We arrived in the late afternoon, feeling tired, hot, and hungry. It was a relief to get out of the car and stretch.
We always stayed in one of the small, sparsely furnished huts, built on a wide area of sand and scrubby grass, just a couple of minutes from the beach itself. The area in no way qualified for the term “resort”! There was nothing there. Just the huts and the occasional tree casting minimal shade onto the hot ground.
We stopped to enquire which hut was to be ours. Once we had located it, my father parked the car just outside and we unpacked. It didn’t take us long. However, we were tired, cranky and in need of sustenance, but we didn’t head straight to the sea, as one might have thought. No, not at all. Night falls suddenly in Africa, early, at around 6pm, so it was too late. Instead, we drove to a nearby restaurant for a cheap dinner of local fish and chips. That restored some of our energy, but it was by now too dark to do anything much except sleep. So back to the hut we went to get ready for bed. Our parents knew we children would wake up early because our excitement was almost uncontainable. Tomorrow was when our seaside holiday started for real.
Sure enough, bright and early the next day, we three children were up, breakfasted, in our swimsuits, and ready to go. Urging our mother to hurry up as she cleared away our breakfast cereal bowls, we were soon charging down the beach to plunge into the sea. This was what the weeks of planning had been all about! What a glorious feeling it was to dive in, to float on an incoming wave, and to frolic in such an abandoned way. Incomparable! This was special, something we could not do in land-locked Southern Rhodesia. I loved it. I forgot instantly all the preparations we had made. I obliterated from my mind the long, tiring journey and I did not think about the equally uncomfortable return trip to be undertaken in a few days’ time. All that mattered was that we were here, now, at this spectacular beach, in this sparkling sea, for five glorious days.
It was fabulous, and worth it all!
