I wrote this a few years ago but have never had somewhere permenant to put it. so here we are
‘There I was in Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon, looking for 100 brown M&M’s to fill a brandy bottle, or Jamie wouldn’t go on stage that night. Just then Ryan pops his head round the corner and say ‘there’s a sweet shop on the edge of town”. So we go…but it was closed. I managed to knock down the door, but instead of a guard dog, they had this bloody great big Bengal tiger! Alex took that out with a can of maze, but the shopkeeper and his son was a different story all together. I had to beat them to death with their own shoes.’
“Hey, how ya doing?” In some cultures, you toast the departure of a good friend. Wishing them farewell and happiness in future endeavors. In others, it’s an occasion of reminiscing about the past, great times, and the possibility of even better times in the future. But what if you have no culture? I’m not presuming that we are unsophisticated, although it has been said! But what if a group of people, all of whom have their own culture and background, what happens when they come together to celebrate, not only the departure of a good comrade but the passing of a year? Mayhem and anarchic? Or urban legends? Only time can tell.
This is document is purely being produced in the hope that it may give some insight, in the future, to these magnificent eleven individuals. The 30th of December to the 2nd of January 2004 may have been the last time that these outstanding young gentlemen were all together at the same time, so this may be a great clue to describe the waywardness that ensues in our own lives.
Day 1
Marc, Ronnie, Ryan, Andres and Ben had reached Theewaters a day before the rest. I think this may have been an idea that they would try and ready our would-be neighbors for what was to come. This was like sending the world beer-drinking champion to lecture at an AA meeting. No matter what happens, it’s going to end badly. The second group, which consisted of Alex R, Dane and myself, traveled in the most style. A 1962 sky blue Pontiac was our mode of transport. A rare car in most places let alone rural South Africa. We arrived at the camp in the late afternoon of the 30th to find 5 extremely hung over teenagers sipping from large bottles of the cheapest thing that would return them to a less tender condition. I assumed last night must have been a moderate success, as there were two girls, Anna and Nicki, who, in less than 24hrs, had made themselves at home at our camp. It was clear that with the alcohol rendering their brains out of commission, they were thinking with a different part of their anatomy.
Our campsite consisted of a trailer, a pick up and deck chairs, with a big cooler in the middle. Could we be anymore white trash? “You might be white trash if you leave all your crap on the floor and call it a yard sale”. Our location was no more than 200m from a large expanse of liquid, directly ahead of us was the dam, and to the left of us was the bar. So hydration was never a problem!
Alex F, Jamie and Adam arriving in the evening must have made us all really thirsty as our fluid intake seemed to triple as these guys arrived. But this normally happens when James goes anywhere. He can locate beer with lazar-guided precision. This is truly a notable talent, which will benefit him greatly when in the UK, where he will be too broke to buy his own.
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It seems quite odd that we went to a dam, yet I have made no mentioned of actually going near it. Well now is a good a point as any to stress that we did make great use of the dam. In actuality, the dam was the single most useful thing there. Not only did it give us our slight bit of daily exercise, but it also served as a shower, a washing machine, and most importantly, a soberer. Getting a friend to dunk your head under the frigid water in the morning after a heavy night is truly breathtaking (excuse the pun). In the middle of designated swimming areas were these floating platforms covered in rough carpet for grip. This was the arena for possible the greatest thing ever seen on water, Greco-roman manly wrestling. The rules are simply, last one standing, wins. This made for one of the quotes of the trip. James had put me into a half nelson, and I was falling, so I wrapped my legs around his, he landed on me into the water, and I had no hands to break my fall, “dude, I could feel your face ricochet off the water, that was an awesome smack down”. Trust me, it hurt!
That evening, our group seemed to split up all over the place, but they all had one thing on their mind, ‘Boerewors’. If you not sure what that means, ask someone who was there. There is a large wood surrounding the dam, perfect setting for some Boerewors. My group was Ronnie, me and about 8 other people that we had only met in the bar a few moments earlier. In retrospect, walking into a dark wood with complete stranger was probably not the best thing to do, but who cares. By the way, just a word of advice, never try zip-lining in the dark, you have no way to judge if you’re near the end, and thus hurtling towards a tree. So don’t say I didn’t tell you so!
