Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
forest razed but with so little agriculture in its place that it made what we had seen yester-
day seem even more hopeless. Our goal was to reach Lake Kyoga by nightfall but, delayed
by Florence's constant chewing of my earlobe, stops to catch her when she scrambled from
my shoulder, and my repeated attempts to find her a safe haven, we fell 10km short and
spent the night in a little village called Galiyiro. North of us, the Victoria Nile disappeared
into Lake Kyoga and emerged again on the lake's most westerly point, then wending its
way due west to Lake Albert. We had fallen a day behind and, with Florence, would fall
even further - but that was a problem for another day. Now, hot and exhausted as we were,
was a time for clean water, laundry, and clean clothes.
In the village, we shared dinner: big plates of chapatti and beans, with Florence boun-
cing between the two and stealing morsels from our plates. When I was finished, I looked
up to see Boston stifling a smile. I thought he was laughing at the monkey, but he had a
different kind of sparkle in his eye.
'What is it?'
'How did you like it, Lev?'
I had liked it well enough - but, then, I had eaten enough rotten goat and bush rat in the
last weeks to make anything hot and filling feel like a banquet.
'Haricot viande!' he declared. 'Meat beans!'
'Meat beans?' I asked, noting that Florence still held one in her tiny paws.
'It's the dish of refugees,' Boston explained. 'We'll see a lot more of it the closer we get
to South Sudan. You see, Lev, these beans, they're rotten. Full of maggots.'
My stomach clenched. Instinct was telling me throw up, or at least throw a punch at Bo-
ston for not warning me before.
'It's protein, Lev! You whites wouldn't understand. This is good food for starving Afric-
ans.' He leaned across the table, wearing his familiar conspiratorial smile. 'Trust me, Lev,
when we cross over the border, you might be grateful to find a plate of haricot viande . . .'
At that moment, my phone rang. Boston was lucky: it was the only thing that stopped
me from throwing my plate at his face. On the other end of the line was Pete Meredith.
Pete had been in touch with a representative of the Ugandan Wildlife Education Centre in
Entebbe, a big town sitting on one of Lake Victoria's many peninsulas, some forty kilo-
metres away from Kampala. The endless calls I had made during the day, it seemed, had
not been so fruitless after all; if I could get Florence back to Jinja, the Education Centre
would pick her up and rear her in safety, before aiding her reintroduction to the wild.
When the phone call was finished, Boston was still smiling.
'You can wipe that smile off your face,' I said, refusing to admit that the memory of the
beans was not so disgusting after all. Even maggots taste good when you're as famished
as I was. 'We're marching again tomorrow, without this vervet to slow us down.'
