Eating, Sleeping and Dreaming

Sunday 29th March 2009

In the middle of nowhere with no electric light, you wake up when the sun rises and go to bed soon after it sets. It just makes sense. Coming up to the winter in Botswana, the days are getting shorter and shorter, so by the time it gets dark we're only just cooking dinner. In London there is a restaurant where you pay a lot of money for dining in the dark; the experience is supposed to enhance your sense of taste. Here we enjoy this experience every evening, for nothing. Maybe that's why everything always tastes so great, or perhaps it's the fact that just about anything cooked on the campfire after a long, hot day will always taste fantastic.

By nine o'clock we've usually finished dinner and had our cups of tea, and after a few rounds of yawns it's time to head to bed. We do the short walk from the kitchen area to the sleeping quarters together, screening the nearby bushes with our torches for pairs of eyes, and then it's the sound of tent zips going up and down, teeth brushing, some more tent zips going up and down, until it's just the sound of the frogs, the hippos, and the rest of the gang in the nightshift.

I usually listen to them for a few minutes until I put on my earplugs and fall asleep within minutes. After the restlessness of the first few nights I now sleep pretty much through the night, easily for eight, nine, or even ten hours - depending on the time of the wake up call in the morning.

In my dreams I visit people form the past. On my first week here I've already met an impressive and a very surprising array of people from all around the world and been to several continents. It's almost as I'm suddenly been detached from my normal life and relationships, I'm making up for it in my dreams. I wake up in the morning still thinking about them, long into the new day. People I haven't remembered for a long time. People I haven't seen in a decade or more. Now we've been reunited again here in the deepest, darkest, faraway corner of Botswana, in my dreams.