As you get older, you tend to hone your likes and dislikes quite succinctly, to the point that there’s very little grey area  – only grey hair. I’ll drop you from my life if you mispronounce ‘indubitably’ or confuse ‘borrow’ with ‘lend’. If you consider the works of Danielle Steel or EL James literature, I’d advocate for burning you at the stake. If you exclusively watch reality TV shows and feel the need to tell me about it, our interactions will end abruptly.

But worse than any of this is having the audacity to tell me you like camping. Or the absolute insanity of ever inviting me to join you. I’d rather discover that you don’t drink.

Comparing camping with holidaymaking is like comparing reality TV with art. It’s the biggest con after cryptocurrency or male feminists, and one that seems to haunt me more and more, now that I have boy children. Fortunately for me, one of those boy children considers nature an affront on his soul, and would rather go without oxygen than WiFi. Unfortunately, the young boy child is buying the camping Kool Aid, and gets more excited by the concept with every ill-advised school campout.

I recall, with horror, our days of being forced to camp at school. Trekking with a backpack so fully laden that I now have a future of scoliosis to look forward to. You’d arrive at some dusty campsite in the middle of some godforsaken place, with teenagers fresh out of school themselves tasked with ‘leading’ your camp groups while your teachers hotfooted it to the nearest bar to begin their weekend of inebriated ‘child-minding’.

The first step would be to set up camp. This involved unpacking a mouldy tent, only to discover you’re missing 2 key elements that actually make the tent stand upright. After 75 gruelling minutes of trying to decipher the mechanics of a tent designed by some coked-up engineer from the 1970s, you’re forced to string up the tent to the nearest thorn tree and hope that a gentle breeze doesn’t send it all scuttling into the croc-infested river nearby.

It’s at this point you realise you haven’t eaten anything since the packed school lunch on the bus that was as indecipherable as your tent instructions. The team leaders, who are nothing more than militant Nazi youth, instruct you to cook your own food over an open fire, using a pile of twigs and a lighter you had to borrow from the teachers on their smoke break.

Having eaten your soggy two-minute noodles, you’re escorted to the ablution facilities, which are so vile, you’re basically risking an STD and inevitable snake bite upon entering. Fortunately, all this is interspersed with ‘team-building’ activities that make Lord of the Flies seem like a vacation in the Seychelles – all overseen by sadistic camp leaders on a power high.

These school tours were supposed to teach you resilience and camaraderie. All it taught me was that teachers have a surprisingly high threshold for liquor. And that camping is the absolute worst.

Going into adulthood, this is not an experience I wish to re-enact. And yet, every family wants to go on camping trips based on some complete misconception about what camping is – and how much camping really costs. It’s not fun. It’s not cheap. And you will wish for death. No matter what they tell you.

Between the petrol, campsite, equipment, and post-camping therapy, it’s one of the costliest vacations you can take. I drive past campsites and can only stare, dumbfounded, at these R1-million cars are parked alongside tents and trailers, with families looking more like they’re in a concentration camp than seaside camp. Parents, with their lifeless eyes, trying to change stinky nappies in the sand, wondering why they didn’t invest that R1-million in a holiday home rather than a holiday hell.

Camping is for the insane.

In the words of a wise man, the only stars I want to see are the 5 stars on the hotel door.