"Christina, I LavYou"

Words you don't care to hear outside your tent door at midnight...

We thought we had chosen a nice hidden campsite, far from the highway and a ways between villages. It turned out that the nice little foot path that we followed to find our little spot was a well-travelled route between villages and so several people passed by as we sat outside our tent and had dinner. Everyone was all smiles, though and gave us the thumbs up when we gestured as if to ask if it were ok that we camp there.

While we ate, a man came to join us for a few minutes and although he seemed strange (simple, shall we say...), he was nice enough and asked our names and where we were from. And then he went on his way...

Or so we thought. As we settled into our sleeping bags for the night and turned off our headlamps, we heard footsteps approach and then stop right outside the tent. Our 'friend' was back. We heard, "Christina, Jodie" and so unzipped our tent to tell him that we were sleeping and didn't want to visit. He pretty much tried to crawl right in and we had to more or less shoo him away so that we could rest.

Or so we thought. An hour later, he was back, this time standing right outside my tent door saying over and over, "Christina, I lav you!" I'm pretty sure these were the only english words he knew and I'm sure that he would have been coo-ing Jodie's name too if only Russian speakers didn't have such a hard time remembering it!

We frantically flipped through our phrasebook, looking for the words "stop" and "go away" and repeated them over and over to him (he was being pretty persistent). We knew that this man was harmless and just didn't understand that we wanted our privacy and in the daylight, such an encounter wouldn't have been a big deal at all. But oh how things change when the lights are out... When he finally left, we both laid wide awake and alert, trying to disern between noises in the wind and human noise.

Finally, we both had to pee and so opened the tent...and there he was, perched up on a small hill looking down at us. "Christina, I lav you". I'll be forever grateful to Jodie for being the brave one that night, standing up outside in her down jacket (extra intimidation) and yelling at him to "go home".

At last he finally did and after an hour or so more of straining our ears against the flapping of the tent and a final look outside to see that we were alone, we fell asleep.

It was an uncomfortable night and a good example of the different levels of privacy that we expect at home and that we get when we're travelling. From now on, though, I prefer to meet my crazy people during the day :)