This morning's clear sky was short lived, with clouds rolling in.
Walked on from camp with Jim and Bob (we got little chance of any real exercise during our expedition so walking on some mornings was a welcome leg stretch), passing some fantastic village scenes and numerous women winnowing grains with huge woven sifters, who laughed when we tried to photograph them, running away but then joining in Jim’s good humoured clowning.
Back on the truck, we stopped to photograph a valley of villages. And there I was, minding my own business, not bothering anyone or anything, when the only stinging/biting insect for miles attacked my right thigh! I enjoyed grinding the post-sting half-dead blighter into the road. Everyone laughed, including me, despite my leg swelling and being sore for some time. We stopped again to buy fruit from women with beautiful bowls finely woven from plain and dark fibres. And again to watch men chopping wood, two of them working a massive hand saw more than two metres long, one standing above and the other below a frame fashioned from wooden poles, slicing a huge slab of timber into planks.
We saw more and more villages extending into larger estates, with hillsides covered in huts, red roads and, later, clipped hedges. We passed larger settlements with roadside markets, iron roofed houses, main roads, boulangeries and shops. We ate lunch overlooking a massive valley stretching to the horizon. Driving on, we spotted a huge troop of baboons ahead on the road snaking down the Ruwenzori Range, but they'd scampered into the trees by the time we got there and didn't come back, despite us offering tempting bananas.
We drove slowly down into a valley peppered with expanses of fluffy white-headed grasses populated by herds of red deer whose image we couldn't find in our mammal book. Warthogs and the odd bird and distant glimpses of distant black buffalo were the only other wildlife we saw.
Ugly marabou storks with scaly heads and scruffy topknot feathers patrolled the petrol station at Hotel de la Rwindi, where we battened down the hatches and rushed into the bar just in time for a massive electrical storm and torrential downpour. We continued on a road alive with baboons we raided the truck bananas to feed them. Vicki happily peeled and halved fruit for a surprisingly docile bull whose head, jaw like a plastic model but very real, yellow fangs, came up to her waist. From the crows' nest I spotted a herd of buffalo, kingfishers, monkeys, a hippo wallowing in a mud hole and hundreds more red deer before rain forced us back inside the truck. Driving along within view of the river we spotted lots of pink/brown hippopotamus bodies around green islands, one group of three adults and a youngster. Further along we came to a sulphur spring, and we stopped at the next one to wash our hands and feet in the bubbling creek and search out the source, a frothing hole in the hillside, disturbing a large water buffalo in the process.
The highlight of today was our next stop, where the spring entered the river and warmed the water; here were twenty submerged hippos, only their ears and noses showing above the water. Our approach provoked warning grunts but they didn't move until we got within five metres. There I got a full-frame view of a hippo snorting and spraying water as it came out of the river and then disappeared below the surface again. I would have stayed there watching but the rumble of another vehicle provoked a 100-metre hippo dash, and we ran back to the relative safety of the truck. The passing truck passengers waved their fingers at us – obviously aware of what we’d been doing, Kel congratulated us on our prompt reaction. (Reading this now to post here, I realise how stupid we were to get that close to them. But it was just part of our crazy adventure back then.)
A short way along the road we met another Exodus truck going in the opposite direction. We stopped and chatted about our different trips. Heard that Mick, my Kathmandu to London overland expedition last year, had been in Nairobi, heading south, so looking forward to seeing him in Johannesburg. Also heard a robbery story that beat ours but made me think it was a gang: another Exodus overland truck was camped with people sleeping in the back, when thieves removed the windscreen and stole the briefcase containing the trip funds. They showed all the stealth and professionalism of our invaders and too close to where ours took place to be a coincidence.
We camped on village-less grasslands backed by a mountain range. Bob leapt out of the tuck onto a chopped bush stalk that went straight through his thong into his foot and he landed flat on his stomach. Dr Slinko needed again. Maybe Bob has reclaimed his role of the injured and I will get a break.
Enjoyed a night that was quiet apart from the hum of crickets and the chatter of nearby baboons. We put everything away and safe, at least from human hands.
Caption: Ugly Marabou stork, photo by Catherine Merlin
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