I WOKE TO THE SOUND OF A HUNGRY HIPPO
Of cOurse, in principle, it’s magical. But there is so much about camping that isn’t fun. I’m not going to dwell on the obvious lack of lavatories, and memory foam mattresses, and ovens and fridges and bathtubs and sofas, and roofs and walls and air conditioning and all the things the human race has gone to such elaborate ends to invent to avoid sleeping on mud, under canvas.
But I like my creature comforts. And the older I get, the more I like them, the more grateful I am to live in a world where, for most of us at least, sleeping rough can generally be avoided.
However. A person should always try something once.
I did it when I was 23. I was living and working in Kenya as a teacher and the people I hung out with were a hearty bunch.
They call camping ‘going on safari’ in Kenya, which already makes it sound more appealing.
Plus, of course, the weather is guaranteed.
My boyfriend of the time had a cool jeep, which he let me drive across a desert- like patch of landscape. The jeep skidded in the sand, and we had a row under the hot, hot sun. After that, his trust in my competence as a safari companion was gone. He drove. He put up the tent. He did pretty much everything. so in a way it worked out well for me.
He had a small tent, and we — he — set it up on a grassy bank of beautiful Lake Baringo, famous for its crocs and hippos. We built a fire — or possibly he did, I don’t remember. But I have a blurred photograph of the two of us sitting either side of it, drinking Tusker beers, with the lake behind us and a couple of blurred photographs of the sunset on the lake with the hippos basking in the water. We’d been warned not to make too much noise after dark on pain of being trampled to death ( quite an incentive) because at night the hippos would sometimes come onto the bank to graze.
This is what I remember: being woken to the sound of noisy munching just a few feet from my ears. I crawled very quietly to the front of the tent and remembering it even now still makes my heart beat faster. When I peered out from under the zipper, a hippo’s head and neck was all that I could see. Hippos are massive.
And that’s it. I don’t remember the rest of the night, the lack of lavatories, or memory foam mattresses . . . But the sight and sound of that munching hippo, so close I could hear his breath — that, I will take with me to my grave. I’m grateful I did it, and even more grateful I will never do it again.