SUNDAY 1 MAY     PUNGALINA

We were up early to do the breakfast for the guests, after which they departed.

Their Guest Book comments were: “Thanks for a great visit and canoe adventure. Thanks Wendy – excellent food.”  So I felt good about their stay, too.

My next set of tasks was to put the kitchen tent into rest mode, till the next visitors. Turn off and defrost fridge and take all the foodstuffs from fridges up to O’s place, for storage there. I cleaned the kitchen fridge and the drinks fridge and generally cleaned and tidied up the place. Mopped the tarp floor.

It had been very good to start off our time at the camp with only a couple of guests at a time – good trial run, to work things out. I had the rather extensive procedures manual provided by S and A before we came – useful, but some of it not up to date with the place as it was this year. Also some unrealistic – like keeping up our supplies via the weekly mail plane; this could only be done on a very limited basis due to weight constraints and ban on frozen items, meat etc.

Reading the section, now, about what to do when there were guests was really interesting – it was obvious all the things that were done poorly when A and S came up here, last year!

Now, having run the kitchen for a few days, I had really clear ideas what must be purchased to bring things up to a standard that justified the charges – like having plates and cutlery that matched, and enough of it all! We were really poorly equipped.

I had the bedding and towels from four guests to launder, plus the one and only table cloth, hand towels and tea towels that had accumulated over the time. I carted all that in Truck, up to O’s, and did it all, in several loads, in the washing machine there. I decided I was going to do our washing in that too, from now on, whether he liked it or not. We had accumulated quite a bit of washing over the past few days and I had not had time to do any of it by hand. Everything was hung out to dry on the lines that stretched across the house yard. It did not take long to dry, once through the washer.

In between loads, I wandered across to the vegie patch and helped John.

Apart from the vegie and house garden watering, John was able to get back into his normal safari camp routine – watering the grass, raking leaves and so on.

He refuelled Truck, hand pumping diesel from one of the drums of fuel at the house. The speedo read 434kms. About 180kms of that was the distance we’d driven since our last fill-up at Hells Gate. The other 250kms, or so, had been accumulated by the driving we’d done about the property, but mostly by my trips between the house and our camp. John was mostly driving the property’s old Hilux and he kept this at our camp each night.

We had been here three weeks now. It felt longer! I thought we had achieved a great deal in that time.