Meserani Campsite and Bar Evening

September 3, 2005

Before dinner this evening our group gathered around the truck to celebrate Jo's birthday. She turns forty today.

We toasted her with potent cane spirit fruit punch and munch chips and popcorn.

Jo told me and Jeff that one of her reasons for booking this trip in the first place was to be far, far away from England before her mother got any ideas about planning a monstrous birthday bash. A cunning plan....

This camp hosts barbeques for overlander truck groups. This afternoon I noticed a lamb turning on a spit in the cooking area. Around seven o'clock we trooped down to a covered area and find seats at long tables covered with red and black Masaii-inspired table-cloths for a huge buffet meal--all sorts of food really, vegetarian and otherwise. None of it was particularly African, but it was good.

I make friends with some of the camp's resident animals, a little cat and her friend the dog. They sat behind my chair and waited patiently for the little delicacies I handed down to them.

After our meal, most of us end up in the campsite's bar which is reached through a warren of passage-ways thatched with mud and straw and littered with rustic twig furniture.

The overlander bar is full of character and mostly-young people holding drinks. The ceiling and walls are hung with T-shirts, flags and souvenirs from all over the world. I am suddenly filled with a feeling of kinship with travellers on George-like trucks everywhere, rumbling over the roads of the world. I dunno, maybe it was just the Tusker beer talking.

There is a large section of wall by the bar crowded with photos of overlander trucks mired in mud, overturned in ditches, or crossing swollen African rivers. The overlander tourists in these photos are soaked in red dust and mud and are a good deal more scruffy-looking than I feel at this point. I am glad that I am visiting this part of the world in the dry season.

Jen and Jeff and me have a conversation here about how the group dynamics would be on a much longer trip like this. Exodus offers an eleven-week overlander trip from one end of Africa to the other. I wonder how that would be. Part of me really wants to find out; the other half of me who enjoys creature comforts frowns at the idea and hisses 'you fool! when am I going to get that hot bath you promised me?'

Jeff and I go for a walk around the camp-site before bed. We walk by peaked wooden cabins thatched with straw that you can rent here. Little clouds of green and yello love-birds chitter on the pointy rooftops. There are big tropical flowers growing among the dusty trucks and tents. We see red geraniums growing as big as shrubs here.

I wonder if the flocks of guinea fowl roosting on the grounds will keep us up all night with their noise. They make a shrill sound like creaking bed-springs. It sounds like a lot of enthusiastically amorous people.

Well, good-night to the crocodiles and off to bed.