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Fantasy and Travel

Adventures, drc, Travelling in Africa, Why,

Reading a passage in a fantasy novel this evening, I was transported back to Christmas Day 2011 in the rain forests of the Eastern Congo. It was a weird kind of day and in retrospect so exotic as to be life-changing. I don’t think it felt that way at the time but at this distance, it’s hard to tell. We’d gone hunting with the local people. We’d been there a day or two and taken a couple of walks across the bridge over the river which dominated the whole area. I remember being a little terrified by the ant-hills sixty feet or so up on giant tree branches. It was a little like being in a National Geographic special without the comforting best-British-voice commentary.

We joined the hunters around their fire. I remember reading before the trip that they used marijuana in their hunt preparations but we weren’t out to get high. The idea of being intoxicated in those forests, where one wrong step could lose you forever, is not appealing. It was that thick and intimidating. As we walked, the group I was with got a little behind the rest and within moments couldn’t see the others and were scrambling to find the hidden-in-the-undergrowth path.

After a while, we reached the point where they left us behind with one or two of their people; strung up their nets and faded into the forest. I’m sure they knew it would be a bad hunt because we were too noisy – strange, large people moving around when we should have been quiet.

The sounds drifted back to us through the forests. Thick, dense, suffocating forests. You could hardly see any patch of sky when you looked up. It was hot and humid and around us were giant, unfamiliar plants. I remember standing there – time seemed distorted and somehow irrelevant – and following the trunk and branches of a giant tree. Somewhere the sounds echoed. The echoes were hard to follow in that dense, overgrown clearing. The sounds were eerie. Terry Pratchett talked in one of his books about words being manipulated and used up and sent out to earn a living on the streets. I don’t think I really ever had a reference for the word “eerie” until I heard the unworldly sounds of the “pygmy” hunters driving pray towards their nets on that strange afternoon.

When I started travelling in Africa, a dear friend encouraged me to start keeping a record of each day of the travels. The discipline of writing is so valuable in capturing the moments that would otherwise be forgotten, an emotional and personal record of the things that happen. Perhaps the most specific moment of realising how important it is to record things was the moment I remember writing down in my travel journal that I’d seen a black and white monkey on the trip between Kampala and Fort Portal, seen from the window of the bus, and feeling a little like a scientist recording the sighting of a rare animal. I wouldn’t necessarily have forgotten it, but writing it down cemented the moment in my memory and made it possible to refer back to notes when I doubted, as time fades the memories, what I’d seen.

In retrospect, in hind-sight, so far and so long away, I’m struck by how different the immersive experience of being in the DRC was from the organised, planned tourism experience of Korea. On that day, so long ago, I wrote so little about the hunt. It seems so simple compared to what I am now able to understand as the impact.

Someone asked me recently if I think that travel really broadens your horizons and makes you a better person. I don’t know about the better person bit but I do know that travel changes some of your perspectives – travel means that when I read in a fantasy novel about exploring native woodlands on a faraway version of the planet, the first thing I think of is hunting with pygmies on that strange, faraway Christmas Day. My sense is that that isn’t the norm. My response to the question was to try – I fear rather inarticulately – to explain that travel stretches the borders of the possible perspectives one can hold. For me, travel means that I compare things to that strange afternoon and consider ants and bugs in terms of a range including the rainforests of Congo, instead of the standard spectrum of the country I happen to have grown up in. And my sense, humble though it is, is that the same is probably true in terms of the kind of big conversations about politics and economics and freedom.

The last journey: Epulu to Bunia

Adventures, bus, drc, Travelling in Africa, ,

It’s been more than six months since we returned from that crazy, whirlwind three week trip to Uganda and the Eastern DRC. The whole trip lasted less than 21 days but it’s taken all this time to process, to remember, to understand what was crammed into that short space. I could tell more tales of more journeys – car, ferry, bus, plane – but this is the last story of the trip. The last piece of remembering pinned to the page.

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We woke early that morning, two days after Christmas, packed and went to wait by the road. Unlike our outbound trip, we were unsure what kind of transport we’d get. After all, hopping a bus where the route started in Bunia was likely to be far easier than cramming a spot on an overcrowded skorokoro already full from its starting point in Kisengani.

So we waited. The guards, who knew us of old by now, brought us blue plastic chairs to sit on. Five travellers, with their bags, by the side of the road. We took bets on how long it would take us to get a ride. We took bets on what kind of vehicle we’d end up catching. We contemplated playing cards.

