No Stopping for Lions (16 page)

Gerard is much chattier on the return and he points out delicate luminous flowers like shiny silver cachous, and fungi with lacy cream caps. He shows us fresh footprints of the elusive forest elephants and for a while we track them, but have to turn back when the ground becomes too boggy and the forest too thick for the inappropriately dressed Glynns. As we walk along Neil talks to Gerard, and once he's learnt that we aren't wealthy American doctors with a big house and many cars he relaxes and they establish a cautious rapport. We learn that his wife and family live in a village in the south of the country and he finds this separation very stressful. He longs for the day when he can work close to his family but is torn by the need to earn enough money to support them. When Neil tells him that that is a universal problem, that many husbands in other countries are taken away from their family by their work and find it difficult, Gerard is sceptical. I start to tell him about the time that Neil worked in another city during the week and I would only see him on Saturday and Sunday, but it becomes too involved in the telling. We get back to base and when we say our goodbyes Neil gives Gerard a hefty tip, but he's embarrassed by it and goes quiet. I whisper to Neil that maybe it isn't enough, but no, Gerard indicates that he is grateful. Not for the first time we've not appreciated the difference between a working relationship and friendship, and while a tip is expected in the first instance, it is insulting in the second.

On the drive back to camp Neil asks me what I was getting at when I referred to his working stint in Melbourne. We've never discussed it, not the impact of it, except early on when we agreed that it was necessary, good for his career. I was happy for him because he was happy, and there was a tacit understanding that there was also an ego thing happening. To ride a taxi to the airport every Monday morning and breakfast in the Qantas Lounge with all the executives in their power ties before jetting off to hotels where they greeted you by name and boardrooms where what you said counted. So we talk about it now. I remember Friday nights when Neil arrived home grumpy and too tired to listen to anything other than the TV. He remembers coming home to me chattering on about insignificant events and people he didn't remember. I felt that he wasn't interested in my week, and he felt that I didn't understand his. Social life was reduced to Saturday night and the rest of the weekend was filled with Neil sleeping and me doing a week's worth of washing. On both sides was a feeling of detachment, that the weekend would be over and on Monday morning we could each get back to our week. The fact that friends were doing the same thing seemed to validate it for a time, but we couldn't or wouldn't acknowledge the truth that the partnership was operating as two sole traders. Then one fine day it was taken out of our hands when Neil's presence in Melbourne was no longer needed and he could work out of Sydney again. We went on holidays, came back and, without us knowing it, life returned to normal.

Back in camp we continue to click with the staff and by now we're being treated like part of their close family. I get lost in the intricacies of making bread-and-butter pudding with the lovely old cook, while Neil has long complicated conversations with the young night guard about their hopes and fears for Uganda's future. When Neil suggests to him that it is up to everybody, but particularly people like him, to make their homeland great once more, he replies softly that not everyone has the wings to fly.

The morning we leave camp it's overcast and drizzly, but the entire staff put on sparkling white uniforms and line up to shake our hands and wish us a safe journey. We're very moved and I'm close to tears as we take off, the old chef crouching down low so that we can see him in the side mirrors as we drive away, waving madly and blowing kisses.

We need to visit Uganda's capital, Kampala, to have the Troopy serviced and to pay for the next leg of our trip. Those in the know have warned us about the unruly population and the congestion on the streets so we've decided to arrive on a Sunday when the crowds will be less. This would have to be one of our biggest mistakes. How were we to know that Sunday is the day to stock up on provisions, visit relatives, take the donkey cart out for a spin? We have a map but this is useless when streets aren't marked and they're blocked to view anyway by the sheer mass of humanity. We head in the general direction of the city centre, but progress is thwarted by pedestrians on the road and broken-down buses. For minutes at a time we don't move at all, then inch forward only to realise that we've just passed a possible route of escape. Three hours after hitting the outskirts of town we emerge on the other side and vote unanimously that this is our least favourite city of the trip.

Thirty-five kilometres away on the shores of Lake Victoria is Entebbe, an altogether different place. Although the capital's airport is here, the town is much smaller than Kampala and quite intimate in comparison. It has few crowds and big, well-tended houses surround the town. This is where diplomats and the wealthy reside, and a number of international-standard hotels dot the lake's shoreline. We choose one of these and it's not long before we're out by the pool with a tall drink, observing the spoilt carryings-on of expat children. The hotel's fine but the staff are unsmiling and surly, the first time we've come across this in Africa. It's either the result of pandering to all those loud and demanding Europeans or, more likely, they're left over from a time when Ugandan hotels were government run.

Refreshed and refuelled, we're on the road north to the famous Murchison Falls National Park. It's Uganda's largest protected area and in the ‘60s it was crammed to overflowing with huge herds of game. Then came Idi Amin, and his ban on tourists combined with uncontrolled poaching started the decimation of the wildlife. After he was ousted things got worse, and the animals in the park were killed for rations by first the military then bands of guerrillas. There was little left. But political stability brought a change in the park's fortunes and since the early ‘90s animal populations have been steadily building. We've been told that the journey is worth it for the falls and the Victoria Nile alone, so even the presence of the murderous Joseph Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army to the north of the park is not going to put us off.

