Wednesday 10 May 2006

Hammock

I had another go at sleeping in a hammock last night, I didn’t get too hot but I did wake up shivering. It was really uncomfortably – I felt as though both my hips had come out of joint. I woke up every time I had to roll over and spent a lot of the night with my feet higher than my head. Horrible. In case it rained I had to put a tarp out over me and so I couldn’t see the sky, might as well of been in a tent. When I sleep on the ground I now, unless it looks as though it is really going to bucket down, I leave the tarp on the ground next to me; that way if it does start to rain I can pull it over me like a sheet and keep dry that way. It did rain last night and I got wet even with the tarp up. I assume I got wet; the sleeping bag was soaking when I got into it my morning it looked as though it had dried out due to my body heat and then had got a bit wet from the rain. It also feels really exposed dangling about in the air like that, it’s not natural I tell you. Hammocks are all very well on the beach, there was one I found outside a hotel when I was living on the beach in the Cayman Islands that was basically a thin mattress suspended between two trees, that was alright, it was like lying on a wobbly bed. I slept on that for a while, it was great I was there at the start of hurricane season so when it rained all I had to do was roll out of the hammock in such a way that I landed on the sand underneath the hammock and managed to tip it over at the same time, this way the sleeping side stayed dry. That way I could sleep in the shelter of the solid mattress until it stopped raining at this point it was simply a matter of tipping the hammock back over and going back to sleep. That’s what hammocks are all about, Caribbean island, coconut trees, cocktails with umbrellas in, warm weather and lots of waves.

3 comments:

Hugh Sawyer said...

Forgot about them.

Mike came back at 2:30 am that night. He says that the fog was so thick that visability was down to about two meters. I think this might have been the cause of the damp.

Mervyn said...

I'm at work dreaming of "Caribbean island, coconut trees, cocktails with umbrellas in, warm weather and lots of waves". Not fair!

You know in the jungle, if you sleep on the ground, won't you be eaten alive? i wonder if you could build yourself a platform of some sort up in the trees.

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