3000m

May 17th, 2005

In 2000, after completing high school, me and a friend went to the United Kingdom with one goal in mind, to see as many live bands as possible. Apart from this goal we also drank loads of pints and fueled the British economy by joining the working class masses in embracing the crappiest jobs on earth!

As the year went on we got ourselves some tickets to go to the three day Reading Music Festival. Because our jobs were so crap, we figured we’d save some money and not buy a tent for the weekend. Instead we’ll pack light and sleep under the stars.

So on the first day of the festival, we jumped around to the sounds of Limp Bizkit (we were only 18), Rage Against The Machine (One of their last gigs ever), Foo Fighters and Blink 182. Round about 11pm we were sort of standing at the edge of the crowd enjoying Oasis. Next thing, a gentle, yet worrying drizzle started to materialize out of nowhere. I don’t know why we didn’t think of this possibility. I mean we were in the UK for crying out loud. It always rains there. We sort of panicked a bit, calmed down a bit, and then tried to do some super fast, emergency “socialising” with any girls in our immediate eye sight who might be kind enough to share their humble abodes with us for the evening. After failing dismally, we suddenly saw something very inspiring, a fully stocked camping store right in the middle of the festival grounds. We immediately forgot about our very shaky financial situations and spent a ridiculous amount of foreign currency on a two-man tent. After walking what felt like forever, we found the last bit of unoccupied grass left in the furthest corner of the festival grounds. We quickly pitched our tent and prepared ourselves for a comfortably dry evening of peaceful sleep. Our tent kept us dry for 3 nights, but because we packed “light”, we had no sleeping bags and we nearly froze to death for 3 nights. Every morning we hopped out of our tent at the crack of dawn and jumped up and down outside our tent in order to get ourselves heated up and ready to rock.

Eventually we had to return to South Africa and we brought our “Reading” tent with us. Through the years the tent got passed along between our friends, and saw many music festivals and camping weekends. In the mean time, I’ve moved on and bought another tent and forgot all about our “Reading” tent. That is, until a couple of weeks ago!

I found myself hiking in the Drakensberg mountains with some friends for 4 days. Upon reaching the summit, to my astonishment I came across one of my close friends hiking up the very same mountain. He was hiking with another party from the other side of the mountain. If this was not already a big enough coincidence, strapped to the bottom of his backpack was none other than the “Reading” tent! He borrowed it from my UK buddy and took it on the hike. He said the tent worked like a charm, that is assuming that it is not going to rain. The heavens opened up the previous night and apparently it rained harder inside the tent than outside. In the middle of the night he hastily had to find refuge in a fellow hikers tent to avoid sleeping in a lake.

So after traveling 10 000km and providing friends with a “home” for the night on many occasions, 5 years down the line I caught up with “Reading” tent on top of a 3 000m mountain, sadly not able to keep the rain out anymore!

If you have a memory of a time when the “Reading” tent was involved, feel free to add a comment!