Day 2
When you’re at a campsite you have no control of what time you surface in the morning. Your mother would be proud to know that you have experienced this thing known as ‘morning’. This is solely based on the fact that as soon as direct sunlight hits tent/trailer, it’s transformed into a pressure cooker. You would have thought that the company that made these products would take into consideration that not everyone goes camping in the artic, and we do occasionally see the sun in Africa! So regardless of how little sleep you get the night before, you will be up, at the latest, by 9am. So emerging from our quarters slightly singed, we set about looking for something to do to pass the time until a more respectable drinking time. By 12 the drinks cooler was empty. I think we may have a hole in it or something! And anyway, one mans respectable drinking time is another mans breakfast, so don’t pass judgment on me!!! After some quick games of rugby, everyone was ready to do what teenagers do with an extreme level of skill, absolutely nothing!
You can’t resist the urge of sitting around, and basically doing nothing. It just feels natural to watch the world go by. But often, the world would stop off and have a drink with you. Ryan Snr, our resident alcoholic, adopted our group as his second home, this was probably because we had more beer than him, but I would like to think he enjoyed our company too. Ryan Snr is one of these guys, who probably had a good education, and at one point had aspirations to do something really great, but he got side tracked and is now on that perpetual gap year, a pitfall that plagues many a student, and I’m sure I will be tempted by. He always had that look on his face, as if thinking, “I’m sure I was going to do something really important with my life, but I can’t quite remember, well I guess have a beer in the mean time”. I think he must have had a degree in engineering or something. This assumption is based on ‘Natalie’. ‘Natalie’, as Ryan Jnr will tell you, is a truly great development in beer management. For all of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, don’t worry. ‘Natalie’ stands for National African Team Alcoholic Liquid Equipment…actually I lied, I made that up. It really is one of those funnel that you can drink beer out of with the tubing “beer bong”, but this one was hand made and even had a tap. A true labor of love!
It was getting to late afternoon on New Years Eve, and we seemed to have attracted a sort of gathering. I expect that the word had got round that there were this group of young, attractive eligible teens. But it did make me worry, as our gathering was mainly guys! I think the ratio was 10:1.5, boys to girls. The level of alcohol consumption had step up a gear by this point, and we had a bit of party ambience going on at our trailer. Wow I never thought id ever write ambience and trailer in the same sentence, I’m not sure if I should apologies to the French or Alabama. Anyway we started telling jokes, and if anyone knows me, I really get into, as I try and do the accents for the Englishman, Irishman, and Scotsman ones, which is a joke in itself. Only after about 20 minutes and a couple beers, you’d have thought we known each other for eternity.
I think now is a good time to point out that a lot of sun and copious amounts of alcohol messes with your system, and the rest of the night was a little hazy, well for me at least, so I’m going totally on secondary information. Allegedly, we hit the bar about 9pm, and the theme was tin foil, don’t ask me why, I think it was to amuse the Boer Afrikaners, ahh simple minded people “wow, shinny!” anyway, we didn’t want to start trouble, so we carried out their request and donned the tin foil, which I have no idea where we got. Marc was actually working that night, and he had put one of those disposable baking trays on his head. He looked like a fashion conscious person of the Hebrew persuasion. Classic!
When you’re in a place like this you get a real feeling of community and friendship, a bonding of all mankind regardless of race, status or age, and the most mundane thing, like sharing the urinal with someone, will prompt your fellow urinatory to offer to buy you a drink at the bar. Hell, I’m not complaining. Maybe this is way Angry went to the toilet every 5 minutes!? After about 6 or 7 drinks at the bar, my body was telling me that it may be a good idea to lie down, and it did care where. So let’s just say, I didn’t see the New Year in! But everyone said it was really good. As you can imagine, I was quite pissed off about this, I was probably the only one who didn’t see it through! I think 12-year-old kids saw midnight. To suppress my irritation one of the guys told me a very amusing story about the night and the count down, which made me feel like less of an idiot. In the bar it was approaching midnight and they were counting down “10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4”. Well, when they got to about “3” a guy came rushing spraying a bottle of champagne every, yelling “happy new year”, I’m not sure what his exact world where, but I bet he wished he had got a more reliable watch.
Day 3 (Welcome to 2004)
I woke rather early, roughly about 8am. I guess I had more sleep than everyone else. I got out of my car/bed and found Angry and Alex R setting around a smoldering fire, “HAPPY NEW YEAR” they exclaimed. How could they be so vibrant when they had just woken up? Well it turns out that they had never gone to sleep, and were just finishing their breakfast of champions, steak!
