Country Mouse Giles Wood

My journey to tropical Hell and back

giles wood

By courtesy of this exceptionally mild late winter, red admirals are floating by the cottage window. Mexican orange blossoms are flowering for the second time. And soon we will have scarlet nasturtium flowers to decorate the festive salad bowl.

Winter sun streams through windows – but womenfolk turn up the heating anyway and, inexorably, their menfolk move forward to turn it down.

And yet I have also turned down an invitation to a tropical paradise issued by my best man, Bongo, who is Africa-based.

I can’t admit to Bongo that a growing sense of caution has trumped my sense of adventure. But do I really want to spend a winter break on a dhow, sailing up the coast from Mombasa to Lamu and beyond? Motion sickness, the smell of diesel and the smell of daily catches of raw fish on board?

I also ponder the likely confinement below deck, grappling with Delhi belly delivered by dodgy ice cubes, the presence of camel spiders, the bites of the black mamba and the glimpses of pirate ships on the horizon.

When I listed my reservations, my old mate vigorously defended our former colony. ‘Why should there be pirates?’ asked Bongo.

‘Well, we do read about them near Lamu in the Daily Mail.’

‘Do you go the doctor, Giles?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I wasn’t going to go to a doctor in England because I read about Dr Harold Shipman in the Daily Mail.’

Winter sun solutions – are they?

When eventually I succumbed to Bongo’s exhortations, it was to discover that mangrove and casuarina trees gave the resort the sinister look of a swamp in Florida.

The palm tree is not indigenous to the region. So the only ones here were the imported sort, quite recently installed in the muddy sand around the hotel.

They kept falling over, exposing their root-balls. Guy ropes were subsequently attached because, after five days of sun, a ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ cyclone descended and howling winds strewed seaweed all over the narrow strip of sand they called a beach. Sandflies inevitably followed.

Our little house resembled the prison officers’ mess from the set of Tenko. It came with a cleaner who had an uncanny knack of entering the kitchen each morning just as Mary and I were sitting down to snap at each other over our first cup of coffee.

‘Good morn-ing! How are we this morn-ing?’ he would ask in a Dalek voice.

He strongly recommended the restaurant where we both ate something prawn-based, which confined us to barracks for three days.

At least this gave me time to swot up on locations to explore from a book I had bought at the airport: Wild Places of the Southern Bahamas. Sadly I could only dream of venturing inland to explore tropical dry forests, sinkholes, blue holes and natural limestone caves surrounded by mangroves where osprey nested.

Iguanas? Boobies? Yes – but it turned out the locations for all these were on other islands. Clearly that was why we never again saw the pop stars we’d hoped to befriend, as they’d headed off to their private retreats accessible only by hovercraft.

My having lost a stone, we paid out a substantial number of pounds (140) to hire a taxi-driver so we could explore our own overcrowded island.

Yes, there were some nice butterflies in the location I directed him to after careful study of the map. Mary hissed at me, ‘Why have you taken us to a landfill site?’

The only other biodiversity remaining on this overdeveloped tiny island was an abandoned go-karting track covered in broken glass. Still, enough scrub had grown to attract at least one pair of gnat-catchers – which was doing its best to raise a family.

Our resort was at least aspirational. Our Dalek cleaner told us that, ‘at no ex-tera cost’, he would secure for us two luxury sun-loungers on the strip of sand.

These took the form of adult perambulators shaded by parasols whose spokes turned inside out at the slightest breeze. Not once did we see another hotel guest using these facilities.

Still, the parasols gave a few moments of pleasure. They allowed us to observe the passeggiata of fellow tourists of all shapes and sizes. Most wore back-tofront baseball caps, waddling aimlessly backwards and forwards like zombies on Oxford Street.

Meanwhile the constant surveillance of a guard in a lookout tower made me think of Guantanamo Bay.

‘But at least you must have slept well,’ said our old friend Jo on our return. Jo always likes to look on the bright side.

‘Sadly,’ I explained, ‘next to our villa there was a giant chessboard with resin pieces, each one the size of a man. Every night, at three in the morning, a gang of American teens, en route back to their own huts and high on Coca-Cola, after a heavy session on the hotel’s Sega machines, would kick them over.’

The next morning, I would look out to find them upright again, standing to attention and good as new – unlike me.

‘We lost your luggage’