by Tony Park
‘Safari.’ Michelle said the word to herself again. She loved it. The way it rolled off her tongue, its myriad meanings, the promise of travel and adventure.
It was derived from an Arabic word for journey, but used in different contexts it conjured up so much more. It could mean harmless game viewing or a hunting trip. In Zimbabwe, a safari area, such as the Matestsi, where Fletcher operated, was a place where game could legally be killed, under a strict quota system.
To Michelle, it was travel. Packing her meagre belongings into a backpack, saying goodbye to a place she had called home, and venturing out into the unknown. She felt the same as she had when she left Canada. A mix of excitement and anticipation, leavened with a trace of fear. It made for a heady combination. She relished it.
The relocation to the Congo would be fascinating for her professionally, and equally intriguing on a personal level. A couple of times she had gotten the feeling that Fletcher had driven down to her place, when he was between safaris, for the sole reason of getting laid. She didn’t necessarily see that as a bad thing – he had reawakened her sexual appetite for sure – though she had thought it would have been nice if just once he had come for a chat, or so that the two of them could go out and do something as a couple. It would have been good, she realised, with a touch of surprise, if she could have spent time with him as she had done with Shane, in Victoria Falls and Livingstone.
With Shane she had talked and walked and eaten and drunk and gone sightseeing – the things some people normally did before they started sleeping together. She had thought Shane might make a move on her at some stage. He was a good-looking guy, still single in his mid-thirties, and she’d no indication that he was gay. She wasn’t conceited enough to think she was beautiful, or irresistible, but she imagined that a handsome soldier would fancy his chances with her. The fact that he had studiously avoided propositioning her was kind of nice, though. If it was because she was attached to Fletcher, it showed he had a personal code of honour.
Which made her question her own morals. Despite the way Shane had drunkenly taunted her about being a ‘sell-out’, inferring she was with Fletcher because of his wealth, when she left him in the bar of the Sprayview Hotel at Victoria Falls she had felt an intense pang of irrational jealousy when she noticed the backpacker girl rise from her table and nonchalantly saunter over to the bar to be next to him. The whole time Michelle had talked with Shane she had watched the blonde girl casting furtive glances at the pair of them. Michelle wondered what she would have done if Shane had made a pass at her.
She zipped her pack closed and carefully disassembled her two cameras, separating the lenses from the bodies, and packed them into a padded photographic bag. On the research side, she was confident that her new English assistant, Matthew, would work out just fine. Matthew had the right qualifications and seemed to have a good work ethic. Michelle planned on initially spending about two months in the Congo, doing the initial wildlife assessment of the concession, and then returning to Zimbabwe to check up on Matthew’s progress with the dogs. She smiled to herself. Not too long ago she had faced the prospect of winding up her research and flying home with her tail between her legs. Now she was starting a new project, employing an assistant and she had enough funding to fly from one country to another. She still found Doctor Charles Hamley the Third loathsome, but without his money she would probably be back on the prairie teaching high school science or breeding lab rats in a university somewhere cold.
Michelle heard the buzz of a light aircraft overhead and darted to the window. She recognised the registration letters of Dougal’s Cessna and was just in time to see him waggle his wings as he droned low over Main Camp.
‘All set?’ Matthew asked, popping his head through the open door.
Michelle looked around her at the first place she had called home in Africa. She hadn’t spent much time there lately. Aside from some hand-stitched curtains and a few dog-eared paperbacks on the makeshift brick and timber bookshelf, there was little evidence that she had ever been there.
‘I guess,’ Michelle said. She closed the door.
14
It was in Africa, but that was where the commonality between Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo ended, Shane thought as they headed north, on an atrocious road, from the decaying regional town of Goma on the shores of Lake Kivu, north towards the Virunga National Park.
‘Ow!’ Michelle cried as the Landcruiser lurched sickeningly in and out of a pothole. ‘What gives with this road?’
