30th March 1986 : Buying Memories

Breakfasted with baboons, a scampering crowd of bulls, mothers and youngsters that chewed their way along the escarpment edge.

Spent the morning scouring souvenir stalls packed with ebony carvings, rummaging through Maasai heads, warriors, twisted towers of human figures, walking sticks, letter openers, and an assortment of African animals including strangely distorted elephants. It was a crazy few hours trying to guard the truck and hunt through the stalls. Eventually, I bought a magnificent Maasai warrior for 1150 shillings (about $US10 on the black market), having met my match in a salesman who realized how much I wanted the statue and what I could afford to give. (I still have this carving; it occupies pride of place on my mantlepiece.) I also bought a pair of trousers and shorts. 

Having somehow managed to get everyone into the back of the truck long enough to shut the gate, Kelvin drove us away, Stanley now well and truly laden with dark wooden pieces.

Stopped for a welcome wash (amid souvenir markets) in a flat rocky stream where I immersed myself in a natural spa, a delicious refreshment with only a small local audience.

We spent the afternoon on rutted roads, a brief but heavy thunderstorm transforming lunch into a fast-forward comedy. A lake and distant hills decorated flat terrain before we started to climb. The ascent was like journeying back in time to the hills of Burundi, with thick green coverage, small clusters of mud huts, cultivated patches on the hills and multitudinous savanna trees. Flower-bordered mud paths led down from the road to a mud house in an almost English-garden.

We camped on a levelled green area that turned out to belong to a school, immediately drawing a huge crowd of spectators and several concerned villagers who thought we had broken down and offered to help.

Markus and Gary reversed Nikki and Kel’s fly sheet and those of us sitting on the truck counted down to when they finally went to bed, laughing at the comments that reached us from out of the dark. Sudden rain forced us to drop the truck sides, trapping the few mosquitoes inside with us.