Permission camping
Tonight I am permission camping. The sun set three hours ago and the trucks are less frequent. But when they pass by on the potholed road they make such a loud rumble that it sounds like they will crunch us in our tent.
I laid back from a crouched crossed legged position to rest my head on my inflatable pillow and my shoulder crunched into a bag of small bags of chips. Little red bags that a little boy brought us around sunset, from the shop up the street. A purple bag from when Bell, so hungry, walked with her headlamp and got snacks and drinks from this shop while I cooked coconut lentils. The shop is run by a sweet, helpful teenage boy with quiet eyes and a fanny pack that is bursting with highly organized rumpled bills. The shop sells a good variety of snacks, including individually wrapped wagon wheel cookies from Vietnam, like the ones I handed the little boy and his buddy in thanks for the chips. It’s fine if he threw a rock at the roof above our tent an hour earlier.
Across the road is a steep slope and this is where the residents of the village come on scooter or by foot and huck their bags of trash. At dusk I saw a small dark pig rooting around. You never see the pigs outside, just hear or smell them as you cycle along sometimes.
On a trip where you have a tent, you can group your sleeping options into three clusters. You can sleep inside, you can wild camp, or you can permission camp.
What I mean here by permission camping is when you seek an invitation to camp in a village, school, church, hospital, gas station, or on someone’s property. I love permission camping because you get to meet people and see a bit of life through their eyes. It is also, significantly, a clean solution to the anxiety of trying to hide your camp when you’re not confident you won’t be seen.
Every night permission camping is different. The trucks have nearly stopped and I can just hear voices and the put put put of a scooter at a soothing distance. The earplugs will be in tonight.
The picture is of Bell permission camping inside a national park compound in Sumatra back in July :-)