This morning we were quickly into banana country, where the hillsides were heavily planted with banana palms as well as other fruits and vegetables. The lush, green hills were peppered with mud huts with thatch roofs and occasional old, rundown Belgian farmhouses, some of them red brick buildings with arches, porches and pointed roofs, and all enjoying wonderful views of hill tops and valleys.
We saw lots of eucalypt trees too, areas of tall old timbers and hillside plantations of young trees. Our roads were lined with tall trees and reminded me of Coffs Harbour's mixture of tropical and bush vegetation.
Reached the long-anticipated town of Beni where Kel ordered fresh meat for a special Exodus meal. Half our group headed for the banks to change money and spent the whole time enmeshed in bureaucracy. I found baking powder and joined Kel, Nikki, Vicki, Ben and Geoff out the back of the Hotel Beni for some welcome quiet respite overlooking clipped back lawns. A delicatessen provided strawberry jam for private and truck stores, lengths of cabana (I couldn’t believe I was devouring a length of heavily garlicked deliciousness), sliced ham, monstrous avocadoes, and 5.5kg of beef just that morning passed by the white-coated inspector. (We had rarely bought meat over the last few months, other than goat killed for us because of the dodgy handling but overland drivers knew that they could trust the quality here.)
We stopped again, for lunch, at an overgrown concreted lookout perched above a beautiful valley. Smoke rose from villages below that looked more like miniatures. It was very hot and dusty with hoons racing along road raising clouds of red dust. We cut and marinated the meat for dinner.
The country became more and more rugged during the afternoon and our going slowed on potholed roads rutted by water. We've seen more agriculture in the last few days than the rest of our trip, bananas, coffee, tea and clusters of pineapple bushes spiky against the softer lines of trees and hills. Here it was green as far as we could see in every direction, with only the slash of red road in contract.
Late in the day we drove through the large town of Butambo, where the main road was dual carriageway for considerable length, though still dirt, and lined with huge open buildings on whose floors squatting women sorted piles of coffee beans. Also here were garish buildings with stone façades, the grouting picked out in paint, the Bank of Zaire highlighted in lemon. The hills on the approach into the town were covered with houses like an outer suburb new estate – though these "houses" were built of mud and roofed with thatch or iron sheeting, the roads unmade and the only transport infrastructure was feet. Mud houses with corrugated roofs sat behind clipped green hedges along the main, still-dirt, roads in Butambo.
A long drive got us clear of the town and back into densely planted hills. We passed occasional tea plantations before Kelvin turned us off the road and down a plantation road, signed on a tree. At the bottom of the hill we had to turn slightly to cross a bridge and us lot in the back were ignorant of anything unusual until the right-hand side of the truck lurched and dropped and Kelvin yelled at us to abandon Stanley.
Out of Stanley we saw that his rear wheel was buried to its axle in a hole in the bridge with the fast-flowing creek visible below. A rotten timber had broken under our weight. We had very little solid ground from which to mount a rescue but Ben and Kelvin set to it, jacking up, blocking under and tying the truck in an effort to lift its buried wheel to bridge level.
We camped on the road and the 3m wide strip became a hive of activity as the cooks set to in front of Stanley and a group worked behind. It was tricky work, requiring teamwork, but there seemed to be more chiefs than Indians and suggestions from one drowned out others. We felled a small tree and I helped saw it by using my weight to stabilize the trunk as the work progressed. Food, equipment, and clothes needed off the truck were retrieved by a single person, and Myrta was marooned for while when all movement was forbidden.
A huge local audience of adults and children gathered around us, way too close for comfort and the metal rope tying Stanley to a tree and, hopefully, prevent him slipping further.
Our dinner of not hugely tender but flavourful beef with scrumptious mashed potato and cauliflower cheese was cordon bleu after months of “dog food” and dehydes.
We couldn't all sit in Stanley to write diaries but with him blocked up and slanted, his rear end held clear of the bridge by six separate supports, Kel declared it safe for the truck sleepers and we went to bed to sleep gently, leaving others around the fire on a surprisingly cold night.
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