A TRIP TO MABIBI

Note the sea pools where the sand ends. Put your mask in at the edge and psychedelia's right there 

IN JULIA'S WORDS

24 April

I have memories from this part of the world. The first was somewhere like 26 years ago in nearby Sodwana, when with psychedelia in our pouches David, Dorfy, Heidi, Mark and some others drove from Joburg for a weekend. David Matthews is he who went on to giddy success with his American band. Know that tune, “Tripping billies”? The words, at least, are from that Sodwana trip.

You don’t really need mind-altering drugs here though, because it all feels incredibly, madly ze’eeep and kano’skelly all by itself. Those sweeping dunes with their population of lime-green succulents tipped with orange; the forest of low trees buzzing above them; patches of the crystal sky trapped in the sea-pools with the haute-couture fishies amidst which we swim ....

After a psychedelic snorkel there's the trippy path through the trees to our campsite

Then again, 15-plus years ago, I was right here in this same Mabibi Camp with my old friend Katy (knee-high Mira was yellow-haired, pink-costumed; Sophia still suckling). The sites are the same sandy, becanopied things they were then, as are the 120-odd wooden stairs to the beach.

Now I’m here with Rehana. We’ve both noticed the dark blue wee fish that’s striped with ribs of bright blue and white. Not unlike R’s cozzie.

Steps to the beach, trees draped in fat spiders

Heard that one about “a happy camper”? Like, “Bliksem is one happy camper who ..." 
What needs to be known, though, is that in the case of real camping, to be a happy camper is to be an ORGANISED camper. Else you’re that strange stressed bunny who hops seemingly in circles rummaging without respite in bag after thereafter box.

This leads to the “unhappy camper”. Which we are rapidly becoming, R & I, save for our vermillion determination to become organised, and therefore, HAPPY campers.

DESPERATELY SEEKING ZEN IN THE ART OF CAR BATTERY MAINTENANCE

IN REHANA'S WORDS

Saturday April 27, 2013

I shan’t bore everyone and myself again with all the details of the near-death of one of our three batteries. Here's a precis. Our fridge’s temperature soared up to 26 degrees Celsius on Thursday morning, which made the chicken smell a bit dodgy.

To resolve this problem we removed our little mat from the bottom of our ladder, dismantled our downstairs room, folded it up and stashed it under a tree. We had been storing all our boxes and bits inside the add-on room. Putting it all back into the car seemed a step too far. We'd have to take it out again when we returned after seeking help at the nearest powerpoint. We have a battery charger in the car, but it only ran off mains electricity -- and there was none at the Mabibi campsite.

I remembered the women at the entrance of the campsite, from whom we bought firewood every day, who offered to wash our dishes and clothes and guard our campsite from the monkeys when we were at the beach snorkelling. 
I went to the gate and negotiated with a young mother who brought her infant and ensconced herself in one of our comfy chairs for the afternoon. Our goods under the tree would probably not be carried off by a troop of avaricious monkeys. Turn your back on them for a second and they'll take off with any possession they can grasp.

We stashed the tent away on the roof and drove through the soft sand to Mbzwana, 30 kilometres and an hour’s drive away. The owner of Go Boy Steel Gates and Baglars let us plug our battery charger into his switch hanging on its wires. So kind, he said yes immediately when we explained what we needed and wouldn’t set a price. But the battery wouldn’t kick into life.

Hoping against hope that this is the cure

So on Friday we packed up again, hired another monkey guard and drove down the sand and gravel road to a cashew nut plantation – the first place I spotted with an electrical supply, hard to miss the red Coke cooler in the tuckshop facing the road. 
Again, we were allowed to plug in the battery charger, with everyone refusing to accept payment. The fridge has been a constant nine degrees today. Inshallah, it shall remain so until tomorrow, when we pack up for the third and last time - in five days! - and leave South Africa for 11 months.

We read in our trusty 4x4 book that a battery that is near depleted sulks and does not readily accept a charge when it's offered. Well, now we know. Julia says that I must not regard this as time wasted but as time spent learning, but I am struggling to find zen in the struggle to keep a battery going.

