Delicious beans eaten. So very, very many. I miss them so. These fine specimens from a market in Fort Portal. Where there were, alas, no portals. Only very fine tea.

FARDC roadblocks run: 2

FARDC roadblocks screamed ‘bonjour’ from: 1

Bribes paid: $0

Km driven on a small Indian motorbike: 45

Rides in UN vehicles: 1

Vegetarian burgers eaten: 1

Cost of a night in a Bunia ‘hotel’: $25

Cost of a night in a real hotel: $65

Nights spent in a real hotel: 0

Cost of a night in a cheap Bunia hotel: $10

Probability that the cheap hotel was a brothel: 100%

Immigration stops: 2

Nutella found: 1

Nutella found to cost: $6

Wheels of cheese found: 1

Wheels of cheese found to cost: $8

Average litres of water drunk in a day: 4

Average miles on a valuable used car from the US: 500,000

Average miles on a valuable used car from the DRC: 50,000

Cost of a 1.5l bottle of water: $1

Cost of a beer: $2-3

Primus beer labels collected: 10

Total video and photo material returned with: 600Gb

Great memories returned with: so bloody many.

My music player has been repaired with duct tape where the headphone jack broke. Only one of the earpieces still works anyway. I do this every year to headphones that have served me so faithfully otherwise. The last push always kills them.

I’m the roughshod remnants of great lakes dust, existential confusion and too much learning to be healthy. Packaged in a clean steel tube and flung through the skies back to South Africa.

The Epulu river at sunset. Eastern DRC.

I’m the will to ride tiny bikes into mountains, and the dying carcasses of busses into the  orange-dirt throats of the tumbling green jungles.

I’m nights spent wrestling with the dark, the heat, and the mosquito questions of why. Needing a reason beyond simple tropes of ‘feeling alive’ and discovery. Life is bigger, so much bigger than my own tiny preoccupations. To live is to engage. And to engage reaches so much further than myopic fantasies of embellishing personal stories.

It requires, in humility, that we learn to reach excitedly into all the spaces we are not. Aren’t yet. All the worlds and stories that we could think to create with each other. The places where we come with nothing but eager energy.

For all their power, castles are lonely places. It s only on the wide, unprotected plains that we find ourselves so free to run.

When the sun sets, I want no empire. Only held hands, full eyes, and tired feet.

Cattle crossing the Epulu river at the end of the day, as a storm approaches. Not a minute later, everything was sodden. Eastern DRC.

There are militia bandits out in the countryside somewhere. And the road to Beni is unsafe until January according to the UN people who live in a giant headquarters up the road that looks like someone buried a battleship in the ground.

But we’ve also been warmly received everywhere we went, by locals and government bureaucrats alike. I’ve eaten some of the best food of my life – both at the UN restaurant, and in back alleys and squirrely little restaurants outside. Black beans of some kind, fried sweet banana, mashed sweet potato and, in the case of the aforementioned UN bar/club/food stop in Bunia, a vegetable burger that brought me close to weeping in happiness.

Getting in

We arrived in Kasenyi, on the border with Lake Albert, some time on Monday (I think? It’s a blur). It was still 45km from there to Bunia, and nobody was willing to do it late in the day. Including us, to be honest. So we overnighted and then pushed through to the town the next day on the back of small-engined Indian motorbikes. The road was terrible, but by no means the worst I have ever seen. The route also crossed a mountain range on the DRC side of the Rift Valley, with views from the top that go on for miles.

Those bikes there are called 'boda bodas'. From the fact that they started out ferrying people across a border somewhere in East Africa. The name stuck, and the bikes spread. As far as Ituri district even.

The first roadblock we encountered was one with two sleepy FARDC officers hanging out at a moderately large home-made speed hump. They were likely looking for cigarettes, or a toll (around $0.50 if you are a local, presumably more for four mzungus on the back of bikes). We will never know.The first bike got stopped, but the four others caught up fairly soon after, and the two FARDC troopers trying to hold us all at the roadbloack was comparable to herding cats. Whichever bike they looked at would sit smiling, while the other three or four edged on a foot. Half a foot. A few inches. Then one broke free and the rest followed, leaving the checkpoint in 100cc engine dust behind us.

