Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
As I looked at them, I nodded. 'It makes sense. There's no reason you have to walk the
whole way.'
Jason nodded. This wasn't a decision he'd come to on the spur of the moment, but rather
one he and Matt had debated that morning as the realities of the walk set in. 'We'll take
the bikes north to Pawar.' He paused. 'We'll rest up and see you there.'
What Jason was proposing did make sense and, if I am honest, there was a small part
of me relieved - without Matt and Jason, Boston and I would cover the remaining seven
kilometres we had planned for the day much sooner. After our water supplies were replen-
ished, we watched Matt and Jason disappear up the road into clouds of dust, riding pillion
with the locals they had persuaded to taxi them to our camp.
Though the road took us up and down a succession of arid hills, Boston and I were able
to complete the final stretch of the day in only an hour and a half, and found Matt and
Jason making themselves at home in Pawar, where Matt was in deep conversation with
the village headman and Jason was taking photographs of the scrub that overlooked the
village. Both seemed revived by their restful afternoon, and Matt had already negotiated
a campsite with the villagers. As a group, we followed a small game track down to the
bank of the river where, thankful for the cool breeze coming in off the water, we pitched
tents and opened our ration packs for the night. Soon, the headman - a drunkard with a
longbow over his shoulder and a string of children hurrying behind - brought us firewood
and three jerry cans filled with purified water. We sated ourselves greedily, and Matt was
already standing over our fire, warming through the dehydrated ration packs of chilli he
had brought with him. After weeks of rice and fish, and whatever other inedible foodstuffs
the bush had thrown up, it was a feast beyond my imagining.
Later, as more and more children flocked out of the village to watch from the edge of
our camp, Jason and Matt took photographs of the crowds. Boston and I lay by the banks
of the river. The night was curiously silent, the river barely seeming to move. There were
no crocodiles or lowing hippo to remind us where we were.
Before dawn, Matt was awake and brewing porridge on his little twig-burning stove. Jason
was refilling the jerry cans while Boston was already in Pawar, locating the headman and
the local ranger station. Today we would enter the Ajai Wildlife Reserve, a small conser-
vation area surrounded by seasonally flooded swampland and forested savannah. Ajai had
been the traditional home of the endangered white rhino in Uganda for decades, with the
species hunted to near-extinction in the 1960s and the survivors all relocated to protect
them from poachers. Entering Ajai would mean we would not pass any villages, and water
would be more difficult to find. Even with the rangers Boston was procuring to take us
into the park, the amount we could carry would be limited. Even more than the days we
had just completed, this was going to be tough.
