Man Camp
It tastes like burnt.
- The common consensus on the
taste of boiled Lake Victoria water
If you want another spin on the Man Camp
experiences, be sure to check out the entry
on Spike's blog.
20th October 2006
I have marketable skills. I can make computers dance intricate
little dances for me. I can turn complicated systems into simple,
easy-to-follow systems.
Through me in the jungle for three days though and I am next to
useless (the "next to" being important). There is no
need for a n-tier relational database system. Knowing the
difference between the 3rd and 4th normal database will not be
help. Nor will recursive algorithms.
So when the revolution comes - and society reverts to a hunter-gather
mould - I will be first against the wall.
This truth became obvious to me when I joined a bunch
of fellow volunteers and headed into the jungle for two nights and
three days.
Man Camp is the brain child of Travis
- the head of MACRO, the
organisation I kinda work for. More on the
"kinda" later. The idea is to take some
bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Mzunugus and throw them into the
jungle to see what happens.
Supplies
A true Man-Camper will only take the following items:
- A machete
Vital for hacking your way through the jungle - destroying
precious rainforest and making extinct several species of bugs that
no one has heard of as you go.
I thought it would be cool if I purchased my own machete for the
trip, so I traipsed off with Moses on afternoon and got me one for
the princely sum of ush2,500 ($NZ 2.08). The other boyz
thought it was a good idea and got one as well.
I also thought it was a good idea to name my machete (Thresh) and
burn her name into the handle using a heated pocket knife. The
boyz also thought this was a good idea and followed
suit. Thresh is coming back with me to New Zealand by the
way.
All this following-of gave me the misguided idea that I would become
the Alpha Male of the camp. How little I knew...
- A box of matches
Prior to departure I downloaded a survival guide that detailed
how to a make a fire from sticks. It went onto mention that it
takes a lot of practice before you can get any good at the
technique. If not, you might have to resign yourself to a day
or two of frustration before you can get a fire going.
Frustration sounds like no fun, so we brought along a box of
matches.
- A pot
We were to camp near Lake Victoria, so we figured it would be
sensible to take a pot so that we could boil drinking water.
"It taste likes burnt," was the common consensus of boiled
Lake Victoria water.
Boiling the water took a lot of effort. Just keeping the fire
hot enough to boil the water was a challenge, and even when you got
it boiled, you had to wait an interminable time for it to cool
down. Some clever person eventually realised that if we kept
the recently boiled pot of water in the lake, it would cool off a
lot quicker.
We also found that if we kept one pot on top of the other, the
second pot would act as a lid to the first pot. You have to
make sure the bottom of the second pot is very clean, or else you
get a big pot of boiled, muddy water and
have to start again.
- The clothes on your back
I decided to go hardcore man-camp and only wear trousers, a
rugby shirt, underwear, socks and shoes.
Some of the other man-campers chose to go softcore and wear
a lot more...
Hardcore vs.
Softcore
And speaking of Hardcore vs. Softcore, some campers decided to
go very softcore, which was fine. That was the experience they
wanted. I wanted to push myself as much as possible and see what
happens.
The Softcores had the following luxuries:
-
A blanket to sleep on
-
Bottled water
-
Cigarettes
-
Food
Both that was brought in (passionfruit, apples, bread...) and that
purchased in the village about an hours walked away.
-
Beer
Yes, that's right beer. Eddie
and Niall were quite heroic and
fetched a crate of beer from the village. Took them over two
hours to retrieve it.
Simon, Chris,
Niall and myself were the only ones to go
fully hardcore and survive the weekend. A couple of other
those-who-shall-not-be-named tried, but wilted at the site of eggs,
rice, beer, rolexes...
Getting There
Getting into the jungle was an easy enough experience.
Travis has arranged an hour long taxi
ride that took us to the village.
We waited near a school while Travis organised
a couple of local lads to show us to the actual spot we would be
camping. In the great tradition of volunteer travel everywhere, we
quickly attracted a swagger of kids.