The subsequent roadblocks (there were at least six) were a mix of either running through completely, to the impotent shouts of a couple of soldiers, or were far more genial affairs at the larger ones. The officers would wave us through with large smiles and shouts of ’bonjour!’. I’m really not sure what I expected in the Congolese countryside, but this was nothing like it. There’s some pretty sweet footage of this and other nutty rides in the countryside that I wil never, ever be able to upload from here, but which I will most certainly share when I am back in the lands of the faster Internet.

This includes finding ourselves stuck in what passes for a traffic jam in these parts, thanks to a UN convoy heading back to Bunia from a remote posting out somewhere close to the town of Bogoro.

A UN traffic jam, starting at the back.

The front of the UN traffic jam, two trucks, a water tanker and an ambulance later. I would truly hate to be one of those guys on the uncomfortable-looking seats at the back.

All of which is really not intended to reinforce the horrible impressions of the Eastern DRC that you see in the media. Yes, the things you read about happen. And the area is massively underdeveloped. And there is a lot of army. And you cannot get chocolate anywhere.

But this part of it, at least, is peaceful. People grow crops here, raise kids, send them to school. There is even a university such as it is. What you read in the news is the tender edge of wounds that run deep into history, but the energy of this place is not those things. It’s so much safer, and so much more hopeful than you are told it is.

In the evening, with the right light and the feet to take you there, the mountains near Bunia look a little like this. Particularly if you are standing in a giant field of cassava. As I clearly must have been.

This morning started out promisingly enough. Only a short ride on the boda-boda bikes (video soon. I promise) to the Karin children’s clinic, a fifteen minute ride over roads that have turned to giant ponds in the aftermath of last night’s rainstorm. The clinic moved from its previous location last year after the government asked them to fill in this area instead, given that it is woefully undercovered for basic primary care. That is to say that the entire province is fairly under-covered, but that this area is more undercovered than the average undercoveredness of the landscape overall.

This bag and I have a long and nostalgic history. The water bottle and I much less so. That boded less well for the water bottle later in the day.

Post-clinic visit and an interview later, and we catch the boda bikes one more time, going an equal distance out of Gulu town in the opposite direction. The Karin clinic project has another phase being built here, which was only walls and facebrick when I was last here. A year on, and it’s close to completion. I arrive first, and it’s fifteen minutes before the others arrive. One of their two bodas had a puncture, and the second decided to take advantage of the situation to overload for the last few kilometers and claim an extra passenger’s scalp. The result looks a little like this.

These are the cheeky people I share the Hotel Tropikana with. Except for the driver. He is a far more responsible citizen generally. Except when chasing an extra two fares.

Well, a lot like that actually. This bunch of posers insisted on driving at a crawl around the grass until I could shoot a decent pic of their escapades. If you are the mother of one of them, please realise that this is not in fact an uncommon practice in this part of the world. Overloading, I mean, not chugging around for photographs.

Next up is an agricultural appointment. Heifer International has been busy here in the past, running a program for cattle-raising in which selected families receive a loan cow that is to be ‘paid back’ by the return of its first female calf. Then the primary cow is theirs to rear and breed from. The project also put in place the infrastructure for milk from the various individual cows to be sold by their owners to a central cooler back in town. The cooler pools all the small contributions and sells the result in bulk to local businesses, creating a market for small-volume milk production in Gulu. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the bare-bones outline of an agricultural development project.

There are photographs of cows somewhere, but they are  really not all that interesting. I maintain that documenting livestock projects must be as one-dimensional an occupation as shooting the front cover for Farmers’ Weekly. Oh, this cow is brown? How exotic! Let’s try and get it to look cute. Or have a picture of it getting fed. Isn’t that adorable?

