Living for Disco

I’ve been eaten alive. For the last three nights I’ve opened my eyes at about 3am, fully awake, staring into the dark. I know what’s woken me, and the fact that it’s now silent makes me nervous. I wait for the telltale whine to begin again, for the mosquito to dive bomb my ear, blowing a high pitched vampire raspberry at my futile attempts to kill it. The little fucker has it in for me.

If anyone could see into the room at this point, they’d witness a bizarre and silent pantomime, which always culminates with me repeatedly slapping myself over the side of the head. It doesn’t work. I woke up yesterday with 38 moquito bites on my ankles and legs. I looked like I had an extremely isolated case of chicken pox. Now, 24 hours later, they’ve turned into giant festering blobs. I’m starting to worry less about chicken pox, and more about anthrax.

Worse, I showed my polka-dot legs to Kamati in complaint. “Why don’t you use the bug spray in your room?”, has asked, reasonably enough. I told him that the only spray in my room is lavender fragranced air freshener. It matches the walls.

“Well, why didn’t you put the fan on?” he asked, clearly exasperated at my stupidity. What fan? He had two fans in his room, which unlike mine was decorated with manly animal prints and ochre paint. All there was in my room was a wall display with pink plastic flowers, wall to wall lilac, a faulty table lamp and an indestructible blood-sucking agent of the devil. Sexism in action.

No matter. We are now in Swakopmund, and I know that by Tuesday I will be begging for lilac paint and mosquitos. For the next few nights I’m sharing a basic 15 bed dormintory with 11 teenaged girls from Kamanjab, on the youth drama tour that I am accompanying. I’m too old for this shit.

Also, after my Oshakati trip, on which I took a towel, a sleeping bag, a pillow and a jumper, and needed none of them, I decided not to bring any of them on this trip. There are no towels at the hostel. No sleeping bags either. No pillows. Oh, and it’s cold. Ford Prefect did know a thing or two after all.

Swakop is an odd place, incidentally. It’s a town of wide, palm lined avenues. Stuccoed buildings, complete with cuppolas and verandas overlook the blue Atlantic. A cool breeze blows sand gently down the roads. It could be a Riviera town in the 1950s. A handpainted sign on a pharmacy door says “Out of hours service: tel 5523″. A clothes shop window display helpfully informs that ‘Lay-by’s are allowed’, in case you want to come back for your purchase. And it’s utterly, utterly empty of people. I ran in here in relief, certain that I was about to be consumed by strange time-eating monsters, like the people that accidentally end up in an empty yesterday in a Stephen King story - The Langoliers.

Still, I have to say that I’m unutterably, completely happy. Long may it continue.