New Year’s Day was unbearably hot. Which was cool (what a great use of the English language, god I’m an idiot), as it reminded me of last new years, which was spent on top of Ben roof in town, watching the sun come up to light up a 40c day. I was awake for 36hrs, mostly drunk! Ah…good times! But back to the issue at hand. I made my way over to slipway (the place of food!) to get some kind of wake up juice. I guess my mishap of the night before had become common knowledge as everyone knew who I was, even though I had no idea who most of them where. I took a seat at the table which had the most faces that seemed familiar, and if not familiar, sorry for me. I did find one recognizable friend, Ben trying to scab 15 bucks of me, dam that Aussie! Oh by the way, I was recently told that I have completed my new year’s resolution already. Well when I said that I was going to drink the bar dry of Jack Daniel’s, I didn’t think I was going to be held to it. But I am proud of myself, this is the first resolution I have ever kept to.
I sat at that table talking about everything, nothing, the world and the regularity of certain people (thanks James), and putting society to right. See adults don’t think kids have intelligent conversation when they are not around. But really, we probably speak about more thought provoking topics when they are not around. It is a conspiracy to cover up our true intellects, and thus getting out of family chores, as we are seen as incapable. I was there for a while; so long in fact that by the time I looked at my watch it was 12.30. Not bad, I seemed to have talked my way out of a hang over! See if you get past the first 20mintues of incredible stabbing pain in your head, talking seemed to be the best cure I have come across.
To the water! not only can we stare it girls in bikinis, but we can make asses of ourselves, I wont fully enlighten you on this but, if anyone has gone wading into a big mass of water without thinking about the temperature, you only start to realize how foolish you have been when the water gets to about groin level! And in one swift moment, 5 studly guys turned into a bunch of castratos. Well we all got to the floating raft and dragged ourselves gracefully onto it. I think it may have resembled seals launching themselves at rocks to avoid sharks…..it was that cold! And, no I’m not being a ‘pansy’.
New years day afternoon, was quite a quiet affair. People where starting to feel the affective of drinking the bar dry the night before, also a lot of people where heading back to town. So by the time everyone had regained consciousness, the place was quite a lot emptier, which was kind of eerie….it was like “where’d every one go?”. So, yeah, not much happened until the sun started to set, then we seemed to get a new less of life. We decided to cook up everything that was left in the fridge in one go, and being head chief, this turned out to be a great challenge. Have you tried cooking bacon on a home made BBQ? I’m still extremely surprised that no one got food poisoning because no hands were washed and plates were used both cooked and uncooked food. Talk about living life on the edge! After eating, James and I had got word that there was an acoustic guitar in one of the other camps, so we thought we might asked to borrow this. I think this was because people weren’t believing the line “hi, I’m a singer in a band”. So I had something to prove. We followed Michelle back to her camp, and where promptly told to hit the ground! You know those warnings on the back of deodorant cans “WARNING, do not dispose of product on a fire as consequences may include losing vital organs, or the ability to pick things up”, well they mean that. A rather large explosion emerged from the BBQ. I’m usual quite manly in moments of sheer terror, but let’s just say, I screamed like a little girl. Anyway, they let us borrow the guitar out of guilt. James now has to eat through a straw, for Gods sake, it was the least they could of done! Well back we went, strumming “kombi a” as we walked. The play list of the evening consisted of: Mexico and pardon me by Incubus, the general by Dispatch, 7 nation army (because everyone can play that), and sweet home Alabama, which was a crowd favorite. So after the crowd had dispersed form the greatest rock show the place had ever seen, we headed for the bar. I should have told you how much stuff cost earlier, I may have, I can’t remember. Well if I didn’t prepare to be amazed! If I did….prepare to be amazed again! 25p a shot, and 45p a beer! And doctors wonder why my liver is the size of a walnut! George Best, you have inspired a generation of drinker. You showed us that it doesn’t matter if you liver dies, you can just get new one! So need less to say I was a little tipsy, not as bad as the night before, but I was in a great mood. Everyone was, well except for this one guy who I think felt threaten by a bunch of teenagers, and tried to pick a fight with everyone, except for me. He knew I’d kick his ass.
