The fear of tents

The last time he spent a night in a tent, he was fearing for his life in the mountains on the border between Zimbabwe and Mozambique, says Sean Hunter Christie, who’s in no hurry to do so again.

Ihave a fear of tents. There, I said it, and it is no small admission. For much of my life, I have projected an image of outdoorsy competence. I am not sure that I had much choice in the matter. My father is a former infantryman, capable of rolling a sleeping bag up tighter than a geometric tortoise. On my mother’s side, I’m directly descended from the Edenburg trekkers. I’m to the manner born, as they say, except that my track record tells a very different story. Once, I was eaten alive by sand fleas on an Eastern Cape beach because I failed to put down a groundsheet. Another time, in Mpumalanga, a large red centipede stung my toe after I failed to shake out my shoes. Clearly, I’m more of a Papa Berenstain than a Bear Grylls, more qualified in “How not to” than the tying of knots. This painful realisation truly hit home in 2010, high up in the Chimanimani mountains – the range on the border of Zimbabwe and Mozambique. I had heard that scores of men were panning the mountain range’s rivers for gold, and as a journalist with conservation leanings, I felt a duty to investigate. I asked a photographer friend to join me, and I should have known what we were in for when I saw how she intended to hike: with a 20 kg rucksack, a camera bag of equal weight, and a tripod that could have held up the temple of Dagon. The next thing that caused me a prick of concern was hearing from the guide we had hired – a former gold panner called Luke – that our destination was called Musanditera, meaning “don’t follow me”. This, Luke explained, is what panners had been telling their families ever since the great cyclone of 2006, which had killed many panners and an even greater number of wouldbe rescuers. On this upbeat note, we made for the narrow passes after which the Chimanimani are named and which for centuries have served as trade routes between Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Except for the odd shoe sole and a few pairs of old shorts, we saw no sign of panners, and Luke reckoned that it had something to do with the fact that armed rangers had been attacking panners and stealing their clothes. We would find them all on the other side of the range, he thought, in Mozambique. The border between the two countries is a barrier of rocky spears, grassed up to a point and then grey white like sharpened pumice. Weighed down by camera gear, we ascended through a ravine the panners called “Razor wire”. It remains to this day one of the hardest things I have ever done. At the top, I collapsed next to the path and removed my shoes, and in doing so, I effectively chose our campsite. Luke wasn’t happy about it. He explained that the panners moved at night to avoid detection, and as the hump of land I’d chosen fell away sharply on the right and left, anyone coming that way would have no choice but to pass by the tent’s entrance. The panners, he now admitted, had been violently fighting with Mozambican rangers, too, and any panner who stumbled upon us would probably assume we were rangers and might feel inspired to torch our tent. At the very least, he thought we’d be robbed of our food, as the rangers had closed the mountain mtsikas (markets) and chased away the women who supplied them. As the sun set, we observed streams of men climbing out of the nearby valleys, pickaxes slung over their shoulders. Soon, fires speckled the cliff faces. It was at this point that the photographer – a society maven with no camping experience – finally summoned the courage to ask if it might not be a good idea to relocate. I had an egg boiling away on the Primus, however, and reassured her that all would be well. Luke said nothing, but chose not to join us in the tent and instead unrolled his sleeping mat behind a distant rock. Around midnight, the photographer shook me awake. “Something’s out

there,” she whispered. I listened. “It’s the wind,” I said. “Somebody’s whistling,” she insisted. “It’s the whistling of the wind,” I said, and closed my eyes. Minutes later, a torch beam probed our tent, and to quote Bill Burr, I have never been so effing scared in my entire life. We rustled our sleeping bags in alarm, and this caused several pairs of feet to drum away at speed. A short while later, the torch beam was back. Luke, from the safety of his rock, yelled out at the top of his lungs, and again we heard the drumming of feet. Why had I chosen to pitch our tent across the smuggler’s trail? Come to think of it, what were we doing in a tent at all, unable to observe our surroundings and with no way to escape quickly and soundlessly? I felt like a fish in a basket as I searched in my backpack for a weapon, and produced a little yellow box cutter, the sort of thing that might fly out of a Christmas cracker. At the same time and without warning, the photographer activated her headtorch. Very few things could possibly distract from the sort of situation we were in, but the sight of me on my knees holding the tiny blade in two sweaty hands was clearly one of those things, because the photographer laughed, and then I laughed, and we both laughed so hard and so long, we nearly collapsed the tent. There were no more surprises that night. At 05:00, a delegation of panners arrived at our campsite, led by a man called Kudakwashe. Word of our presence had spread, and throughout the valley, bands of panners were waiting in their caves for further information before descending to their works. In chiShona, Kudakwashe described his terror at finding our tent in his path. He said he and his group had scattered, and after reforming some way down the hill, they had indeed discussed whether to attack the tent with their pickaxe handles. But then they heard maniacal laughter and became convinced that whoever stood in their way must have the protection of powerful muti. And so they had retreated. We all shared a good laugh, and Kudakwashe invited us to spend the day observing his syndicate’s panning activities. With the exception of the J&J booster jab I took last November, I haven’t stepped inside a tent since.