by James Best
Despite the British doctor’s earlier words of reassurance, the two things I was really worried about were malaria complications and a serious bacterial infection like pneumonia or meningitis. There were other investigations I would have organised if I’d been in Australia, but these tests would give us the most important pieces of information. Malaria, caused by the parasite Plasmodium and transmitted by mosquito, can cause liver failure, kidney failure, cerebral malaria (infection of the brain that can lead to coma and death), severe anaemia and other complications, and quickly. The World Health Organisation estimates that there were 429,000 deaths from malaria in 2015 with over ninety per cent of these deaths occurring in Africa, mainly in young children.
I desperately hoped we could sort things out; this was as good as it got in Uganda, the next step would be helicopter retrieval to Jo’burg.
Sam tolerated his second venesection of the day much better than the first; maybe now knowing what was involved in it dampened his anxiety. The formal malaria film was clear. We were processed, door to door, including pathology collection and results, in under two hours.
As soon as I had made the decision to go to the hospital, Sam started to become more congested. By the time we left the hospital he was coughing, snuffling and sneezing. We finally had a focus, doctor-speak for an explanation for the fever. The blood count also revealed a profile consistent with a viral infection and unlikely to be a bacterial infection or acute schistosomiasis. Phew.
The next day Sam’s fever settled but I was over it all. The medical dramas of the last few days had exhausted us both. I was pining for home, for Benison, for my bed, for a half-hour hot shower, for the security of having a developed world tertiary hospital a short drive up the road.
Come on, James, I rallied myself, pull yourself together. Regroup. We are here to help Sam. I knew I’d have to pace it carefully though; Sam would take a while to recover. I decided to slowly reintroduce some school and neuroplasticity exercises over the next couple of days before we left on our trip to Murchison Falls National Park.
Judging him to be sufficiently recovered, I got Sam to write his second blog entry on his opinions of Africa. He wrote:
I would like to tell you all my opinion of Africa. I have being in Africa since 1 April 2015.
I’ve seen lot of things and met lots of people. It has been a tough experience.
I’d been in South Africa for nearly a whole month and I started off at Cape Town and Max the camera man had been there for filming us for the first 8 days in the whole trip and spent 6 days at Cape Town and then we went to Hermanus and stayed there for 2 days and Mossel Bay and Wilderness and Port Elizabeth and Chintza and Coffee Bay and Sarni Pass and Durban and then we travelled to Namibia.
The good bits were shops at Durban such as game shops, KFC and many more and also other things.
The bad bits were visiting and helping and saying hi to the Malawi children at preschool and African babies wah noises.
The thing that I enjoyed the most is going to the Durban shopping mall.
My blue DS is missing but they might find it eventually but Mum is going to give me another DS as a replacement or as well as the other 2.
Gabriel is a man we met in Namibia who has glasses and went to the desert in Namibia for 2 nights at a house.
I was happy about Uganda because it had McDonalds and KFC. I had a bad cough and bad sneeze for no more than 1 or 2 weeks. I got a fever for 2 days and I had being in Red Chilli for 9 days.
I met a guy named Mike who lives in Windhoek and I went to his house.
I have being in most rooms in Chameleon backpackers.
Overall, I liked South Africa the best.
On our last day at Red Chilli, before leaving for Murchison Falls, a sweet lady from the kitchen handed me the coffee I had ordered. ‘How is your Sam?’ she asked.
I smiled. ‘He is all better now, thank you.’
‘Ay-eh, he is a good boy. We are praying for him.’
It was four months to the day since we’d arrived in Africa. Cape Town seemed like years ago. It was time to get moving again.
CHAPTER 28
The greatest waterfall of the Nile
We were on our way north, to Murchison Falls National Park. Not so long ago the north of Uganda had been a place governments issued travel warnings about. The problems had begun in the late 1980s with the rise of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), led by chief wing-nut Joseph Kony.
The Christian militia has the supposed raison d’être of establishing a state run on the principles of the Ten Commandments, but in reality the LRA is a bunch of thugs bent on rape and murder, with no identifiable political program or ideology. In the 1990s, the LRA received support from the Sudanese government, in retaliation for the Ugandan government’s support of southern Sudanese rebels, who eventually prevailed and established the new country of South Sudan in 2011.