Thus are the five or so permutations of a cow-photographer’s repertoire exhausted. Far more interesting was lunch.

Pumpkin with sesame seed paste makes for a fine snack, but watch for spills.

Pumpkin with salt and a sesame seed paste called sim sim is an absolutely delicious way of climbing down from the dizzying experience of a brown cow. But you need to mind your fingers, and not be too heavy-handed when scooping sauce, or you will come unstuck.

Ten minutes on the battery.

Boda boda ride to St Judes. It’s a children’s home that’s been looking after the orphaned, abandoned and mentally and physically handicapped since the early eighties. That’s to say, since the time that the Lords Resistance Army was busy tearing up the place. Visiting the  center and chatting to one of the coordinators was a lesson in the stories that journalists can choose to tell, or not tell.

The wards are full of sad stories. A father who killed himself in shame after his fifth child in a row was born with a degenerative motor-neuron disease. Or a student at Gulu University who has begun losing the ability to use her legs just as she was approaching the end of her studies and a future beyond as a teacher. These people exist, but to tell their stories to the exclusion of all others is to misrepresent a sense of the place.

Two hundred women are enrolled in their caregiver training program, providing support to handicapped and disabled children as far away as South Sudan. Their children graduate from St Jude’s primary school program to go on and enroll in mainstream secondary schools in Gulu. The university student is looking forward to being a special needs teacher, and may in all likelihood go on to be an excellent one.

Nobody usually tells you that. Pictures of distended heads and sadness bring in the aid dollars and accord with people’s expectations. They are also just the low-hanging fruit for lazy journalism. The truth is more complex.

Because even in sadness, there is hope and progress and good, and they stand apart as much as they brush against each other. Conflating them hides the sharp edges of each, and that’s just not how life is.

St Jude is a home for orphaned and abandoned children. And a lesson in the kinds of stories we choose to tell.

Five minutes.

A landcruiser arrives at St Jude. Inside is Brother Elliot, an Italian who has been working with St Jude since the days of Idi Amin. He’s off to inspect a mission farming project almost an hour away on some terrible, terrible roads. Would we like to come along, eat peanuts out the ground and learn about brick making and the farming of cassava, groundnuts and sesame?

But of course.

Fields at the St Jude mission farm. A very, very long distance from Gulu indeed.

I’ll mostly be hanging around the town of Gulu in the north of the country. Enjoying warm light and the opportunity to sharpen up my videographic skills. I’m new to shooting video, but keen to see what I can create in the medium. Some of it for this blog, some for other channels too, hopefully.

Then it will be on from Uganda to the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ituri region. Traveling through the town of Bunia westward on a more curious bent. I’ll be going to see the Okapi in the Ituri rainforests, and then some far more interesting journalistic side projects. About more you will most certainly hear when they are in the proverbial bag, and I am back safe. There is every possibility that the Eastern DRC will be an internetless place. And possibly a little fraught, depending on how the elections go. But that is a call we can make in a week, when it is time to move from Uganda.

This journey is the first time I have ever returned to a place before. On departing, I always wonder what it would be like to return to a place – to have a new set of adventures playing out on the set of a previous one.

Gulu will be my first chance to find out. The DRC will be something else altogether.

Sunset on the way home from revisiting last year's haunt down at the kabero Opong market. This place really is just that beautiful.

Journalists too often tell stories from the safety of the afterward. I made it. It wasn’t such a big deal. I’m hardcore.

Whatever.

Nobody accounts for their experiences in realtime. Explains the intricate emotional calculus beforehand that balances things-that-are-important with things-that-are-terrifying. Because some things really are worth risking everything for. As anathema as that may be to the comfortable, the cosseted, the generation that can drown the world’s screams underneath Saturday night television.

So in a little over a month, four of us are due to cross over into the DRC. Moving towards the town of Bunia, in the district of Ituri. There we have some work to do. Things to record. Stories to tell.

