i woke up this morning in a foul mood.
i’m not entirely sure why, because i’d had an early night and a respectable lie-in (i was awake at 6.30, but not out of bed until gone 7, which in a world of alarm clocks set at 5.30 is a positive miracle).
i suppose that i should be pleased that it is such a rare occurrence for me to wake up in a strop that it feels worthy of note in this blog. i’m quite positive that back in the UK i would get out of bed on the wrong side most weekday mornings, and if i wasn’t stomping about the house as i rushed around getting ready for work, the morning London commute had almost inevitably put a stomp in my step by the time i hit the office.
most mornings here, even if i don’t exactly spring out of bed, the sights and sounds and smells of a dawning morning in the valley tend to soothe my nerves and my spirit and put me in a fairly chipper place.
but this morning was different- i snapped at our waiter for failing to notice cobwebs on the dining table, i growled at the husband for the tea station being untidy, and then stomped around angrily wiping down the residue of glass rings on the bar from the previous night’s drinks. i managed to raise a smile for the guests, of course professionalism coming first, but was glad that their Dutchness and keenness to speak in Dutch, and just to each other, limited the conversation to a few simple pleasantries and small talk.
i think, on reflection, that i am just a little tired, and all of a sudden the job is catching up on me. yes the pace of life here may be slow, but we have been ‘on’ as it were constantly since we got back from the festival; with guests, attending to every whim, making conversation and generally doing our best to be charming. that is nearly a month, and naturally charming as i may be (ha!), it is undoubtedly exhausting to have a permanent smile plastered on your face (just think about how hard you sigh with relief after posing for a photograph that takes an age to be taken, then multiply that by days and weeks!). and we can hardly claim to have been left well rested after the hurricane of activity that was the brief sojourn back to England for the festival.
at the start of August i was sent out to be the relief manager at one of our other bushcamps for a week, and i had a few sleepless nights without the husband by my side, which has not helped on the tiredness stakes. i had a truly disastrous first night- i arrived in the all-encompassing blackness of early evening, at a camp i didn’t know at all, daunted and nervous about the week ahead. the staff welcomed me heartily, but i was flustered at the thought of being away from the husband for so many days- since the start of the big trip we have barely been apart for a few hours, and the camp radios were playing up at the time meaning i probably wouldn’t even be able to speak to him- so my emotions were running high.
in an attempt to calm myself down i tried to familiarise myself with the kitchen, and make plans for the next day. however, despite being assured that the food order had already been done, the kitchen was worryingly bare, and i swiftly discovered that we were missing several vital things, including candles, matches, milk, potatoes and onions, sugar, beer, coca-cola, and both white and red wine. thankfully there were no guests in that evening for me to deal with, and a swift succession of broken radio calls to other camps left me breathing more easily, with the promise that i could borrow rations from my neighbours for the following day.
but i then realised that in the panic to get me dropped off and the husband back to our camp before his guests returned from their drive, and given that it was already dark, i had left the handover notes about the camp, plus the ever vital ‘movement sheet’ detailing guest info and arrival times, in the car. without this to hand, or the radio functioning properly, this meant that i was working pretty much blind, and this knowledge did nothing to soothe my fractured nerves.
the staff had tried to be kind, and they had left me some dinner from their rations- a rather unappetising plastic plate of nshima, cold cabbage and a small, whole fish. as i sat down on the cold concrete step of the kitchen, and attempted to tear into the dinner with my hands (the traditional way to eat in Africa), lit only by a few guttering oil lanterns, i tried to remind myself of the myriad of reasons why i was here, and count my blessings. but all i could conjure up was a desperate feeling of aloneness, and after a few minutes i excused myself to the staff, pleading an early night, and retired to my room to cry myself to sleep with quiet, frustrated, lonely tears.