Fletcher laughed. ‘You’ll never complain about dirt roads down south again after spending some time up here. We’re actually driving on an old lava flow. It’s solid, so you don’t get bogged in the wet season, but there’s not much the Congolese can do about the holes until Nyiragongo erupts again and resurfaces it.’
It was a pretty callous joke, Shane thought. The volcano’s last eruption in 2002 had displaced hundreds of thousands of people and cut the town of Goma, where they had landed, in two. The mountain smoked behind them as they headed north. Civil war, a virtual invasion by rebels and refugees from neighbouring countries, and natural disasters – even for an African country, the DRC had more than its share of misfortune. In the past ten years, Fletcher had told them, about four million Congolese had died as a result of warfare. Battles were followed by organised rape. It was the way of this part of Africa.
Shane had no regrets about leaving Goma behind them. From the air it had looked pretty enough – the sun glinting off Lake Kivu, which looked cool and inviting; opulent villas lining the water’s edge; and lush green fields of crops thriving on the volcanic soils. The airstrip spanned the gap between the volcano and the lake, and Shane had marvelled that the ramshackle white brick terminal had somehow survived. The end of the runway jutted into the disorganised cluster of stone and tin huts that made up the town and Shane was surprised to see a gaggle of women with baskets of fruit balanced on their heads strolling across the Tarmac, even as the pilot of the aircraft he and Michelle had flown in on was bringing his engines up to full revs and swinging out onto the strip.
The terminal – such as it was – was like others he’d been to in Africa. Frantic jostling and shoving amongst the passengers to grab their bags off the single belt – perhaps their rush was to beat the local thieves – followed by interminable queues and questioning by immigration and customs.
Up close, the evidence of war and the volcanic eruption was everywhere. About eighteen per cent of the town had been destroyed and buried under lava and black ash. In the years since the natural disaster, people had begun rebuilding on top of the wreckage of the old town, rather than excavating and clearing. A new layer of misery was rising from the black earth. Once whitewashed buildings were stained and crumbling, some pitted with bullet holes. The only structures that looked as though they had encountered a lick of paint in the past decade were a cluster of banks at the first roundabout they went through, and the Primus brewery at the second. ‘The mainstay of the economy,’ Fletcher noted, pointing to a billboard advertising Primus beer. The town centre was bustling and chaotic, and had a bit of a Wild-West feel to it, Shane thought.
‘Not much for us here, unless you need fuel, beer, gold or illegal diamonds,’ Fletcher noted. A couple of soldiers in camouflage uniforms, toting AK 47s, watched their progress through mirrored sunglasses as Fletcher geared down and accelerated out of town.
Fletcher swerved, yielding a few inches of road space to an oncoming truck whose tray was stacked high with hundreds of little woven reed baskets, each the size of a shoebox. ‘What’s in those?’ Michelle asked, pointing to the load as they drove through a brief smokescreen of black diesel fumes.
‘Smoked fish,’ said Fletcher, who had collected them from the airport in a new Landcruiser. ‘The baskets are called pockets. The different coloured bits of rag tied to them shows which family has caught them from the lake.’ Pick-ups crammed with people sitting on bench seats in the back – Kimalumalus, they
were called – whizzed past them at breakneck speed.
Wise and Caesar were ahead of them, bouncing along the rutted road in a shiny, dent-free late-model Land Rover Defender, along with Fletcher’s newly employed Congolese guide, Patrice, whom they had all met briefly at the airport. Each of the vehicles towed a trailer packed, like the vehicles’ roof carriers, with tents, tools, supplies and all the other odds and ends needed to create a safari camp out of nothing, in the middle of a jungle. Zimbabwe’s roads weren’t getting any better with age and the crippling effects of inflation and government mismanagement, but the narrow tar routes of his homeland seemed to Shane like German autobahns compared with the track they were traversing now.
A class of schoolchildren, barefoot but dressed in clean white shirts and blue shorts, yelled and waved at them as the convoy bounced past. Fletcher pointed out a man freewheeling downhill towards them on a homemade scooter. Its wheels were simply rounded cross-sections of a fallen tree trunk, and the timber running board was piled high with bunches of bananas. It was an ingenious-looking contraption that even sported shock-absorbers, though Shane wouldn’t have trusted his life, let alone his fruit crop, to it.
