My mum quite generously offered to pick up this last item from our local outdooring store, to give me a bit of extra time packing and getting myself together. I was quite grateful and expected her to bring home a simple, small, light-weight and easily stuffable ball of mosquito netting, to be draped over myself or slept in with the edges tucked under in just the fashion David is currently sporting over on his cot. However, such primitive expectations far underestimated my mother's creativity and her dedication, and it was with great pride that she presented me that night with an Outdoor Explorers BugBivvy (TM) 2000.
I'm afraid it was with less enthusiasm, and only due to the lateness of the game, that I accepted the BugBivvy (TM). It was large, bulky, weighty and of alarmingly low stuffability, but I did my best to stuff it all the same into the one tiny suitcase that would come with me to Africa.
The BugBivvy was first produced about four nights into the trip at one particularly mosquito-friendly hotel, pulled out of my bag to the shock and great entertainment of David. The thing looked like a half mesh, half plastic sleeping bag with enough volume for five people and a single inexplicable collapsing stick that poked its way awkwardly through a paucity of badly-organized loops for about seven seconds before demonstrating its definitive quality and collapsing on itself. Much to the continued merriment of David, happily ensconced beneath his own simple net in roughly the same amount of time. I set the pole aright again and again, if only for the sake of photographing the pathetic construction for my review at a later date when I would presumably find it funny as well, before admitting defeat and clamboring inside its zippered depths, fabric pooling on my face and feeble pole poking one or the other of my arms whichever way I turned.
I have slept in this way three times now, the most recent of which was characterized by David as a battle between myself and the 'cocoon', his moniker for the miserable set of mesh and pole that I spent much of my pre-dawn hours thrashing about in. My mother's dedication shall always be appreciated, but the BugBivvy was not exactly a success.
IT IS THE MISERABLE FATE of a miserable traveling Murphy's Law that the night I
finally realized how to properly put together my cocoon, the night I declared I would spend the rest of my nights abroad comfortably ensconced in its protective zippered depths, a night that should have remained one of unbridled elation and triumph, was the same night that I discovered I had, with the introduction of an unsavory bedsheet the night before, invited into said cocoon an army of the hungriest bedbugs the third world has ever seen. By 2 a.m., I had 47 new bites. Unable to sleep with frantic scratching, I spent from 2:15 to 2:25 a.m. locating and cataloguing all my various new bites. I then spent from 2:25 to 2:50 ruefully reflecting on the bitterness of irony to the regular respiration sounds of the enviably slumbering David in the next cot. I then spent from 2:50 to 3:16 a.m. writing this very blog post, scribbling it out on my notepad between scratching sessions, and deciding upon its title: truly, a Cocoon Found and Lost.
Sad, I had the bedbug experience once in Guatemala. I told the owner of the hotel there were bed bugs, showed her my whelps, to which she told me the mosquitoes must have gotten into my room. Let it be known, I am not a fan of dermatologists and would not want to ascribe the title to myself, but even my untrained eye knows the difference between a sea of flea bites and a mosquito bite. The owner, not being too much of one for thinking, again stated that I'd been bitten by a mosquito, but was willing to enter my room and look at my bed. After watching the fleas bound about their playground for a while, her response wasn't so much an admission of guilt, a waiving of fees, or even acknowledgment that perhaps they should take some action to preclude another insomnic, flea-bitten night for their next guest, bur rather just a simple, 'Man, you've got bad luck.'
ReplyDeleteSad case, not even deet would save you from this one, as you'd melt through your tent... all the same, I think you made good use of your time.
seriously. sleep was far from an option.
ReplyDeletehahahaha that's what it comes down to in the third world.. you don't get rid of the bugs, you don't lower the price or warn the next person.. you just commiserate with someone else's shitty luck.