Post Camp Bliss

I am sitting here on one of my 4 balconies. It’s nothing near as special as it sounds, but I feel pretty fine all the same. I am typing this blog on a laptop in an apartment that have both been paid for (in full) by the last 3 weeks of work. Again, it is not as special as it sounds but I feel pretty fine all the same. 3 weeks doesn’t sound like much, even at 18 hours a day. I have worked more hours for more weeks at a time many times in my life. But I have never done it for any reason apart from the cashola. What we just did would never be done for the dollar value remuneration, you’d be a nut job just considering doing it for the cash, it is so much more than that. It is 18 hours a day, minimum, for 3 weeks. It is months and months and months of preparation, it is convincing parents to trust you with their 10 year olds for 3 weeks in a wide brown land many thousands of miles away, it is hundreds of hours on the phone. It is cleaning up a 9 year old girl’s spew and trying to console her after the plane hits turbulence. It is keeping kids from waking your nana after midnight because one week without sleep is about as much as you are willing to put her through, even though she has never complained, not even once. It is asking your parents to take annual leave and spend it doing everything apart from where nana and/or other family members take up the slack. But considering I am lucky enough to have family members from arsehole to breakfast time who are willing to do just that, I am feeling pretty lucky. It is asking your wife to take a month away from a business she has started only 10 months previous and begin it all over again when we return. But I am also lucky enough to have a wife who thinks that that is a pretty fine idea, and I feel fine. It is vorbei, Buju Banton is playing on the new laptop on the new balcony of the new apartment where I sit in my old couch in around 0°c, smoking Benson and Hedges, drinking red wine and feeling fine.

If you would like to know what makes it good, I’d like to tell you. It isn’t that cash. Parky and I are about $2000 up on what we would normally make in a month had we stayed in Corea. Had we paid any of the 11 family members who slaved for bugger all, we would be $5000 down minimum.

What makes it great is watching 13 children shoot a roll of film each in an open field and admiring how fast Corean kiddies have come to love wide open spaces. It is asking them a rhetorical question, for example “What are you photographing?” It is getting an answer like “KANGAROO POO! EVERYWHERE!” And realizing all of your assumptions have just been blown out of the window.

It is taking your kids caving and having the tour guide rehearse volumes about how dark it is going to be when she turns the lights out and how we shouldn’t be scared because she can turn the lights back on again anytime we like, we need only ask. It is about realizing at times like these, when the lights are out and you are to experience something unimaginably different/amazing/terrifying that one of your children has blue L.E.D. lights in his shoes. Not only that, but when the lights go out his tap dancing is 500% more exciting than an absence of light ever will be.

It is about having a pelican eat a child’s camera, vomit it back up and have your cousin collect it from inside the zoo cage. It is about not being there to see it happen. It is about hearing 13 different versions about how it happened when you return. It is about having an earnest 11 year old tell you that the pelican ate the camera, your cousin wrestled the pelican, put an arm into it’s beak, a hand down it’s throat and dragged the digital camera back from where it was lodged in the pelican’s neck. And having your cousin give the girl a postcard of a pelican on the day you leave. And seeing the look on her face when she gets it.

It is about waking up at 4:00am, going to the airport, 13 unimpressed children in tow, having your flight to Sydney cancelled, waiting 90 minutes to realize you are going to be diverted to Canberra then to Sydney. You are going to arrive 2 hours later than expected and you are going to miss your Darling Harbor Cruise and your whole plan is shot to shit. Thinking that the parents are going to ask for money back at best, you are going to have to deal with the travel insurance company at worst and you are buttered, shagged and far from home whichever way it turns out; and all with less than 24 hours to go. It is about having had it up to the back teeth, helping the kids empty their pockets and bags and put them on the conveyor belt as we travel though the departure lounge when our flight is finally granted. It is about filling their pockets and bags again and having a 10 year old walk through the airport security in Adelaide and ask “Are we in Sydney now?” It is about now being unable to answer her, because after all the shit that has just happened, she thinks the metal detector is a teleportation device and you can’t pick yourself up of the ground because hysterics have taken over.

It is about getting your wife’s birthday wrong and having 13 children sing her “happy birthday” at midnight on the wrong day. It’s about realizing due to the lunar calendar she also didn’t know when her birthday was and that she is happy that you remembered even when she didn’t.

It’s about realizing that her ‘real’ birthday is the day after you get home and making smoked salmon, Ementaler cheese and green olive bagels for breakfast and blending "pinya colda" with your bottle of duty free Malibu. Getting drunk before 10:00am just because you can and … I feel fine.

There is only one photo you need to see. One that sums up our entire camp and I will put that here; but if you would like to see more click the link below.

Cheers,
Benjamin

www.campwombat.blogspot.com