One of the more disturbing tactics of the LRA was to abduct children from schools and villages and use them as sex slaves or child soldiers. Sometimes these children would be forced to attack their own village, often in the frontline, leading to high casualties. Drug use was rife among the fighters, which encouraged risk-taking. Because the child soldiers were easily replaceable, the strategy proved to be militarily successful but brought international outrage, condemnation and, eventually, action.
In 2006, UNICEF estimated the LRA had abducted more than twenty-five thousand children since the conflict began. Millions of people had been displaced trying to flee from the terror they caused, leading to tens of thousands of deaths from disease in refugee camps.
Eventually, with dwindling support, and increasingly isolated from Sudan after the creation of the nation of South Sudan, and renewed international military support for the Ugandan forces, the LRA were driven from Uganda, only to inflict a terrible toll upon the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo. While now numbering only a few hundred fighters, they continue to wreak havoc in central Africa with their own brand of terror.
At Red Chilli, a plaque on the wall had brought the terrible conflict a little closer to home. English expat Steve Willis, who set up the original Red Chilli with his wife, Debbie, was killed by LRA rebels in 2005. He was responding to a distress call from a group of explorers in Murchison Falls National Park when he was ambushed and shot in the heart. Debbie was pregnant with their second child at the time.
Uganda was wet and green. It had rained at least once every day we’d been here. Storms bracketed periods of searing sunshine. Our van dodged the boda bodas and minibuses in the driving rain, until it eventually unshackled itself from the crazy Kampala chaos and we were free, on the road again. I realised that we had never actually made it to the now-legendary McDonald’s of Kampala. Sam had never pushed the issue. I think he’d just liked the idea that the city was sophisticated enough to be home to the golden arches. Which was fortunate, as I found out later that Mike and Lenneke had been mistaken and there wasn’t one at all.
Sam made his presence felt early on the bus trip. ‘Excuse me, driver, how long is the drive?’
‘About six and a half hours.’
‘I don’t want it to be that long. That’s too long.’
The driver, Juma, looked confused.
One of the other passengers, a special-needs teacher from Liverpool, tried to help. ‘How long do you want it to be?’ she asked Sam. ‘About two hours?’
‘Let’s make it unknown,’ he said.
‘Okay,’ she agreed, ‘unknown.’
Actually, the time flew. Uganda’s bitumen roads were way better than those of Malawi, so Sam could read his Kindle, I could write on the computer and we could chat with new friends. It was now a familiar pattern for me: the slow dawning among our fellow travellers of what we were doing, the realisation of the challenges Sam posed, but also his innate charm and humour. Given time, people like Sam—they can’t really help it.
We left the bitumen and turned onto a road of sodden paprika-coloured clay,
sprinkled with puddles. By the road were baboons, vervet monkeys and warthogs. We passed small villages built of the same paprika-coloured clay as the road. Kilanyi Primary School’s road sign exhorted people to SUFFER NOW, ENJOY TOMORROW. Corn, sugar cane, banana, coffee, spear grass, cassava. Pawpaw, jackfruit and mango trees. Small mosques, small churches, small communities.
Wet and green. The forest thickened and the canopy closed. As we drove through the Budongo Forest, home to the chimpanzee, we could see no more than ten metres into the East African mahogany, impenetrable and seemingly endless. The forest cleared into woodlands, still dense, still wet, still green.
We reached our second great river of the trip, the Nile. An English maths teacher on the bus turned to Sam. ‘Sam, the Nile is the longest river in the world. It is 6,700 kilometres long.’
‘If you were going one hundred kilometres per hour it would take you sixty-seven hours,’ Sam said.
‘Yes, I suppose it would,’ she said, surprised.
Our minibus pulled up to a clearing next to the river above the falls. Time for a quick guided walk. The humidity was oppressive and we were soon lathered in sweat. This was the Victorian Nile, the section between its origin at Lake Victoria and Lake Albert, its waters tumbling off away from us down the valley below the falls.