It took us about an hour of walking to find the
place where we would be camping. The walk started out fairly easy
with a walk down paths and through corn fields, but degenerated into uphill
climbs and thick jungle before the end.
Eddie - in a desperate
attempt to become Alpha Male (he wasn't) - took the lead and hacked the
way through the jungle with his trusted machete called Lil' Ed.
Eddie had been on a similar Man Camp and wanted to find the site he was
at before.
Setting up Camp
Eddie did manage to locate the previous camp site and we quickly set
about the task of setting up our home for the next few days.
I was desperate to destroy some of the environment
with Thresh so volunteered myself for firewood and
big-sticks-for-shelter duty.
A bunch of guys claiming to be engineers
volunteered to build the shelter. They had great ideas and built a
really cool roof. Well, really cool until it fell
on top of them anyway...
A couple of ladies took over
proceedings and constructed a very cool shelter.
Basically some lengths of wood connecting together a bunch of trees and
then large fern leaves forming the walls. It rained on both of the
nights we were there but we kept surprisingly dry. There was a lot
of tree cover above and the shelter itself kept off most of the rain
that sneaked between the trees. A couple of people complained
about water dripping to their heads, but nothing too serious.
Food
The thing I was most looking forward to was hunting. Simon
and I were particularly keen on it. We discussed at length how we
were going to bring an antelope down with out machetes. Our basic
plan was to surround it and force it to run past out where we would try
to break one its legs as it scampered past.
We hunted for many hours and didn't even see
an antelope.
We figured that the wildlife would come to the
shore at dawn. We got up before the sun came up on the second day
and stalked our way along the shores of Lake Victoria. Apart from
some birds, we saw no animals.
We downgrade our expectations and decided to
take out some birds. Our high-tech approach was to sneak up and throw
rocks at them. We didn't come close to hitting
one.
Poor old Simon came close to losing it on the
last day. Some Softcore volunteers had purchased some fish
from some local fisherman. Simon placed the unwanted fish guts on
a rock in front of him and waited stock still with a rock poised for
attack. He waited for about an hour with no success.
Jeff reported
having seen a rather large rabbit at one point, so we hatched a new
plan. We would take some dry vines with us, light them on fire and
stick in down any rabbit holes we would fine. The rabbit would
bolt in panic and one person would catch it inside a t-shirt while
another person would club it to death. We found some things that resembled
rabbit holes, but the weren't nearly deep enough to include a rabbit.
In the end, we had to resort to the clams
and snails we found along the shoreline of
Lake Victoria.
I did not like the clams. I ate a total
of six over the three days. Ugh.
The only other thing I ate
was a millipede. Not so much for its nutritional value, but more
to freak people out. The white goo at the
front end and the black goo at the back end was enough to gross most
people at. Heh heh heh.
Hanging out around the
campfire
Unlike the rather pitiful
campfire at the scout camp
I attended in the Philippines, our campfire
was actually pretty decent.
Most of the praise for the campfire has to go
to Jeff - the true Alpha Male of the
camp. He kept it going, organised people to get the wood and was basically
the superstar of the camp. He practically spent the whole of the
first night just keeping the damn thing going - sometimes from just a few
embers.
I got a little bit of sleep on the dirt floors of the shelter, but
spent most of my time talking to people around the campfires in the
evening. Like campfires all over the world, we talked about the
deep stuff. i.e. God and Religion.
I enjoyed the discussion. I took the
hard-line Atheist role, Jeff the Born Again role, Eddie the Skeptics
role and others chipped in with useful questions and interesting
insights. Rather strangely, the Atheist quoted the Bible more than
anyone else...
Getting Back
and pigging out
We headed back to the village early on the last day. Most
people had had enough and I was even feeling a little dizzy due to lack
of food and water.
As soon as I was officially out of the jungle
and into the village, I scoffed down some
chocolate, gulped down some mineral water
and followed it all down with a couple of rolex.
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(c)
2005 and 2006 Malcolm Trevena.
All the stuff on this site is written by me, Malcolm Trevena. Feel free to
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