Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Of course, I knew of the danger of crocodiles - but in most places where humans live,
the crocs stay away. The chances of getting eaten are usually pretty slim.
'Not here,' he said. 'They are monsters. My brother was eaten by a crocodile.'
'I'm so sorry.' I said, again on the verge of speechlessness. 'When was that?'
Sirillo, covered in piss and glistening in the sunset, looked at me benevolently.
'At eleven o'clock this morning.'
He shrugged his shoulders, picked up his spear and weaved his way through the cow
horns and smoke back to his home, a teepee of dried grass. In the golden light of dusk, it
looked like nothing so much as a bird's nest.
The time had come to say goodbye to Boston. For some reason there had been a mistake
at the border office and he'd only got a month instead of two, and what's more, the fighting
was intensifying and I wasn't prepared to put him in danger. We'd spent a solemn week
north of Juba, but since our conversation things had been difficult in the knowledge that
he was going home. We'd hardly spoken, and when we did it was just the mundane, daily
practicalities of the walk. We'd reached the edge of the Sudd, and for Boston, the end of
his journey. Standing on the banks of the Nile, we kept the goodbye short and I made Bo-
ston the promise that one day we'd meet again, and with that he got into a minibus which
had been idling, waiting for fleeing Dinka from across the swamp. Without so much as a
rearward glance, the car disappeared down the dusty road. In a moment it was gone, lost
in the bush - and so was Boston.
It wasn't until some hours later, as I was poring over a map of Lakes State and trying
to synthesise all the information Miller had given me that the prospect of heading into the
wilderness without Boston began to feel real. Boston had been my ally and protector for
so long that being at the mercy of strangers was going to feel strange. I tried to shake off
the feeling. I was going to miss his tales of Congolese misadventure, his wildly inaccurate
conspiracy theories - not to mention his pigeon hunting - but I had started this expedition
alone and that was how it would have to continue.
Outside Juba, we'd enlisted the services of a young Ugandan man named Siraje, to help
ferry our packs further north. For a week, we walked north through the Central Equatorial
State, through tiny villages where food was scarce and where the locals, desperate since
December, stared at us warily. Harbouring a foreigner, here, had seen more than one person
murdered when the rebels last swarmed through, and every few kilometres the road was
blocked by police barricades and army checkpoints. Very quickly, I was glad for the two
Dinka accompanying me north: at every village, they somehow charmed the local chiefs
into allowing us the use of an empty schoolroom or police station for a camp; at every
roadblock, they regaled the security officials with tales of my derring-do - explaining to
the commanders how I'd been walking for five years through a hundred different coun-