At Murchison Falls, the churning white water of the Victoria Nile, a hundred or so metres across, compresses through a six-metre gap between two obdurate pillars of granite before, under intense pressure, spraying a giant upside down geyser into the river sixty metres below. In terms of pressure, Murchison is the most powerful waterfall in the world. The group peered down into the void, speculating that the force would probably tear a body apart. Sam didn’t like that idea. Neither did I.
Our guide picked up that Sam needed close supervision near the cliff line; Africa doesn’t usually believe in safety barriers. I gripped Sam’s hand and steered him away from the edge.
We headed for camp. Sam was tired after a day of travelling and I was worried about how he would behave.
‘I don’t want a tent,’ he declared.
I knew where this was going. ‘There is no other option, Sam.’
Before I could explain further, he replied loudly, ‘No! You fuck off! I am not going in a tent.’
That got the attention of the fifty or so people in the reception area.
Sam stomped around the tables and chairs, pointing at me. ‘I want a better father. I will sleep here, in reception.’
I let him be and just followed at a distance. We missed the orientation talk but the others filled me in soon enough. Apparently warthogs frequently grazed around the tents, baboons stole anything edible that was not locked up and hippos wandered around at night.
It came time to allocate the tents, which were actually safari tents—permanent cabin-style—with two single beds in each. I managed to get Sam to have a look, and he immediately calmed down.
After Sam had chilled for a while, I called, ‘Sam, come out of the tent, you’ll get a surprise.’
He came out and laughed. ‘It’s Pumbaa!’ Three warthogs were grazing just outside the tent entrance, completely indifferent to our presence.
The next morning we crossed the upper Nile at dawn so that we could reach the game drive early when the most animals were about. Because there was no power in the tent, I hadn’t given Sam his medications, including his ADHD medication—it would have been too hard to organise in the dark. My headlight torch was on the long list of items lost on the trip.
The diesel-powered car ferry chugged across the smooth waters below the falls. On the other side of the river the landscape was dramatically different. The dense forest disappeared and soft waist-high grasses covered undulating hills, stippled with thornbushes, acacias and palms.
The wildlife was jumping everywhere, and so was Sam. Then we both jumped when we got bitten by tsetse flies, which inflict a nasty pinch-like sting but fortunately for us no longer carried sleeping sickness, at least not where we were. When the fly is carrying the disease, the bite erupts into a red sore and, a few weeks later, swollen lymph glands, headaches, muscle pains and irritability ensue. It can advance to the brain and cause confusion, slurred speech, seizures and difficulty walking and talking. All this can progress over years and, if not treated, it’s fatal. It used to be endemic to Uganda but was now limited to other parts of Africa.
Sam announced to the bus: ‘I’ve been bitten by a titty fly!’
I clarified. ‘That’s tsetse, not titty, Sam.’
Sam also wouldn’t stop talking: Harry Potter, girls, impersonations of animals and different races, Malawian children, Harry Potter, girls. I hoped he wasn’t going to annoy our fellow travellers, but they seemed to be taking his chatter and chaos in their stride. We continued to be blessed with such impressive groups of people on the tours we’d joined.
The game drive was pumping. There are over seven hundred species of birds in Murchison, and it seemed like we saw most of them, along with all the big game like giraffes, elephants, baboons, the list goes on. Charlie, a young Englishwoman currently employed in an orphanage in Kampala, had worked in a wild animal park in the United Kingdom for six years and was helping the guide decipher animal tracks on the dirt road. She was christened Tracker Charlie by the the other passengers.
As we all climbed out of the bus I noticed Sam pat Tracker Charlie on the bum. ‘Sam, don’t do that!’ I yelled.
He flashed a sheepish smile. ‘Sorry.’
Tracker Charlie shrugged and smiled as she walked onto the ferry.
I made sure Sam knew that was inappropriate. ‘You go over to Charlie and apologise.’
He walked over and said sorry, giving her a hug. As he was hugging her, he sneaked a kiss on her cheek.