Shane wound down the window and breathed in the thick, hot, wet air, savouring it. It was the smell of the tropics – rain, wet earth, year-round perspiration, rotting food and vegetation. It was, in his experience, more Asian than African. The smells took him back momentarily to the dank jungles of East Timor where he had hunted Indonesian-backed militiamen hell-bent on disrupting the former Jakarta-ruled colony’s transition to independence.
The dense vegetation that still grew in pockets between villages and subsistence farms was vivid emerald. Luscious, impenetrable, and speckled here and there with the bright colours of flowers and tropical fruits he’d not seen since leaving Australia. As they neared small villages he saw patchy groves of banana trees. Women sat behind tomatoes, carrots, cabbages, beans and potatoes, all piled high on mats on the side of the road. Skinny kids, who realised they wouldn’t make a sale from the two four-by-fours, chased after them down the rock-hard road, hands outstretched. ‘Jambo, Monsieur! Give me money, give me ballpoint!’ a little boy with a potbelly yelled as Fletcher down-shifted to tackle a steep hill. Two young women dressed in brightly printed bikwembe, which reached from their hips to ankles, carried curly-haired babies on their backs, bundled tight in matching wraps.
Here, more than in Southern Africa, was evidence of an economy dependent largely on aid. In Zimbabwe, as bad as things were, it was still relatively unusual to see anyone other than the poorest of the poor begging. The only other new vehicles they passed now were the ubiquitous white Cruisers of the UN.
In Shane’s Africa a man could walk or drive for hundreds of kilometres and not see another human being. Here it seemed they couldn’t move more than a hundred metres without doing so. People thronged the roads, staring blankly at them, as if they had arrived from another galaxy instead of another country. Here, they spoke French – with the exception of the kids’ begging English – and drove on the wrong side of the road. There was more litter than one encountered in Zimbabwe, with plastic bags scattered along the roadside.
It had amused and annoyed Shane the way outsiders often thought of Africa as a single entity, a basket case that would only survive with billions of dollars of foreign aid and the goodwill of middle-aged musicians who would have passed into obscurity had it not been for massed concerts which perpetuated the myth that money would solve the continent’s myriad problems.
Africa was as unified as Europe. This was so in name, perhaps, through some largely ineffective institutions that allowed overfed politicians to congregate and talk at a different luxury tourist destination each year, but in practice, it was ridiculous and insulting to suggest that Ethiopia shared the woes of South Africa, or that Namibia should be lumped in the same leaky boat as Nigeria.
Fletcher seemed to read his mind. ‘About the only thing this place has in common with Zim is AIDS.’ In the front passenger’s seat, Michelle’s face was perpetually turned to the parade of life flashing past them. Shane was in the back seat.
He could tell when they were about to reach another village, as the bush on either side of the road thinned out, replaced with stacked sacks of charcoal on the verges and fields of unweeded crops – maybe potatoes, he thought. The roadside rubbish was worse as well. As they cruised through each ville their senses were assaulted with music, played African style, at full volume as every tiny shop or bar tried to compete with its neighbour in an eardrum-bursting competition. Those without radios made their own music, on drums made of upturned tins. Young girls danced and swayed as boys, still too young to pay much mind to them, kicked an improvised soccer ball made of a balloon filled with rags and wrapped in string.
‘White caps,’ Fletcher said, pointing to a roadblock ahead, manned by local policemen. ‘Patrice will sort them out with a packet of cigarettes or two. He knows his way around the law, that one.’
Shane nodded. He tried never to pay bribes to officials in Africa. He found a ready smile and an inexhaustible supply of patience usually got him around any requests for money or gifts, or spurious fines dreamed up by shifty policemen. Whatever Patrice said or did worked, though, and they moved through the roadblock without hassle.
