Buffalo Camp

Living in a bus sounds like fun and it is. Different is always fun, depending on how long it lasts. After traveling for days on end, it was a bit strange to be on board a bus that was definitely not going anywhere.

There is more space in a bus than there is in a car, but once you have a few beds loaded into that space and five people, it is certainly cosy. Outside the bus is space and sunshine, beautiful msasa trees in a cloudless blue sky. It's fantastic to be outside. The bus is really the bedroom where we all cuddle up to sleep. Mila and Ella have always shared a bedroom but now their beds are less than an arms length apart.

The kitchen is under the trees and within a day or two, we have a bathroom and toilet, screened behind grass walls. Before we left suburbia we watched a TV series called Out Last. One of those reality TV survival shows, where various camps compete with each other to be the last camp standing. So many human qualities and weaknesses are highlighted by the cameras that are ever present, but somehow absent from the minds eye. Reality shows, starting with Ben Grylls, have always left me in awe of the gullibility of the human mind. Human endeavour and co-operative existence were the main talking points that we looked forward to experiencing in our own camp. It also gave us the feeling that this was all a bit of a game.

Oscar and I found an old metal sculpture that I had acquired from a weld-artist years ago and we placed him at the entrance to our new camp, proclaiming the camp to be Buffalo Camp.

Buffalo Camp mascot wearing a Halloween mask

We dont have a rival camp, in the same sense as the Out Last teams, but there is Mike's

Camp, a few hundred metres away. Their kitchen is in a cooking hut. We are not competing with each other, quite the opposite.

We are on the same side, but that doesn't mean we dont have our differences. Here is an example, we love the darkness of the night all around us and the stars above, while over at Mike's they have a security light that is in reality, a spot light which shines into the darkness, that is our camp. The argument goes like this, thieves, also known as totsis, don't like light so they will avoid you if you have bright lights, lighting up the night. I point out to Mike that he has a spot light shining out at the front of his place, into our camp, while the back of his house is dark. Light creates darker darkness.

We have come to a compromise where his light still shines but in another direction.

Mike grew up here. In the early days of Zimbabalooba he was a picinin playing on my overland trucks and breaking things off them. Now he has his own family, a hard working and skilled welder and leader of Mike's camp, together with Amanda, his wife. Their children are Gerald and Precious, who is uncontrollable and mischievous and Ocsar's friend.

The main purpose of our move here is to get closer to everything that is important to us. To nature and to sustainable living, which means getting off the grid as much as we can. Possibly more importantly, from a financial point of view, we are here to get closer to the roots of Zimbabalooba. The process of creating, dyeing and printing that gives us the sheets of magical Zimbabalooba cotton. It all happens here on the farm. We have come home to the heart and it feels good.

We have also come home to be at home, with each other. Our children are growing up

so fast. In the past I have travelled up and down, leaving everyone else living another life with me "away", then back to leave again. Not to mention the dreaded screens - TV screens, laptop screens. mobile screens. This is a challenge that we all face and I m not going into it any further than to say we hope to reduce our exposure and dependence on something that is probably an evolutionary process. Meaning, if we were to succeed in avoiding it, we would end up being like the last pygmies who were "discovered" deep in some equatorial forests; left behind. This is where the debate gets really interesting, because being left behind does not imply that those of us "on the bus" are going anywhere happier or Nivanaesque. Poverty is actually a by-product of progress, if you stop to think about it.

I sometimes imagine a cataclysmic event happening, in the future, whereby the future network of communication, that we will have by then, is suddenly disrupted and the human population who are, by now partly integrated with machines (or worse if you read some of the projections for AI), are unplugged. In that scenario only the " pygmies " who had avoided the whole integration process would be able to continue to survive, thanks to the fact that were not relying on the network for their survival, in the first place.

It's really only a bit of conjecture, because to be human is to be seen by others and to be part of it, and one's children want to be seen far more than we do. Evolution happens on that cutting edge of the next generation. It is the children who are thrust into that space and what can we do, or not do, to influence the process?

That brings me to another aspect of our lives, our children Mila, Ella and Oscar are enrolled in a school. Like families everywhere (except possibly the pygmies) this has become one of the main events of our lives. The other main event of our lives is living in Buffalo Camp.

The months before the rains are extremely hot and dry, the months before them are dry and cold . The days are warm as the sun burns out of an azure blue sky, but the nights are chilly and sometimes colder than that.

The bus is warmer than being outside but it has a lot of windows and cracks, here and there. It is an old bus, of course, dating back to the days when Salisbury was not only a cathedral town in the south of England, but also the capital city of Rhodesia. It still bears the paintwork / livery of the Dept of Correctional Services of that era. My conclusion is that this would have been the staff bus, as convicts would not have travelled in such style, if at all.

Sleeping in this airy space, we feel the elements and that is part of being connected to nature. The msasa trees started to lose their leaves soon after we arrived. Msasa trees have a cycle that is quite unique, as the dry winter comes to an end, they drop their leaves. Living underneath them one experiences leaves everywhere and in everything; then suddenly they stop and the trees start to produce new leaves. The new leaves are not green, they are red and orange and every shade from purple to ocre. While the air is dry and the ground is dust, these trees suddenly produce this new life. They find the resource to start the new cycle. The only other place I have ever experienced such a display of rich, enchanting colours was in Chianti, in an Italian autumn. The vines have the same colours as the msasa trees, but in autumn, while for the msasas it is spring.

What happens next is even more surprising. The cicadas start up their cacophany, transmitting on all channels, with a sense of urgency that perhaps comes from the length of time they have been waiting for this moment to arrive - seventeen years!

The insects that are creating this buzz are the prodginy of the generation who had their last breeding party back when Usian Bolt was breaking records at the Beijing Olympics and Satoshi Nakamoto was penning his " Bitcoin : A peer to peer electronic cash system ".

Cicadas, we all agree, look like aliens. Once their party is over they start dropping out of the trees and showing up either dead, or, on their way out in our outdoor bathroom, amongst other places. This creates more than the usual hysteria around brushing teeth at bedtime, with alien beetles in their death throes under foot.

Alien insects

With the trees above us gone silent we discuss the next event that nature has waiting in the wings for us. The rains will be arriving soon. The kitchen floor, which has been created by Vimbiso, our darling helper and already dear sissi to our children, is going to have a lot of water added to it, when they do arrive. We all know that means mud.

Vimbiso lives next door, she joined our family the moment we arrived, she was always going to be part of the deal. Without her would not have made it thus far. The only way we get three children to school wearing white shirts and white socks is because Vimbiso is part of Buffalo Camp. She also made the kitchen floor with termite mound and cow dung and the grass walls of the bathroom. I'm surprised it has taken this long for her to enter the story.

Vimibiso working on the kitchen floor

However, as I said, the rains are coming. The heat is almost unbearable now. So the rains will be most welcome but we need a roof. Outdoorness is fine, until it rains, so around about now we need a roof. We better make one.

Ella and Precious