‘Sam!’
Charlie laughed. ‘Don’t worry, that’s the highlight of the day!’
That afternoon, the group was due to take a boat tour to the falls, seventeen kilometres upstream from the campsite. I wondered if I was overstretching Sam and hesitated about whether we should go. I knew Sam found these activities draining, but we were here to make a change, so I cracked on and took him.
But Sam did well. He was interested by all the wildlife on the banks, and all the travellers in the boat too. Giraffe, baboons and warthogs cautiously walked around the buffaloes and hippos on the banks. A large yellow-billed heron tiptoed her long legs through the shallows of a tributary, in the gaze of a Nile crocodile; pied kingfishers flicked and chirped in and out of their nests buried in holes in the mud of the riverside cliffs.
‘Honk, honk. Mhree-ha.’ Sam continued to imitate the hippos and elephants. He was getting quite good.
The open boat toiled upstream. As we approached the falls, dirty froth speckled the surface like ice on an Arctic sea, a product of the force of Murchison. The famous last line of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby came to mind as we worked up the fast-flowing river: ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’ We rounded the same curve that, in 1864, Sir Samuel Baker and his wife had plied in two dugout canoes. He finally solved the mystery of the source of the Nile by connecting the placid river entering Lake Albert with the wild rapids of the river that left Lake Victoria above. Baker described his discovery:
The roar of the river was extremely loud, and after sharp pulling for a couple of hours, during which time the stream increased, we arrived at a point where the river made a slight turn. Upon rounding the corner a magnificent sight burst suddenly upon us. On either side of the river were beautifully wooded cliffs rising abruptly to a height of about 300 feet; rocks were jutting out from the intensely green foliage; and rushing through a gap that cleft the rock exactly before us, the river, contracted from a grand stream, was pent up in a narrow gorge of scarcely 50 yards in width, roaring furiously through the rock-bound pass it plunged in one leap of about 120 feet perpendicular into a dark abyss below. The fall of water was snow white, which had a superb effect as i
t contrasted with the dark cliffs that walled the river, while the graceful palms of the tropics and wild plantains perfected the beauty of the view.
This was the greatest waterfall of the Nile, and in honour of the distinguished President of the Royal Geographic Society I named it the Murchison Falls.
Now, the boat abutted a rocky outcrop on the river, as close as it was safe to go, and we took it all in, the eddies and whirls around the boat shaking our craft.
Back down the river, the current was now our ally. Quietness enveloped the boat. We were all lost in our thoughts, the jungle drifting past in the late afternoon haze. Near our landing site stood a large herd of elephants, drinking and bathing on the bank, spraying water over their backs and under their ears and sides with their trunks, babies hiding under mothers, a matriarch and a bull watching us closely.
Murchison had been an unforgettable experience, but not as unforgettable as it had been for Ernest Hemingway. In 1960, the Nobel Prize–winning writer decided to take his fourth wife on a flying holiday across Africa, which included a flight over Murchison Falls. Hemingway, an experienced pilot, clipped an old telegraph pole and crashed his plane into the jungle on the banks of the Nile. Sustaining non-life-threatening but painful injuries, they spent the night trying to avoid dangerous animals before being rescued in the morning by boat, coincidentally the same boat used in the film The African Queen.
While attempting to fly back to Entebbe, this time piloted by a local, the plane crashed and burned on take-off. This time Hemingway sustained more serious injuries, including a ruptured liver, a burnt scalp and a fractured skull, the last when he head-butted his way out of the plane. It was reported in the West that he had died, and he spent his convalescence reading his own obituaries.
On the way back to Kampala, our tour visited a rhino sanctuary. Rhinoceroses had been previously found throughout Murchison and other areas of Uganda but during the conflicts of the Amin era and battles with the LRA, soldiers had funded their activities by poaching rhino and elephant and hunting other animals for bush meat. The wildlife of Uganda was devastated, and rhinos were completely wiped out. The sanctuary, breeding rhinos imported from Kenya and the United States, hoped to build up its population to a level that would allow them to start reintroducing them into Murchison within ten to fifteen years.