It’s not that the specifics are vague, it’s that sharing them might just be to tempt fate. Fate and I have an understanding at present. A trust of sorts. The kind where suddenly reaching out to tickle it while it’s sipping a soda might provoke its karmic wrath. Besides, it will be worth waiting for the dispatches. I promise.

But back to that emotional spring. We’re covering all the bases we can. First aid. Cell phones. Dozens of conversations with people-who-know-things, and planning appropriately to the advice we’ve been given. Don’t travel before 9am or after 4pm. Talk to the MONUSCO peacekeepers in Bunia when you get there to get a sense of the security situation in the outlying areas. Bring a phone. Keep in touch.

Maybe it’s all overstated. God knows I was tense before heading to Northern Uganda, and in the end it was nothing like its history. The danger lay only in the frozen echoes of the war that stick in the Internet. Gulu moved on, began repairing. Though there was much in the days to push and challenge us emotionally, it wasn’t a dangerous place.

So I can’t help but wonder, in fleeting moments, if the DRC is everything Conrad’s ancestors have made it out to be.

But that wondering undermines vigilance. And the truth is that even if Gulu is not still a dangerous place, it was once. Here and there, at the edges of the world where things break down, those places still exist. Pockets of danger in otherwise banal scenery.

And so if you are not careful, you may – just one time – stop looking for danger long enough that you fail to recognize it in time. That oversight needs to only happen one time.

Hence the phones. Hence asking for advice. Hence planning, reading, learning, preparing, and planning some more. Hence the tightly coiled spring. Because the nervous energy, even as it burns your attention to the minutiae of pre-departure life, is an investment in vigilance that should neve be avoided.

It’s exhausting, and it’s wracking, but it seems foolish to be otherwise.

When my flight touches back down in South Africa there will be time enough to exhale.

What I do remember, was the conversation that evening. Words more vivid than the light, the Ethiopian dusk, the peanut tea.

We were talking about our long friends. The ones we’ve known for many years and who – as we grow older – we are fortunate to see grow and struggle through life. The friends who seem to be perpetually in flux, railing against something, forever restless. I recall saying that it felt to me as though we were in some kind of inescapable spiral in our lives. Like a satellite that has dipped its toe into the atmosphere once, and finds its destiny sealed as its gentle, non-negotiable fall is set in motion.

And so I would say that night, over coffee and peanut tea, in a conversation I would never imagine recalling, that we are caught in something

The more we tried to move forward, the more we are drawn down towards whatever it is we are circling. Every new decision in our lives. Every change in job, in place we call home, every new and more esoteric sojourn abroad, meant a an ever slighter tightening of the spiral. One step closer to the center.

I believed it then, and I believe it now. Each step forward is also one closer.

I want to see the DRC because Uganda taught me that these places are not as I read them to be. That things are different, more detailed, less easily drawn into an essence when you try to discover stories for yourself.

I went to Uganda because my journey from South Africa to Egypt taught me that stories are a strength. They can be an engine to move a life, or the spark to start a new one.

And so on, backward into time. One giant series of cause and effect. One large chain that would have perhaps been clear to a younger me with the right eyes. But I didn’t have those eyes then, and I still don’t.

And so I would say that night, over coffee and peanut tea, in a conversation I would never imagine recalling, that we are caught in something. We are falling. We are the tighter and tighter circles towards a center we cannot see.

Mozambique. A journey, in retrospect, inevitable. And determining of much since.

The end of this year will mark one tighter turn of the spiral. That I am set on returning to Uganda is something that won’t be new to regularish readers. I feel drawn.

What I’ve not spoken of, except in the private organising with those who might yet join me, is that when I finish in Gulu at the end of this journey, I’ve been looking west. To cross over, perhaps, to the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. To trek in the Mountains of the Moon, and to turn thirty somewhere in the space between. Marking one turn closer to the unknown center with a transition of my own seems somehow appropriate.

