Camping is Strange (and Honest)
Camping is a strange thing.
It doesn’t care for pretence or performance.
Try and put on airs, and you’ll be brought back down to earth fast.
Camp life has no time for your nonsense.
It doesn’t care about your shiny-brand caravan or your fancy reclining chair.
Whether you’re parked on gravel or on lush grass.
Whether you drink whiskey or rooibos.
Whether you braai meat or boil pasta.
Whether you’re from Gauteng, Limpopo, or lost somewhere in-between.
It doesn’t care if you’re newlyweds or widowed, retired or runaways or a Nomadic Grandmother.
In the end, everyone’s underwear flaps on the same washing line.
In the end, we all know what you had for dinner because the monkeys broadcasted it across the park.
In the end, your true colours show when the midnight gust sends your gazebo or tent flying.
The soft-spoken saints and the short-fused sailors all reveal themselves eventually.
In the end, everyone sees your face without makeup, your hair without effort.
We all witness the dance—graceful or otherwise—of you and your partner setting up camp.
In the end, we all shuffle in our nightclothes, the kind our grandmothers would faint over.
We all share the same bathrooms, hear each other’s snoring, sighs, and midnight farts.
In the end, someone’s always mopping up the shower floors—at least the decent ones do.
The wind doesn’t care. It finds its way into all our cracks.
And when it rains, every tent leaks somewhere—rich or poor, seasoned or rookie.
Camping doesn’t care who you are, what job you had, what title you used to wear.
It strips us bare and equal.
Camping is strange.
But camping is honest.
It humbles you.
And sometimes—quietly, cruelly—it’s lonely.
Because while the kids laugh and families gather, you feel the empty chair beside you.
Because even with voices echoing all around, your soul might be whispering into silence.
Because you can sit under a sky full of stars, and still feel the vast ache of being unseen.
And when the music dies down and the braai fires burn low…
That’s when boredom creeps in,
When old ghosts visit,
When the laughter of others reminds you just how long it’s been since you really laughed.
But maybe that’s the point.
Out here, under canvas and moonlight, you face not just the weather…
But yourself.
Camping is strange.
Camping is real.
Camping, in all its bare-bummed glory—might just save you.
Inspired by an Afrikaans post I once read. Camp life has a way of sticking with you.
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