Two vehicles arrived. One was an NGO landcruiser. The other was a Nile Coaches bus. After the misery of the trip here, we were reluctant even to consider another eight hours on one of those busses. Extremely reluctant. This one, however, turned out to be a semi-out-of-service bus, which, crucially, meant that it was empty. No millions of people, no masses of luggage, no white sacks, no Chinese flip-flops. An empty bus would be far better able to navigate the potholes. And it could move faster. We were sold. We climbed on board. Most people headed for the front. I found myself a seat further back. This trip I wanted quiet, to be by myself, to watch the world go by.

The world was beautiful. We passed homesteads and households. People sitting outside. Children playing. Forests. Streams. At Mambasa, we stopped for breakfast of stale chapatti and cake. Chapati – the one food I’d rather eat in Uganda.

Back on the road. Run-down vehicles-that-never-die passed us. We passed pedestrians – how far were they walking? Ituri River Bridge (Pont Ituri 22m), donated by the British government and assembled by MONUC Nepalese troops. More homesteads, more huts, more contrasts with the Southern African rural areas.

The bus took us as far as Komanda, where we’d find other transport. We sat on the side of the road, leaning against a fence. Komanda, 2pm. Dusty. Hot. Waiting for transport of any kind. The two people in our group who speak French and Swahili had wandered off. A storm was building up in the distance. We waited. Patiently. Peacefully. We weren’t rushing to be anywhere, anymore. There was an ease to the afternoon. Travelling in Africa teaches you patience. Richard dozed in the reccie hat he bought in Bunia, with his army bag, by the dusty road.

A truck passed by but they said they weren’t going to Bunia. A man offered his car for $90. We countered with $60 but he refused. Two boys came by selling hard-boiled eggs. We bought one. Then another. And another. Boiled eggs with salt on the roadside in Komanda. That’s a good memory. Someone went off and bought more stale chapati and some water. We eat more eggs.

After a time, a mini-bus taxi came past. We wandered over to find out if they were going back to Bunia tomorrow, mostly at peace now with spending the night in Komanda. It turned out they were travelling back that day. A price is negotiated, the taxi headed to town to collect other passengers while we settle back into the shade of our tin-sheeting fence, to wait.

The taxi ride was hair-raising. The driver narrowly avoided a head-on collision more than once. To be fair, this was generally the result of a car in our lane refusing to move till the last minute but still a little terrifying. The poultry were in grave danger of death-by-taxi, too. Chickens who sauntered across the road in front of oncoming traffic. Ducks who refuse to move so the driver literally had to go around. Pigeons who waddled away at the last minute, far too lazy to fly.

In between worrying about cars and poultry, we watched the gorgeous stormlight. Dark clouds across grassland with stretched-out rays creating spotlights of contrast. A relief, as always, to get back to grassland. The forests had been beautiful but the grasslands of the world will always be my heart and my home.

Back in Bunia, the taxi stopped outside MONUSCO house. What a different arrival to the first time, just a week before. We wandered down to Mama Tamara’s, where the boda-bodas had first dropped us, and booked rooms at $10 per night. Way more pleasant than the other place, even if it turned out, maybe, possibly, to be something of a brothel. The doors had locks. The rooms were clean. It was a good place to stay.

A good place to end the journey. The eastern DRC is an amazing place. Just getting there, just being there, had taken months of planning and research, plucking up courage and calming down anxious relatives and friends. I doubt it would have happened if it hadn’t been for Richard. I owe him a debt of gratitude. Him and the others who travelled with us. The people who shared the frustration of getting stuck in that horrible hotel in Bunia and the joy of discovering Epulu and Kisenyi, and the magic of movement and travel and going, just going, not to discover something new and world-changing but just to see.

In 2008, I travelled into Africa for the first time, with an amazing group of people. Since then I have been to two other continents and seven more African countries. I have learnt that the end of one journey is invariably the beginning of another and that journeys start and end far beyond the actual days of travel; the anticipation, the remembering are part of it too.

That last morning in Bunia, I sit on a cement ledge and watch a little microcosm of this foreign-familiar world. Men and boys fetch water in yellow gerry-cans. A woman in a black dress and gold hairnet washes shoes in a bucket. Crows come to rest in the tree next door. A white rooster wanders around, contemplating crowing. A boy teaches his sister French counting words outside a wooden shed. Someone is sweeping the yard. It starts to rain. The camera pulls back and the shot fades out. It’s time for the planning, the anticipation of the next adventure to begin.