the next morning i had shaken off my melancholy, and despite having an almost sleepless night- the room was unfamiliar, the lions had been roaring all through the early hours, and i don’t tend to sleep well without the husband next to me at the best of times- i determined to stop feeling sorry for myself, pick myself up, dust myself off and get down to the business of running a bushcamp. after familiarising myself with the camp, making a menu for the day out of what scraps of food we had, and having a bit of a tidy up i felt much better, and by the time the guests arrived i was back to my bouncy bubbly usual self.
and i was thrilled to discover that the guests who arrived were properly charming, which of course helped to lift my spirits even higher. they were a mother and grown up daughter from London, friends of one of the management team at the lodge who had also come with them to stay for two nights. the four of us settled down to a long lazy lunch, and the guests obvious delight in the camp, the rooms, the food, and the lazily sauntering elephants on the horizon forced me to look at the world with fresh eyes myself, and appreciate my scenario anew. these lovely guests insisted i come with them on their evening drive, which turned up a great lion sighting and some very fun sundowners, and by the time we settled down to our roast chicken dinner back at camp i was smiling genuinely and feeling surrounded by enthusiasm, laughter and love, a world away from my fish and nshima dinner of the previous night.
with the discovery that my room was perfectly positioned for afternoon sunbathing, the donation of some recent trashy mags from the London ladies, the arrival of more lovely guests (an intrepid and fascinating couple in their seventies from Germany), and their continued insistence that i join them on drives, the days apart from the husband passed, and despite missing his reassuring presence in bed next to me at night, i seemed to cope pretty well.
because the camp was not very busy i got to make a real fuss of the lovely guests we did have, and over the course of a few days i took great delight in spoiling them with a myriad of surprises; arranging sundowner drinks in the river, where they got to take off their shoes and socks and wade out ankle deep to watch the sunset with the gently lapping river cooling their feet; a secret ‘Bush Brunch’, where we all enjoyed a good old fashioned fry-up in the middle of the bush; and even a private romantic dinner on the deck for the German couple. they were taken aback, but so appreciative- they both hugged me and exclaimed that only once, 30 years previously, had they ever had a private dinner arranged for them on safari. frankly, their joy brought a tear to my eye, and i just found myself hoping that when the husband and I have been together 53 years as they had we are still able to safari together, and luxuriate in each other’s company and the romance of an African dinner under the stars as they did that evening.
so i returned to our camp, thrilled to be back in my bush home, and in the arms of the husband, but exhausted from the emotional highs and lows of my week as a relief manager. and since i’ve been back at our camp we have seemingly had a long list of difficult guests in quick succession. that is not to say that any of them have been unpleasant- they have all been fine and sweet in their own way- but they have been demanding and hard to please, and as such have perhaps made our smiles more forced and therefore more tiring to hold.
we first had a family with a very young child, who was terribly sweet, but it of course entirely changes the dynamic, and when we had a full camp of guests anyway, and were short-staffed due to sickness and leave, trying to keep on top of constant demands for jam sandwiches, special laundry instructions, an entirely separate timetable for the day, and a supply of boiled eggs for morning drives which increased daily (4, 5 and on the final morning 6!), inevitably left us stretched. it did make me laugh- the mother would repeatedly use the turn of phrase “Ah, he’s no trouble” in reference to her little one, which trips off the tongue very easily when you are sitting at dinner with your back to your child, and someone else is preparing special meals which don’t get eaten, running back of house to get hot flannels to wake him up just as dinner is about to be served, finding blankets to wrap the darling in so he can sleep next to the dinner table when the hot flannels only succeed in bringing on a tantrum, and holding a torch and being a one-person audience for him to do a martial arts show at 10.30 at night as his second wind kicks in. she very sweetly smiled at me at tea one day, and told me earnestly how she is very strict, and has taught him that in Chinese culture it is rude to spit out food that you don’t like the taste of in front of your host. i wanted to ask her if she thought this was acceptable behaviour in any culture, but instead i bit my tongue and stifled a giggle as i watched her little son open his mouth and disgorge the contents, a thoroughly chewed mini doughnut that had obviously failed to please his tastebuds, on to a plate while she obliviously continued on telling me about how many toys he was going to get for being such a good boy, and trying all the different foods and keeping them down. i had to whisk away the plate of regurgitated doughnut before any other guests noticed it, and it made them bring up their tea too, so i didn’t get any further mothering tips. more’s the pity.
