Woke to the gentle patter of rain and a dull, featureless grey sky, and looking dismal for our day’s adventure. I feel no enthusiasm and am cross with myself for that. Everyone crowded onto the truck and rummaged in their lockers for boots and clothes, pulling out old faithfuls buried deep, as the rain kept falling. Our guide arrived and told us he’d be back in an hour so we sat steaming in the back of the truck, reading and playing cards; Wilbur Smith took me to dryer country.
Despite the continuing rain, we headed off into the gloom when our guides - a soldier and two pygmy men - returned. Very quickly I was glad I'd come. This was the first time we’d seen Zaire jungle away from the road and the low light and rain created a moody atmosphere. We walked through manioc fields and wide areas of felled timber, jumped over creeks, clambered over long-fallen logs covered in lichen and white and orange fungi, and dodged low hanging twisted vines while trying not to trip over roots projecting from the ground. We walked along a huge lichen-covered log to ford a slow-moving brackish creek; it was nerve-wracking, but I didn’t have to sit down! A couple of times I headed down one track and was redirected down another only to find that I’d been right and we had to backtrack or go cross country. The guides communicated with calls and we made chimpanzee noises. Monkeys played high above us in the treetops.
We passed an elderly couple of pygmies who stopped and greeted us with gummy grins and shook our hands. They were small compared to most of us, but at 6'4"-ish Marcus towered over them.
Then suddenly we were in a village: seven huts or rather lean-tos, in a clearing of about 7m x 18m wrapped in jungle. Men, women and children sat in groups fashioning cords and burning pieces of wood, seeds, and scraps of dik-dik (tiny antelope) fur to hang wood and beads outside their huts to ward off evil spirits, . One old lady was smoking pot in a huge pipe, leaning forward as she exhaled the smoke through her nostrils like a dragon, and ending up almost on the ground, choking and sick.
Vicki tried to doctor one of our guides who had e a huge abscess under one arm, but his pain was too much for him and Vicki hamstrung by her instructions having to be relayed through three people to the patient and not knowing what the final interpretation was.
Myrta handed out balloons to delighted children who laughed at the sound of the air coming out of the rubber toys and we played balloon volleyball with three youngsters. Then we sat with the village chief and an another elder said to be 82, whose eyes twinkled and gorgeously wrinkled faces creased when they smiled.
We spent a wonderful couple of hours in the village, though I felt a bit disappointed that money plays such an important part of pygmy life now, but that's from the perspective of someone with money! Many of the children were carrying bank notes and were probably far more conversant with it than the elders. The Encounter Overland crew who visited yesterday had traded for all the pygmy bows and arrows so we swapped our small treasures for knives and necklaces and Ben traded his ball of twine for a decapitated, gutted dik-dik we saw beside one of the huts - dik-dik for dinner! We headed back to camp with Albert and Hans carrying the dik-dik on a pole like great white hunters.
A couple of the pygmy family followed us down the mountain with some money and the goods we have traded in a plastic bag, perhaps to trade our trade goods.
Our return walk was very different with golden sunlight filtering through the bright green canopy. We made a short detour to the village’s previous camp, where we learned that while pygmy men chop the required wood, the women build the huts in just a few hours, and the camp we had visited was only two days old.
I was getting weary as we neared home, my feet aching and the temperature much warmer, and on arrival headed straight into the river. Spent the afternoon organising my trinkets. A pygmy from the village we visited had spent his recent earnings in the bar, and emerged very drunk. He stumbled through our camp, falling over, and his friend tried to take him away, obviously embarrassed.
Our big laugh for the day was when Bob traded his pink inflatable Dumbo (elephant) for a baboon’s tooth. Wearing the pink elephant, his face split from ear to ear with a grin, the tiny man stood with his wife and child for Bob’s photo.
We dined on delicious roast dik-dik and are all keen for more if we can get it down the road.
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