My smelly, smelly towel

Possibly the least useful purchase I made before I came away was a 'travel towel'.  These are often highly recommended, folding into a remarkably small size, and I have frequently heard them praised for their marvellously absorbent qualities.  Personally, though, I think that a cotton t shirt does the job just as well, if not better, and has the advantage of having more than one use.  The worst thing about the towel is that it needs constant washing, tending to fester and stagnate rapidly when wet. Even if hung on a washing line immediately after each use, it can render a room uninhabitable after only a couple of days without being washed.

After a few days in the rainforest, with no running water, the towel was an unwelcome companion in my tent, and so I draped it over the top of the tent in the sun - firstly so I could breathe inside the tent, and secondly because I hoped it might prove marginally less offensive when properly dried out.  Coming back from the net hunting trip, however, I found that it had gone.  Noticing me looking for something the Ba'aka, who had maintained a 24 hour vigil over our tents since our arrival, were greatly concerned.  We were here as honoured guests, and for something to have disappeared or, unthinkably, to have been stolen, was a matter of the utmost importance.  The Ba'aka, in my short time with them, I found to be some of the friendliest, gentlest people I have met, and I knew from my conversations with Simon and Louis that they don't steal, they simply don't.  Personally, I wasn't overly fussed about the towel, but this was not now important.  Returning my property so that everyone's honour could be restored was all that now mattered.  Sure enough, within the half hour, one of them emerged from the forest holding a crumpled blue square.  It turned out that a dog had dragged it away into the forest, and if it smelled bad before, now it was truly, truly repellent.  Trying not to let my revulsion show through my gratitude, I buried it deep within my rucksack.

If our belongings had been carefully guarded before, they were doubly so now.  Returning later in the day, I found that a soaking wet pair of striped underpants had been hung on top of my tent.  The lessons of the towel had been fully learned, and I would not be given the chance to report my pants missing.  Not wanting to seem ungrateful by pointing out that I'd never seen those pants before and didn't really want them on my tent, I left them there to continue drying.  Later I noticed that they had been hung above the seating area of the village as a sort of flag, and sometime after that, they were gone altogether.

I hoped fervently that no little helpers had packed them in my bag for me.