Rumours of Okapis

Adventures, drc,

In Epulu, we had the privilege to see for ourselves the crazy, wonderful creatures for which the Okapi Wildlife Reserve is named. The first time you see an okapi, you are reminded of those crazy animal displays that did the rounds in Europe when Africa was first “discovered”, showing creatures with, for example, the head of giraffe but the body of zebra. Okapis are definitely weird looking enough to have been in those displays. They look like they were put together from the left-overs: the legs of a zebra, the body of a horse-sized brown antelope and the horns of, quite possibly, a giraffe. They’re like a real-life embodiment of the rumours of crazy animals brought back by long-ago explores. They are, in fact, quite closely related to giraffes (they are giraffids) but look only a very little like them and are much closer in size to a medium-sized horse.

They are also extremely endangered. Unless something miraculous happens, it seems unlikely, in a few years’ time, that there will be any okapis outside of zoos. The reserve is trying to do something about that, both through research and guarding those few okapis that remain in the wild and through a breeding programme. It is as a result of the breeding programme that some okapis are kept at the centre in Epulu where, if you’re as lucky, you can see them up close. This is a unique and precious experience because, as we learnt on the hunting trip, spotting anything in the wild of those rainforests could only be a matter of ridiculous good luck.

We head up to the okapi enclosures in the early afternoon. My day had started with a cup of coffee by the river, where I watched two giant black and white parrots, looking for all the world like gentlemen in white pantaloons and black coats arguing as the hopped from branch to branch. There was a fish eagle, too, and the ubiquitous soaring brown hawks. The pygmies arrived to sell us necklaces and bracelets. We spent the morning lazing in the gazebo by the river and then went into town for an early lunch, enlivened by wondering, as we sat on our rickety chairs in a dark little room, how in the a Saddam Hussein calendar had made its way to this hidden corner of the Congo.

And then there were okapis. They really are incredibly beautiful, if somewhat improbably, creatures. Their bodies are a rich chestnut colour, their legs and hind quarters clear, clean black and white zebra stripes and their faces ghostly, alien faces with exquisitely expressive eyes. It was feeding time and they were definitely inquisitive. Several came up to the fence to find out what was going on. One tried to lick the camera. Another stuck its super-long tongue through the fence and tried to eat the creeper on the other side. Then they’d get nervous and try on their best defensive pose: standing a little way away from us, under a tree, with their tail ends towards the people and peeking over their shoulders to see if we’d gone away.

Staff arrived with wheelbarrows full of leaves. They went into the enclosures and hung them up like clothes on a washing line. Apparently this is entirely necessary; if okapis have to lean down to eat, all the blood flows to their heads and they eventually die. The creatures wandered up to the lines on food and stood there, glancing furtively back at us. Then they’d take a bite and stand, peaking through the curtains of okapi-food leaves while they chewed. Others, clearly more interested in food than people, ignored us entirely and gobbled their way through a whole washing-line of leaves.

I could have watched all day. We took so many pictures of these strange, wonderful creatures. It was as if we were trying to capture them to take home, on the page and screen if nowhere else. I grew up in a land of game reserves. I’ve seen plenty of giraffes and impala and kudu and zebras. I’ve even seen baby rhinos and rare, secretive leopards. Okapis are special, perhaps because they are more rare, occurring only in the fast-dwindling Africa rainforests.

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Post-script

Before we went to the DRC, a journalist we met in Kampala described the situation there as, it’s all okay until it’s not. Okapi Wildlife Reserve really is one of the most magical, wonderful places I’ve ever been and when we were there it was completely safe and peaceful. Unfortunately, things don’t always stay that way. During June, the headquarters of the Okapi Wildlife Reserve in Epulu were attacked by a rebel group, apparently in retaliation for their work to prevent elephant poaching. Two guards were killed, buildings destroyed and offices ransacked. One of the surviving guards walked all night to Mambasa to call for help and the Congolese army, the FARDC, headed for the area to restore order. Early reports indicated that the village was deserted and the pygmies had fled. All of the okapis we saw at the centre were killed. While this is a devastating blow, the Okapi Wildlife Conservation team are determined to rebuild and are currently raising funds to support the families of those who were harmed, to restore the town and the facilities and to get back on track to conserve the okapis. Hopefully, one day soon, it will again be possible for others to experience the magic of Epulu. Until then, the Okapi conservation team could use all the help they can get.