hot on the heels of the young family, was another, this time with teenage children. though the children were sweet, if a little precocious, and the mother was a fusspot but good natured and grateful, the father just seemed to have a permanent scowl on his face. he refused to really communicate with either myself or the husband, attempts at conversation were batted away with one word answers, and the only real times we were addressed was when he wanted to criticise the camp and find fault. we tried our best to appease- when he said the solar lanterns were useless we gave him one of our own head-torches; when he said there was grit in the water we provided him with bottled water; and when he wanted to eat at a different time to usual we changed the schedule of the day for them. nonetheless, the tension was palpable, and we spent the first 24 hours on tenterhooks, feeling the hostility resonating from him, and unsure what we could do to make things better. on their second night the family were the only guests we had, so we organised them a camp fire on the beach and a private dinner together. they seemed to really enjoy eating un-hosted, and once we had given them some distance his mood seemed to lighten, and he even found it within himself to compliment the food. on his departure he left a massive tip and he even shook our hands, and gruffly thanked us for all we had done, but it was only as the car pulled away that i realised i had been holding my breath for 3 days, waiting for the next complaint or criticism to tumble from his lips.
and so the guests continued, and within a couple of weeks it felt like we had dealt with almost everything our guests could throw at us- some sweet and smiling, but so quiet that getting conversation out of them was like getting blood from a stone; others keen to forget that they were in the middle of the bush and make orders at breakfast like they were in a 5* hotel (“one omelette with tomato and onion, one omelette with cheese and tomato, one bacon and sausages, one bacon and scrambled egg and a pile of pancakes please”…”oh, so… the cereal, toast and porridge we have already provided wasn’t quite what you had in mind?”); some drinking like guppies, so much so that we couldn’t get the wine chilled quickly enough before it was all drunk; some needing space to enjoy their holiday, without being fussed over, and visibly bristling when we did so; others absorbing all of our attention, and requiring continual conversation and special treatment at every turn. exhausting, not exceptional perhaps, but exhausting. and in addition to the usual trials and tribulations of running a bushcamp- staff sick with malaria, mini rebellions over who was going to do the washing up (given the staff shortage), running out of ice, cleaning up a seemingly constant daily barrage of baboon shit on the deck- i find myself weary, and malcontented.
of course, i don’t want to be seen to be complaining. as I said at the start of this entry, it is a rare occurrence for me to be in a bad mood out here, and back in London, in my old life, i would frequently be miserable, moping and melancholy. i would far rather be out here, dealing with the odd tricky guest, than back there, in the daily 9 to 5 grind, battling with the pollution and congestion, co-existing with threatening youths, un-communicative commuters and demanding bosses, under the same grey skies and tramping the same rain sodden pavements.
i recognise that the guests who come out here have paid a lot of money, and are entitled to be as demanding as they like- that is my job, to try and make them happy. but i also take it very personally if they just refuse to be pleased. i have said in a previous blog that i feel like there can’t be many jobs that are so pleasing, and have such instant gratification as this- watching guests beaming from ear to ear and having a holiday of a lifetime is truly heart-warming, the ultimate in job satisfaction, and their joy is contagious. but in the same way, if a guest doesn’t seem happy, i deeply take it to heart, i feel like i have failed them in some way, and i don’t like to fail. so, all is not always perfect in paradise.
just sometimes, sometimes, i wish these tricky customers would open their eyes to the beauty that is all around them in our little piece of Eden, instead of looking for the serpents. maybe then, we could all just be happy to be here.
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