Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
In the morning, we bid goodbye to Florence. I had arranged for a taxi and local guide to
take her back to Jinja and, outside the guesthouse, made certain she had a clean nappy and
wished her a good journey. To me, Jinja seemed far away, but by car the journey would
take only a few hours. Before Boston and I had reached Lake Kyoga, Florence would be
safely with the representatives from the Wildlife Education Centre. Watching her little face
peering through the glass, suddenly I understood how much I was going to miss the little
monkey. My earlobe would heal, the smell of her faeces constantly dropping down my
back would be gone, but for all of that I still felt torn. Perhaps it was only the heightened
emotions that come with undertaking an expedition like this, but watching Florence go af-
fected me in a way I had not anticipated. Suddenly, I was thinking of all the family and
friends I'd left behind in Britain. Was this, I wondered, the first intimation of some sort of
homesickness?
Boston was already half-way down the road. He turned and yelled for me to hurry up.
We had taken on a local boy as a porter. Emmanuel was seventeen, of South Sudanese
origin, and had a bicycle with which he could help us carry our packs. Some of the other
local boys were pouring scorn on him as he trotted after us, but Emmanuel didn't seem to
care. 'Perhaps if they'd gone to school, they'd be carrying the Muzungu's packs too,' he
declared, though I wasn't comfortable with the idea of him being proud to be my servant.
'Are you okay, Lev?'
'That monkey's probably the closest I've ever come to having a baby,' I replied.
'You should have children, Lev. It is the best thing a man can do.'
I hung my head, half-afraid I'd prompted Boston to embark on another one of his rants.
But, this time, he remained silent. 'I think I'll leave it for a while,' I said, and took my first
step out of Galiyiro.
It was another ten kilometres to the shore of Lake Kyoga. Compared with Lakes Victoria
and Albert, Kyoga is a shallow body of water - all of its 660 square miles are less than
six metres deep, with most of the water having a depth of only three to four metres. The
shallow waters are perfect for lilies and water hyacinth, and as we came to the shore we
first had to pick a way through thick, glutinous swamp land. Out on the water, floating pa-
pyrus islands and acres of water lilies gave the false impression of a succession of much
smaller lakes. In places it seemed as if we might even be able to walk across the surface,
if we balanced delicately on the slowly bobbing green sheet.
Boston, Emmanuel and I gathered ourselves. The only clear water we could see was the
expanse where the Victoria Nile fed into the lake. According to the increasingly cumber-
some self-imposed rules of my expedition, we could not use the flow of the river to gain an
advantage, and had to follow its length in its entirety. Right now, that meant crossing the
lake and continuing our trek on its northern bank, where we would follow the shore west-
