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Hemingway Adventure
Masindi, Uganda
Poetry strikes at the Murchison Falls - dense undergrowth and attentions of the tsetse fly make it an inhospitable place to get to.
A terrifying cry rends the night air. A harsh and fearful screech, repeated three or four times until the noise dies to a whimper. I lie, frozen sleepless and full of awful imaginings. Something torn from the trees by a creature from the river. Fighting to get away.Despite the fact that modern man was born in the cradle of these African Rift Valleys, mortality, of one kind or another, always feels close at hand in Africa. Maybe that's why Hemingway liked it, student of death that he was.
I'm idiotically keen on keeping things alive. It probably comes from some deep need to be liked, even by ants and bluebottles.
I remember once in India seeing a naked man, surrounded by a small crowd, being escorted down a street in Delhi. I assumed he'd been arrested for indecent exposure. It turned out that he was a religious leader, a holy man of the Jainists who believe in non-injury of living things. If he dressed then there would be the danger of his clothes squashing some tiny creatures. They call this practice Ahimsa.
All this weighs on my mind for two or three seconds, then I fall back to sleep until five o'clock, when I wake to find a bat flying around in my tent. Unzip the front flap, but for all their much-vaunted powers of radar, it takes fifteen minutes for the bat to find its way out.
We are into our vehicles and off towards Butiaba even before the party of Austrians who arrived last night has stirred. The road is so bad that we have made little progress by sunrise. Outside one village we pull to a halt, beguiled by the sight of a woman, in a T-shirt and brightly patterned skirt, striding through the fields carrying a bale of cotton on her head. Our local assistant approaches her, tells her we are from the BBC and would she mind if we filmed her as she walked.
At which moment heads pop up from all over the long grass and before we know it the fields are alive with the sound of directors.
'Do it once more! They want you to do it once more!' the ever-growing crowd shouts at the hapless woman.
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PALIN'S GUIDES
- Series: Hemingway Adventure
- Chapter: Masindi, Uganda
- Country/sea: Uganda
- Place: Masindi
- Book page no: 187
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