Fear And Loathing In Beausejour

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Kiwis leave the campsite for the game.

By Tristan Holme

I've always been a bit of a fan of madness for the simple reason that staring it full in the face is never dull.

We only live so long and so boredom and monotony has to be seen as the devil, aside from the odd escape to sanity for a breath of fresh air and some rest.

And there I was, hauling on a rope as we attempted to pull a massive tree trunk out of a murky river next to the campsite. We were led by the site's owner and my long-lost friend from Cape Town, who were standing waist deep in this water and pushing the tree with all their might as black gunge dripped from the offending hunk of wood all the way down their arms.

It was one of those moments where you wonder exactly what had led to this point. Was it just the morning of crazed wanderings that brought me here or had my whole life been building up to this point?

Of course the craziness of the last few days was mostly induced by an almost total lack of money, which is never a good thing on a foreign, tropical island. The good people back home had been trying to wire money to me for about a week, but with all the public holidays and an abundance of banking tribulations it just wasn't happening.

I had been left with no option but to hop on a bus and go in search of Wex, my South African friend who was staying with his girlfriend at a campsite somewhere past the stadium, in the hope that he could bail me out of my predicament and get me back on the road to general stability.

Instead it had led me into more mayhem as I found myself in a campsite that was totally unprepared for human habitation. It had some running water and strange tents for showers (the weirdest things I've come across in some time), but there was no cooking facility aside from a fire that required continual doses of kerosene to keep it burning, and the 'kitchen' was ill-equipped to handle the bunch of rogue Kiwis, Aussies and South Africans that had descended hopefully upon it.

A small group of Zimbabwean farmers would have erected a better camp than this in no time. But the state of it was no surprise given the owner seemed more intent on removing dangerous logs from the bottom of the murky river - so that customers could bathe in the gunge without stubbing their toes - than he was on ensuring that they had habitable conditions back on land.

As he waded around in the bog he beat his chest and let out long Tarzan-swinging-through-the-jungle-vines style calls to the wild. It really was quite mental because back on shore there was mutiny brewing as two of his workers screamed insults and threats at each other and others restrained them from coming to blows.

"This is no place for a gentleman of the press," I thought.

But soon enough the madness of this 'survival of the fittest' scenario had gripped me, and given that I have both limited funds and extensive camping experience to go with my general penchant for insanity, I reckon I'll stick around for a while and see how our group of outcasts get along in Beausejour - a name filled with irony given that it means 'place of good living' in French.

Wish you were here...