Woke to a sky of bright orange and the sound of tribal drums.
Drove back out along yesterday's ruts and then turned onto a fabulous stretch of asphalt through villages and from land littered with huge boulders and hills into flatter country offering panoramas of grassland stretching to slight rises on the horizon. The open country reminded me of Australia, the likeness helped by tall gum trees dividing grassed areas and farmed land. We passed many cropped fields one being ploughed by two men working a 4-bullock team. In the neighbouring field, a line of men and women worked the ground with hoes. All of us on Stanley come from countries where stock is farmed and machines do most of the work and it was strange seeing people labouring like animals.
Followed the shoreline of Lake Victoria, with mountains painting dark blue along horizon, then the boundary of Serengeti National Park. Saw our first ostrich and herds of buffalo; white egrets massed on the water and flocks of black and white storks rode the thermals overhead.
We stopped for half an hour in the town of Bonba where I couldn't keep my gaze off a woman in the market whose ears were hugely distended by years of wearing heavy tribal decorations. She had holes at the top of her ears too and at first glance I thought she was wearing earrings, but it was dangling skin.
Driving on, we passed huts beside timber-fenced cattle corals and large herds of hump-backed long-horned cattle. The granaries here were woven and looked like oversized baskets; they sat on stilts and were held in place with lengths of wood. Stopped for lunch under a tree and ate surrounded by thorns. We backed out into an axle deep bog and had to mat out of with much squelching.
Read all afternoon, looking up for banana stops, road taxes, and navigating huge bumps in the road and a newly bridged river; the old ferry lay rusting below us.
We camped in long grass just short of the Kenyan border and here had our first meal disaster of our journey: Markus slipped as he was lifting the spaghetti and produced a modern art piece called "spaghetti on grill”, with noodles on the metal plate and the coals.
A quiet villager returned several times with wood that he lay by our fire. With no other means of communication - he couldn't speak English and we couldn't speak his language - we thanked him with a mug of hot tea with lots of sugar and an empty food tin.
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