Oh well, it's only for one night
About 12 years ago, there I was in the arse end of nowehere in Kenya with ex-MrsPunch, ex Mother-in-Law and a couple of her relatives, attending a wedding on New Years Day. Had driven there from the other side of Kenya after 2 hours' sleep, to be treated to a 'feast' of unidentifiable glop and a four-hour wedding service conducted in an obscure languange in a corrugated iron church in the middle of the day not very far from the equator (= very very very very hot and very very very very boring).

Thanks to my mad skillz driving the 4x4 through the bush I was nominated to ferry people hither and yon. Eventually I joined MrsPunch and the rest at the 'hotel' that they'd booked us in to. It looked... primitive. Yet the the proud owner clearly thought it was of the same ilk as the fancy lodges in the touristy bits.

The fateful words, so popular in this QOTW, popped into my head: "Oh well, it's only for one night".

Our party of five were the only guests, so we spent a thrilling (?) 5 minutes deciding which of the dozen or so little bungalow-shack things we'd occupy overnight. They were all about the same: they looked OK, clean enough and all, very basic and simple, but as if no-one had been in them for a while. This turned out to be the case: we were the first overnight guests for 18 months.

The evening meal didn't go well. We ordered from the menu, and then waited. And waited. And waited. After an hour we were quite pissed after sinking several bottles of South African Red wine, and were ready to kill; but then we found out that, as one of us had ordered steak with peppercorn sauce and the kitchen had no peppercorns, they'd sent 'the boy' to the nearest town - on foot - to get some. This was 15 minutes each way in the car! But we started to see the funny side, ordered more wine, and eventually the grub turned up.

Time to turn in. No electricity in the shacks, so gas lanterns were used. There was something about the shacks, and the beds especially, that made you feel itchy. Into bed, lights out. I turned to Mrs Punch. "First one to scratch is a sissy," I whispered. A terrible night's sleep ensued - remember we're in equatorial Africa in a basic wooden shack the middle of the bush - but even so the amount of creaking, tapping, scratching, buzzing and so on is incredible. And you'd swear the bed was alive with ants / bugs / beetles / spiders / rats / lizards etc., until you got the lantern going and saw.... nothing (except Mrs Punch scratching herself).

At long last it was morning, and time for a shower. This was not a simple matter: it involved the hotel staff filling a huge metal tank, situated on top of a low hill, with water. Then they got a lot of fire wood which was placed under the tank and set alight. After about an hour the water was deemed to be hot enough to let loose onto our itchy bodies. A system of pipes took the hot water from the tank to the shower in each cabin: there was no way to mix in any cold water. Luckily I jumped back after opening the industrial valve for the shower. There was a lot of grunting, gurgling and rattling, then jets of scalding hot filth leapt out. At least this killed the little beasties that had made a comfy home in the pipes for the last 18 months. Once the water ran clear, by jumping into the excruciatingly hot shower and then splashing ourselves with cold water from the sink, we sort of got ourselves ready for... gasp.... breakfast.

Coffee: fine. Eggs: fine. Toast: fine - in fact could we have some more toast? Ooh, err.... we'll just send the boy into town for some more bread...

We decided not to bother. The best bit of this was getting the bill. It totalled up to something like 1,000 K Shillings, which sounds like a lot, but which was then equivalent to something like £18. Worth every penny, I've been dining out on this anecdote for years.

Length? I can spin it out for hours.
( MisterPunch did it that way on, Tue 22 Jan 2008, 13:40, Reply)