Where zen can be found is in the rock pools, 134 steps below our campsite. Except for our first day at Mabibi, we’ve snorkeled for at least two hours every day. We go down to the pools at 8.30am – which, believe it or not, has not been a struggle for Julia and Rehana who love nothing more than sleeping till noon. By 9pm we’re yawning, by 10pm we’re asleep. This trip was supposed to be about changing the way we live, and boy have we already changed radically.

On our first day we went for a long walk on Mabibi's warm beach

The best time to snorkel is at low tide, which ends at about noon. The rock pools, exposed to our eager eyes when the sea pulls back, offer a landscape of reflections, reef and colourful fishies. I boasted that I had seen a red fish, which Julia disputed. This morning though, in between the black fishies with white dots on their tails and the orange and blue and yellow darting littlies, I spotted a big green one with thick red stripes.

I couldn’t think of a better place than Mabibi to start our snorkeling expedition up the east coast of Africa. But this morning, I was pulled short by something Julia said. We got cold after being in the water for three hours and found a shallow pool to wallow in, where the water was piss warm. Julia said, “this is what the Red Sea is going to feel like”. 
And I realised that, enchanted as we’ve been by the couple of hundred fishies we had seen in the pools that morning, we’re going to be gobsmacked when we see the hundred of thousands on the reefs in the Red Sea.

Our nights have been tranquil, the air is soft and so is my skin and my hair. The Milky Way above us is not as low and distinct as it was in Lesotho. But I can achieve zen about the absence of the web of stars because it is caused by the bright yellow moon rising behind my left shoulder. 
When I go to bed at night I walk across a patterned carpet on the sand, created by the moon shining through the milkwood trees that form a canopy over our campsite.

Computer-soft hands protected by Gaillard's gloves

NOTES ON HOW CAMPING CAN RADICALLY CHANGE YOUR LIFE

1.     As already mentioned, campers are early to bed early to rise people. At coloured campsites during apartheid people played Lionel Ritchie and Whitney Houston very loud till late at night, but we haven’t met such a campsite yet.

2.     Bourgeois computer fingers get scratched and bruised and burned almost every time you do something. Almost everything in our lives has a zip, clip, bungee cord, clamp, ratchet, bracket, cap (I’ve already lost one), screw (I’ve already lost one), lock or a peg. I haven’t tripped over a tent line yet, but that’s only because we don’t have any.

3.     Everything takes much longer to do. And you can only do one thing at a time because if you lose your concentration, it will take even longer to remember where you put what and what you were doing while you lost it.

4.     You take pleasure in trying to be the most organised person in the universe. Spending hours packing things away is a delight.

5.     No more en suite, dishwasher, washing machine, iron, house help or cupboards (we have half a drawer each, for all our clothing for one year).

6.     Food tastes better. After driving for hours to stand in the hot sun while your battery sulks, the only meal you can muster is boiled eggs on toast. Sitting at a campfire, dripping mayonnaise down your chest, you savour every mouthful of that sandwich. No egg has ever been more perfectly boiled.

7.     Eating in the dark without messing is hard. (We’re in the dark because one battery has died and we’re scared to switch on any of our many lights on the car. But we have head torches, thanks to Gaillard, and roaring campfires)

8.     You’re out in a world where there are no high walls, burglar bars, alarms and armed response but you sleep like a baby with a only a tent zip between yourself and the world. You greet everyone who passes your tent with a trusting smile and hope your trust is returned.

9.     Darkness is softer than Eishkom’s light and provides you with acres of space between yourself and anything or anyone who may be out there.  A chorus in the church hall; a roaring sea, a nearby road are your only markers.

10. You become more you. I caught a whiff of my underarm after swimming all morning and being in the heat for the rest of the day. I can’t remember when last I smelled so ripe. It made me smile and proudly share my new way of being with Jules.

11. You are completely unfazed by the reports that a family of scorpions has been spotted a few times in the ablution block. When you've got to go, you enjoy that shower so much you forget to look down.