Helen's thoughts on camping

Uses for a Dictionary

use it as a tray to serve the wine.

use it as a plate to eat the food.

use it to sit on on a wet grassy knobul.

use the pages to start a bonfire.

use the blank pages at the back to write a note to a

farmer or to put a message in a bottle.

perhaps roll all the pages up and tie them together to

make a rope for when someone falls down a ravine.

have something to stimulate our minds.

have a purpose for living if we get trapped in a cave.

throw it at anyone who is doing our heads in.

throw it at each other.

hold it up over the sun so that the sun doesn't ruin our photos.

to weigh down a guy rope if we have any missing pegs (er hum).

to stone a rabbit to death if we need to eat.

press mountain flowers in it.

make a jacket out of it.

to store useful things in like zammos driving license or rizla.

crush fruit with it to make juice.

stand on it to be a bit taller if we need to change a lightbulb.

c'mon u know u wanna hang out with me in any survival situation.

it's the most useful item we've got.

25/08/06

Bradipi means sloths in Italian. It's surprising how useful this word is you know, the number of conversations I've had about the creatures is actually quite ridiculous. But it seems that sloths have the same fascination for people that cockroaches or rats do - when somebody in a group of people tells you a cockroach/rat/other form of vile creature story, somebody else always has another one that is more grusome, more harrowing and more disgusting than the one before (I think the winner of these stories so far is the one where someone allegedly licked a postal stamp and somehow or another there were eggs on the back of the stamp which embedded themselves into this poor person's tongue...who later had baby cockroaches sprouting from their tongue...allegedly...any takers for a story worse than that?)...Anyways, sloths. From knowing this word in a variety of languages I have learnt the following:

• there are two types of sloth, two-toed and three-toed. Both types sleep an average of about 22 hours a day.
• because their metabolism is so slow, they don't poo for an entire month, which, as you can imagine, finally results in a long and painful process of disposing of a huge ball of excrement from a tree that is so hard and compact that it could probably kill a small child or animal (okay, I might have made that last bit up but it would bloody hurt!)
• baby sloths, in the excitement of actually moving (I suppose it would be the highlight of your day) have a tendency to get confused between their (very still) arm and the next tree branch that they are going to grab...result? They reach for their arm, let go with the other, and fall from the tree (reminds me of the time my brother fell in a river because he forgot to let go of the stick he was throwing)!
• sloths live in one tree and only ever come down to visit another tree close by, which they effectively use as a bathroom. And here begins the story of....the time I saw a sloth...!

Imagine: you read in your guide book that the stunningly beautiful national park you are visiting in Panama may contain sloths...brilliant! Off we trek to the park, anxious and excited to finally see one of these remarkable animals in the flesh, and it is not until we get there that we realise the challenge we are about to face...trees reach up to the sky and of course there are thousands of them. We begin looking in every single tree, for as long as we can should we be fortunate enough to catch a glimpse of movement....every tree I tell you...we hadn't really thought about the possibility that we wouldn't see one, I suppose in the same way that someone who picks up a chocolate bar and reads 'may contain traces of nuts' would assume that there would be nuts in the aforementioned product.

Finally, at the end of our transcentralamerica sloth exploration, my faithful travelling partner spots one...on the forest floor! What a waste of time it was looking in all those trees! It was in the slow process of climbing its 'habitation' tree and as it climbed higher we moved closer and closer, after all, if it was going to attack us, we would probably have time to walk back to Panama City, eat a bowl of sancoche, walk back to the tree and take a picture of the sloth in action before it got round to actually biting or scratching us (they do have long claws mind...). So we're right up next to the tree and the sloth - slowly - senses something...he turns his head around - a bit like the girl in the exorcist - stretches out his arm - slowly - in a weird gesture that is a cross between somebody going 'welcome' as you cross the threshold of their house and a fascist salute...terrified (you kind of get used to things happened so slowly that they become normal, and normal for us is to run if an animal does any kind of threatening gesture), we run back to the path...and watch the completely unperturbed sloth continue his laggard and leisurely climb up the tree.

Since writing this I have been told that calling my page 'london sloths' is an insult to the sloth community. I confess it's true, anyone that knows me will agree that I'm not very good at doing things slowly!