We stop for lunch in Masindi, a market town en route to the national park, and as we're getting back into the Troopy we see a funny thing: maybe twenty or thirty well-dressed men, marching in a group down the main street. They all seem quite happy and acknowledge us with a smile, and I'm sure they would wave too if only they weren't linked together with shiny steel handcuffs and surrounded by armed guards.

We have booked to stay in a hotel that borders Murchison Falls National Park and sits on the banks of the Victoria section of the White Nile — the far bank. This presents a problem as the ferry that connects the park to the rest of the world is out of action: both engines are kaput, having had no care or maintenance. There is another way to get our vehicle into the park, tantalisingly just a few hundred metres across the water, but that's to drive right out and around and enter from the north, a half-day's drive through land held by the Lord's Resistance Army. We choose to cross the river in a little barge and rather churlishly decline a hotel game drive because the price, instead of being reduced to accommodate hapless tourists like us, has been put up to take advantage of a captive market.

Instead we take a boat upstream to the base of the Murchison Falls themselves. Although the falls have been renamed and are officially the Kabalega Falls now, everyone, including the locals, can't seem to lose the more history-laden name and our boat captain continually refers to them as ‘the Murchisonis'. They're spectacular: the water explodes through a narrow cutting in the rocks above into a swirling dangerous basin below, and I've read that in his heyday Amin threw his enemies from the top into this deadly whirlpool. Now, the boat manoeuvres up close to the bank where many very large crocodiles are asleep on the sand, dreaming of the good old Amin days.

The next day we move to a more atmospheric lodge back on the southern side of the river. We have a little isolated chalet built over the water and it has a deck and a good amount of wildlife of its own. Only once before have I seen so many geckos under one roof and that was during a plague of flying ants. Bats fly in at night if we leave the front flap open and bright orange-and-blue
agama
lizards hide in our towels and under the mat. Out on the deck we sit and watch clumps of water hyacinth float past while hippos snuffle around in the long grass on the far bank like giant shiny slugs. Droppings from one of the geckos in the eaves above land on my shoulder, and Neil juggles a little handful of stones to pelt at the monkeys when they get too close to our drying laundry.

It's very humid here but luckily storms pass through daily, giving us a brief reprieve. One night a ferocious wind comes up, along with great flares of lightning and rolling, rumbling thunder. The wind blows furniture off the deck, collapses our mosquito net inside, and causes waves to break on the Nile in front of our chalet. It stops as quickly as it started, leaving behind a dead calm, and torches go on in neighbouring chalets as everyone is up with the wonder of it all. Then the wind is heard rushing our way again bringing with it a short sharp downpour of rain before it's finally gone for good, and we all go back to sleep.

Another guest, a Belgian, invites us to join him on a mini safari and early one morning we set off in a dinghy to look for a shoebill in the papyrus islands, but it's to no avail. This large stork-like bird is not so much shy as hard to find in the tall reedy swamplands they inhabit in Zambia, Uganda and Sudan. These swamps are, by their very nature, largely inaccessible, but we thought we were in with a chance here on the Nile, poking around the shirt-tails of papyrus reached easily by boat. Photos in the lodge prove that shoebills are out there somewhere and show just how strange and unique these birds are. The body is impressive, with artistically arranged grey feathers that become darker and larger towards the upper back, but the head is what makes this one of the most sought-after birds in Africa: a stumpy topknot of feathers on a sleek neck, and a heavy bulky bill, broader than the head itself. The
sabotier
the Belgian calls it, ‘the clog wearer'.

Next is a game drive in the national park, but this gets off to a bad start when the driver dropping us at the barrage, where we're to catch a boat across the river, locks his keys in the car. He finds a short length of wire and tries to open a window — no luck. Our host puts his weight into breaking a seal — still nothing doing. Another driver sidles over and tries his luck, then someone wanders down from the sidelines with suggestions. Neil gives it a try and someone else offers advice, and before long there's a clutch of earnest faces all hovering about the vehicle, giving their opinion, trying to pop the lock. I step back to take a photo and have to laugh at this scene of twelve wise men, well intentioned but, unfortunately for us, all bloody useless.

We eventually get the door open so feel free to leave the driver with his charge and cross the river to the park. Our little safari collects a ranger and a guide and sets out, but very soon it's stopped by a large herd of elephants blocking the road. We pull up and the tourists among us take many photos of the family grazing, a big bull calling the shots. Then suddenly the Belgian drops his camera bag and it hits the decks with a loud crack. The elephants freeze, the bull bellows and they all turn and run away in panic. They're trampling over bushes and fallen logs, mothers are covering younger ones who squeal and bump into each other, and the patriarch, still bellowing, herds his family into the safety of the trees before they can be shot. The guide with us is very distressed and explains that this terrified reaction is still instinctive for some animals in the park, many decades after the wholesale slaughter of wildlife has stopped.

