Glamping

My beloved and I recently went away for the long weekend. As it was her idea the details were left firmly in her court and she decided to introduce me to a much-loved holiday destination. We went to a resort that offers traditional tent and caravan camping, log cabins, safari tents and mountain tents. Her first preference was the mountain tents, set higher up than the rest of the accommodation and thus closer to nature, but alas, they were already fully booked. So we settled for a safari tent. This was my first ever experience of glamping, so basically living in a tent but one that is already fully equipped with beds, a kitchen and a full bathroom attached at the rear. So imagine that a tent and a log cabin fell madly in love and had one torrid night of steaming romance and the result is a canvas tent/log cabin hybrid.

As I haven't gone camping in quite a while, and my last camping experience involved a traditional tent where you still have to go and use the ablution blocks with everyone else, this was a welcome surprise. No standing in line at the showers, no sitting in a cold bathroom stall listening to a variety of farts, burps, coughs and the occasional splash of a butt bomb hitting water. You actually have privacy. And it was wonderful!

Unfortunately, because it was a long weekend and thus the ideal time for EVERYONE to go on a mid-year break, the place was extremely busy. The tent next to ours had a group of people in their mid-twenties whose sole responsibility, in their minds, was to provide music to the entire resort. Thankfully they did adhere to the 23:00 noise curfew, mostly because they were completely sloshed and thus passed out at that point.

Apart from the interesting neighbors, the rest of the resort was amazing. There were hiking trails, canoeing, fishing, game drives, mountain biking, swimming (they had a hot pool), zip-lining, obstacle courses and a plethora of other activities to choose from. My beloved and I decided to go for a hike the one day and managed to get quite a distance before we realised that we were slightly too unfit for a walk of this magnitude and thus headed back to camp. While standing in reception waiting to chat to someone behind the information counter, a sign caught our eye. It stated that, before heading off for a romantic hike in the bush, reception had to be informed. This was because they had leopard, hyena, honey badger and a wide variety of other toothy critters roaming freely on the property. So we decided to rather hire mountain bikes and follow the rules of informing reception of our plans. Unfortunately most of their trails are all uphill from the camp and we also didn't get tremendously far on the bikes before fatigue, sore buttocks and, in my case at least, mashed man-bits made us turn around and rather go and have a cold beer instead.

I admitted to my beloved afterwards that I absolutely loved glamping. Sitting outside under the stars, grilling meat on the fire and generally enjoying nature (and the occasional good song from our music loving neighbors) makes the experience worthwhile. And then, when all is quiet in the dead of night, you can hear the cries of baboons and leopard and you feel like you really are one with nature. Even though you are in a mutant tent with a comfy bed. I would definitely recommend it!