If the scenario was frenzied before, then at this request it became absolute pandemonium! The crowd clearly hadn’t thought about this possible development, and the excitement about what I was trying to achieve was palpable! Shouts went out to find a bicycle, and within seconds one of the older guys from the workshop had produced a sturdy two-wheeled beast, not unlike the one which my Great Grandfather was leaning on in the photograph…
Shelter is a fundamental part of human existence, and it is as varied as the humans who need it to survive. At its most basic, accommodation is a simple shelter with a couple of barriers from the wind and something to keep the rain off. This blog post is dedicated to the more basic style of accommodation, looking at wild camping and free accommodation options, to hopefully convince you that you don’t always have to stay in a hostel or bed and breakfast whilst out on the road…
If you were woken up and told that today, was the day you would be heading to the Gateway to Hell, what would your choice of breakfast be? A Full English perhaps? Or maybe a giant stack of pancakes complete with all the toppings? I tell you what it probably wouldn’t be: a packet of banana cream biscuits! Yes, remarkably someone has actually created this monstrosity, and they are, as you can imagine, absolutely terrible! This was the reality we faced as we waited outside a small police check point, deep in the Ethiopian desert, for our paperwork to be signed, before we could continue our journey; fortunately, we had been given some excellent coffee to offset the taste of the biscuits, and we both agreed that this was a journey well worth enduring any number of banana creams for.
The first thing we saw to break to beautiful monotony were the camels; there were hundreds of them all relaxing out in the sun, so well adapted for this oppressive environment that they barely batted a long-lashed eyelid at the baking sun, which, despite the early hour, was already pushing the mercury well into the 40s. If camels are the ships of the desert, then donkeys are the sort of raft you’d expect from a particularly awkward team-building day, and the lack of shade was clearly getting to these poor beasts of burden, desperately trying to utilise the bulks of the camels for their own personal parasol...
They say a picture paints a thousand words, well not this one; after looking at the familiar picture on my grandparents sitting room wall, I was struggling to get into double figures; I had ‘man’ and ‘moustache’ which I had quickly followed up with ‘bicycle’, ‘train’, and ‘silly hat’ (which I was definitely counting as two) but beyond that I was finding it hard to find any words to describe this unremarkable sepia image of a man in a hat – that was until I was told that the silly hatted man in question, was in fact my great grandfather.
explore v. (ɛkˈsplɔː) 1. The action of travelling through an unfamiliar area in order to learn more about it