All in all Uganda has been a surprise, as my idea of Africa is still brown dry plains with the occasional waterhole and concentrations of plains animals always dusty and thirsty. Here it is green, green, green with lush vegetation and planted fields everywhere. And it's always mountainous, or at least hilly. Just as everyone told us, we've found Ugandans to be friendly and smiling (Entebbe hotel staff aside); even women wave as we drive past. If we stop to ask directions the Troopy is engulfed in willing guides and there's usually one who offers to come with us to show the way.

Lake Albert lies to the west of Murchison Falls National Park, where it forms part of the border with the DRC. We're told that the road running alongside it is particularly scenic so we decide to return to Entebbe via the lake, just an extra three hours or so added to the trip. The road from the park to the lake's shore is okay and passes through rich agricultural plots with strip villages and muddy, closed shopfronts. The surface is unpaved of course, but we've come to prefer this to a tarmac road booby-trapped with potholes and warped bitumen. We come upon a large herd of thin, lacklustre cattle lying on the road. Neil slows the Troopy to a crawl and, as he's previously done when confronted with similar bovine roadblocks, rolls slowly towards them, expecting them to stand and wander off the road. But these ones are slow to move; they don't seem to register that a large heavy vehicle is edging to within an ear's flick of them, and the nearest one soon disappears from view below the sight-line of the Troopy's bonnet. ‘They'll move in a sec,' I confidently predict, as Neil keeps the Troopy rolling forward and revs the engine. It isn't until we feel resistance, then a definite ‘bump bump' the size of a skinny leg, that we understand that these cows, either through disease or pig-headedness, are not going to budge.

Neil admits defeat and skirts around them through a field of dry, dying maize. The old port of Butiaba is pretty and flat and its roadsides are covered in flowering wild impatiens. This was once an important trade centre but its fame now comes from the fact that it's the place where Ernest Hemingway crashed in a light aircraft for a second time in this part of Uganda, suffering injuries from which he never fully recovered. Neil and I wander over to the wreck of an old cargo vessel, stranded on a shore of pink and white impatiens and abandoned machinery, then we come upon a sandy beach covered in mauve and lilac mother-of-pearl shells. My friend Elaine would have a field day here — and I am momentarily homesick for the days when she and I would potter along beaches in search of the perfect shell.

Heading towards Masindi the road passes through a beautiful forest, and as we drive slowly through it with the windows down, listening for monkeys and birdlife, an odd thing occurs. A guy on a motorbike comes carefully toward us, balancing on the pillion seat a wrapped-up parcel that is clearly a body. It has a blanket tied around it, and its bindings keep it in a semi-seated position. It's strapped on tight but still rolls from side to side in a parody of the bogeyman at the Luna Park ghost train.

There are much more pleasing sights awaiting us on this road. We first caught a glimpse of a great blue turaco when we were in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest and it immediately went on our list of must-see birds. An elegant and slightly exotic bird with rich bluegreen plumage and a crest like a legionnaire's helmet, it's let down only by its uninspiring call. Everywhere we've gone subsequently has promised plenty of turacos, but they've always seemed to elude us … until now. On Masindi road a great blue turaco flies matter-of-factly across our path, so low and slow that we think the Troopy could hit it, and so close that we can see the red tip on its bill. That is rewarding enough, but shortly afterwards the crimson crest and wings of the darker, more glamorous Ross's turaco drift towards our windscreen like a re-run in slow motion. Neil brakes and swerves, and it flies on past without altering its flight pattern by so much as a centimetre.

We're back in Entebbe and although the planned sightseeing has been curtailed by the need to finalise forward bookings and have the Troopy serviced, we take the time to visit the Uganda Wildlife Education Centre, formerly Entebbe Zoo. This is primarily to see shoebills, as we've realised that the chances of seeing them in the wild are becoming slimmer by the minute. We arrive at the centre just as a group of very cute young school children are leaving. One little girl, about five or six and all togged out in a uniform of blue pleated skirt, white Bermuda socks and blouse with an attached pretend blue tie, leaves the others. She has a big smile on her face and many beads in her hair and she walks straight up to Neil and softly rubs his forearm up and down. A teacher calls her away and she moves off, still smiling, and we can only think that she was intrigued by the golden hairs on Neil's arms.

We feel more comfortable being in Entebbe this time. Not only did we take the drive back through Kampala traffic in our stride, but subsequent shopping trips into the city centre mean that we are now comfortable on the roads and can negotiate them like residents. We've chosen to stay in a different hotel, this one with friendly, helpful staff and tortoises in the courtyard. A general air of progress prevails even though it's in the midst of major renovations. Some locals tell the story of one party of guests finding themselves roomless because the builders, in an uncharacteristic fervour of activity, had demolished eight rooms more than they should have.

In the evening a young boy from housekeeping and a supervisor knock on the door and ask if we'd like turn-down service and the room sprayed against insects. I say yes and the obliging young man sprays Doom in all the corners, turns down the bed and fixes a faulty lamp as well. No more than five minutes later there's another knock on the door and the same team from housekeeping ask if I'd like the room sprayed and turn-down service. I laugh but they're straight faced so I can only assume that I've sadly reached the age where all white females look the same.