravanning and camping and always my response has been to swear back, thus expressing my bafflement as to why anyone would voluntarily subject themselves to a form of purgatory that includes communal toilets, other people’s children and, good grief, ukulele nights. Please don’t think I’m being negative just for the sake of it. Informer has roughed it in the great outdoors many times, and loved it. Sure, I may never have waltzed matilda, but I’ve chopped wood, built campfires, cooked damper, pitched tents, boiled billies and bathed in the bollock-shrinking chill of mountain streams.
That was pure camping, proper camping, miles from anywhere and anyone, risky and thrilling. It’s also why Informer has long resisted the version of camping that involves caravans, table tennis and being within spitting distance of Keith and Kerry from Geelong and their seven kids. To snobby old me, this seemed only to cheapen the “pure camping” experience and until recently I believed Mrs Informer to be of refreshingly similar mind. Then she discovered glamping.
Glamping is glamorous camping and Mrs Informer reckons it’s the rage of the age, or maybe she said the rage of the aged. Anyhoo, because these days we enjoy a tad more choice and still possess most of our faculties, hair and teeth, we apparently fit the glamping demographic. Hence her excitement at the Caravan and Camping Expo.
Trouble is, the program confirms little resemblance to the rustic camping of Informer’s youth. What it highlights instead is a menu of astonishing indulgence — caravans with their own Olympic pools; interstellar travel-ready RVs; jetskis with built-in Zimmer frames and free wi-fi; and tents admittedly smaller than the Taj Mahal but with heaps more marble.
Far from cheapening the camping experience, glamping can cost an arm and a leg, limbs that Informer can ill-afford to lose both from an economic perspective and an actual one, especially with the half-marathon coming up. Accordingly, I’ve tempered Mrs Informer’s enthusiasm and so, rather than embark on a spate of reckless glamping purchases, we’re experimenting with the aforementioned midweek jaunt to a rural campsite in a boring place in a hired van boasting all non-mod-cons.
Though Mrs Informer is disappointed, she says there are worse things in one’s life. I fear she’s right, and also vengeful. For one has bought a ukulele.
“FAR FROM CHEAPENING THE CAMPING EXPERIENCE, GLAMPING CAN COST AN ARM AND A LEG.”