Apart from the rich greens of the vegetation, the dramatic relief of the countryside on either side of him was a source of wonder and, at the same time, concern. He and his men would be operating in this tough, hilly terrain. Shane knew from studying a map that they were headed north through the western arm of the Great Rift Valley. Off to their right was the chain of Virunga volcanoes, dividing the Congo from Rwanda to the south, and Uganda to the north. Far beyond the ridge on their left was the Central Congo Basin.
‘Any updates on the situation where we’re heading?’ Shane asked as their heads connected with the Toyota’s padded roof lining.
‘There’s a local Congolese army commander meeting us at the camp this afternoon. He’ll give us a brief on security and what’s what. Bottom line is that you and your chaps will have plenty of business, Shane.’
Michelle looked over at Fletcher and grimaced.
‘Ah, don’t worry, my girl.’ Fletcher put a hand on her bare knee and squeezed it. ‘No bloody rebel or poacher will dare mess with us once word gets out.’
‘I hope you’re right.’ She sounded far from convinced.
‘Seriously, though, I want you to go out with a local guide and either Shane or one of his cronies for the first few trips.’
‘Thanks. Now I’m not just nervous, I’m petrified.’
‘When are you expecting your first clients?’ Shane asked.
‘Chuck’s coming out again in a couple of weeks to see how things are progressing, and Brigadier Moyo will be up here next month to check on his investment.’
‘Chuck’s coming back so soon?’ Michelle observed.
‘Didn’t I tell you? He’s got a stake in this venture now, as well as Moyo.’
‘No, you didn’t,’ Michelle said.
Fletcher explained that, as well as providing extra funding to enable Michelle and Shane to carry out their respective roles in the DRC, Chuck had invested some of his money in Fletcher’s initial set-up costs. He had provided cash to buy the vehicles they were travelling in, and for incidentals such as tents and camping equipment for the new hunting camp. ‘It’s why we didn’t have to ship everything from Zimbabwe.’ Moyo’s chief input had been to secure the concession from the government.
‘I don’t know,’ Michelle said. ‘I just can’t imagine too many rich, pampered American businessmen coming out to this place to hunt.’
‘It’s different.’ Fletcher waved a hand in a vaguely Gallic gesture; Shane wondered if he had picked that up from the locals. ‘Nobody’s hunted where we’re headed for years – not legally, at least – and there’s game here that people from the States and Europe will never have clapped eyes on. I always like to offer somet
hing different for my clients, and word gets around. Chuck’s been great. A one-man marketing machine. They’ll come, all right, mark my words.’
Shane offered no opinion. He scanned the steep ranges of the volcanoes to the east, the dramatic inclines thick with a tangle of trees and creepers and God alone knew what else. He had a job to do here, whether the clients came or not. It would be hard country to operate in, but he found himself looking forward to getting out in it. Others might think him mad for wanting to crawl through a snake-infested tangle of vines in search of armed men who might try to kill him. To him it was a job – a calling, maybe. He wondered if he would ever, truly, be able to give up this world and settle down on a peaceful game farm or run a bush lodge.
The hill country gave way to open savannas, perhaps once the preserve of herds of plains game, but now covered in a patchwork of subsistence farms and villages. They whizzed through the town of Rutshuru, the capital of the groupement, or district, of the same name. It was a smaller version of Goma and, in Shane’s view, just as ramshackle. At Kiwanja, they took the north-eastern fork of the road and started climbing again. Towards the next place he would call home.
The site Fletcher had chosen for their camp was a clearing carved from the forest on top of a small hill. Below them they heard a gurgling stream or river, but the jungle between them and the valley was too thick to see through. Beyond that was a panoramic view of the mountains, which here marked the border with Uganda. They were dressed in a thick coat of green, and crowned with wisps of white mist.
At the centre of the cleared patch, which was the size of half a soccer pitch, was the gutted shell of a mud-brick building, once whitewashed, now scorched by fire. Charred beams sagged between the walls like flayed, blackened ribs. The grass around the clearing was waist-high, stiff and serrated – a field of green bayonets, Shane thought as he ran a finger lightly along one wicked blade.