I went back to the camp, eat my fruit loops and just sat, thinking. I was with good friends, on holiday in one of the most beautiful countries in the world, staring at the stars without a care in the world. England seemed distance, and school, a million miles away. I felt detached from reality, and I felt so free. Wow, sorry, didn’t mean to get deep on you guys. It was about 11pm and I sat down next to the fire, besides Alex F. we were the only ones there, everyone else was trying to get photos of Michelle’s display of projectile vomiting. Lovely! Well, Alex and I where talking, putting the world to right through reluctant American eyes when we noticed Alex R, completely off his head drunk, stumbling around the camp next to us, and he couldn’t quite understand why no one was around. So Alex F and I became the UN and stopped a possible international disaster. The rest of the night was filled with randomness, act that seem so insignificant now, but then appeared to be the centre of the universe, so I wont bore you with the details. What I will say is that due to some people getting very drunk and passing out in the back of the car, I decided to sleep in one of the tents. We went to be with 3 people in the tent, and woke up with four, never a good thing when they are all guys.
Day 4 (Home time)
First of all I have to thank all the parents who willing sacrificed their free time to get us there and back. It was truly a logistical triumph. Us as the kids hadn’t even given a thought to how the majority of us where going to get up and back, but some quick thinking back in cape town saved our collective asses. But that’s not to say we wouldn’t have found our own way back, teenagers are very resourceful when the have to be.
Anyway, my dad called at about 9 saying he would be there in about an hour. So we had loads of time, so we just sat around and talking about the last night. Before we knew it my dad was at the main gate, and we hadn’t even started packing, I had woken James up, which is a battle anyway. But the place was a tip, and marc wasn’t going to let us leave unless we helped clean up. We moved fast, lets just puts it that way. My dad pulled up, everyone said their good bye and loaded the stuff into the care. It hadn’t sunk in that when I wake up the next morning, I won’t have Adam half baked in the morning, or Ben getting pissed off about everyone tuning him, or any of the things that made this trip great. Maybe that’s a good thing!? My body hasn’t taken this much of a beating in along time, and I think its time for a rest. But I’ll still miss all the random, plain stupid things that have taken place. Well I guess that’s why I’m writing this.
We were the first to leave, and I’m pretty sure everyone else got home safe and sound later that day, well I hope so, I haven’t heard from them since, well I’m sure they will turn up. So this was my New Years, and the New Year of 10 others. I’m sorry if it has been very one dimensional, but I can only be myself and tell you how I saw events. I guess if I had more time I could have quizzed all the guys on what the felt should be in this. But as this write up was kind of a spur of the moment thing (that took a bloody long time to right, so appreciate it) I couldn’t really have changed it. But guys, to all those I shared this experience with, cheers! You’re the reason this was so memorable. You have given my hope and determination to get through this term at school, and get back to South Africa and do this all over again. We may have lost one person for a little while, but I’m sure you will agree with me when I say that there is a little bit of James in all of us, and in his absence, we will fill the void with alcohol, surfing and rugby, he’ll want it that way.
Well anyway I hope that if you were at Theewaters this news year, this has done some justice to what actually happened, and if you weren’t there, I’m pretty sure you will be looking at me in new light, like “oh my god, I’m never talking to will again, he so crude and immature”. Well I have a few words for you. I’m proud of who I am so… BACK OFF!!!!
Did I say that out loud? (Memorable quotes from a memorable trip)
∙ “Why are you tuning Ben so much? James- no TV!”
∙ “look, I’m trying to get dry!” Julian protesting about people splashing him on the floating rafts…20m from shore! Just think about it
∙ “twig and giggle berries” one of the less popular name for boerwoers.
∙ “look I don’t mind you looking at porn, but draw the curtains, I have a reputation around here” marc
∙ “of course I can play guitar”, Will then kicks out the jams with twinkle twinkle little star. Rock on!!!
∙ “hey, how you doing”, the phrase of the trip. Well for Will and James at least
Awards: (Supporting drunken, ignorant and plain funny act of sheer stupidity)
∙ First pull/kiss (depending on where you’re from) – I may have to get some official clarification on this, but it was defiantly between Dane and Ronnie or maybe it was Ben?
∙ “I don’t remember having that?” Best/most vomiting – Marc
∙ The man without a function conscious – Ben….he knows why
∙ The “hey this isn’t my gap site?” award – Alex R
∙ The godfather award – Andres
∙ The most likely to have killed him/many others award in a fiery, alcohol induced ‘accident’ - James
∙ most wasted on one night (winner get a free night at the priory) – It was close between Michelle and Alex R, but as Michelle actually wasn’t part of our group it has to go to Alex R
∙ Vampire or alternative creature of the night award – Satan
∙ The Jamie Oliver award – Will. You give me fire, you give me meat, and I make you a 3 course dinner for two
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