Come morning, I sleep in until I can’t possibly anymore. Claw my pillow until every inch of tiredness has been attended to. Then brushing teeth in the damp, green cupboard of a communal bathroom, sitting on a top-loading washing machine that abuts the shower. Then breakfast.

I’m surprised that there’s any left. It’s almost 10h00, and there are piles of eggs and bread still on the counter for toasting. And coffee.

Oh god. coffee.

Proper coffee made from instant powder and milk, not heaps of grinds boiled in water to make a terrible, gritty approximation. I find a large mug and start making some with relish. My standards have dropped, but it makes me so much more easily satisfied. It’s hard to slurp hot coffee through a grin.

Some European lecturer’s African fantasy caught in mid air, transcribed, and danced into a blog – months later – by a stranger’s fingers.

There are transiting travelers everywhere. A Dutch student typing up a thesis or research project of some sort on free trade. Some Germans on a class trip of some kind – anthropology perhaps? The lecturer seems disappointed that some pygmies they had visited were not authentic.

“But weren’t they naked?” the guest house manager asks helpfully.

“Yes, but they were only naked for us. They aren’t naked normally”

“Maybe there are real naked ones further out?”

The lecturer says something disappointedly as he walks out of earshot. I think it’s something about not being sure that there are any genuine pygmies lft in that area.

Oh Africa.

I’m sure there is a wider context to this exchange, but this fragment is more than entertaining enough. Some European lecturer’s African fantasy caught in mid air, transcribed, and danced into a blog – months later – by a stranger’s fingers.

I caught you, sir.

I sit down to charge my laptop. Draft a blog post recalling our evenings in the back garden of the house in Gulu. It’s much easier to write now, further away from the place and better able to sift through the memories. Start seeing the connections at last.

I find Saskia up on the roof, quietly writing in her journal. Probably catching up on last night. Lamenting the first half of her bus trip, spent next to an uncomfortably loud man soaked in gin. For reasons I cannot understand, neat gin in sachets is the clear spirit of choice in Uganda. I can’t see the appeal, but the reek of gin is an unmistakable warning hanging about overly social individuals.

As the sun disappears, Saskia and I update journals until it becomes too dark to continue. Then we just sit in the fast-approaching dark chatting. She is wondering about home. About her boyfriend, Gareth, and being able to bring him to understand this place. It’s tough, being here and thinking about home.

But if it’s unreasonable to expect partners to know what this place means to us, it’s not unreasonable to ask them to understand that we are changed.

The context shift is just so large. Expecting someone who wasn’t here and didn’t breathe the burning garbage in the evenings and didn’t ride on the chicken buses to understand is perhaps asking too much. But if it’s unreasonable to expect partners to know what this place means to us, it’s not unreasonable to ask them to understand that we are changed. That we are richer people for having come here. And that we need the space and understanding to process things when we return. The right to be frustrated at never really being able to explain what Gulu and Kitgum were.

Saskia sounds uncertain that Gareth will understand, and I can’t really give any reassuring advice. When you travel, you change. That’s unavoidable.

And the deeper you go, the more to the edge of the world you push yourself, the more profound that alteration becomes. How a changed you brushes up against the rest of the world when you return is never guaranteed. You work it out a day at a time, I guess. Or else you run away again, as soon as you can, to the places with different light, different wind.

The smell of rubbish burning in the evenings.

Minutes and minutes lost to the world as we sit in music, sit in watching, sit in silence. Undemanded. Minutes and minutes lost to the world. But not to us. Not to us who watch and imagine. For whom the fragile thread of life lies luminous. Bare for the gentlest of hands to softly pick, to tease, to quietly coaxe. To follow a little further towards some unknown, but not unrelished requiem.

In these minutes and in these miles alone, I am myself and no more. No force to touch me but the bare breaths of terrain and time, whispering through their old and terrible smiles. In these miles I am alone in my peace and the equanimity of fresh eyes.

Miles and minutes lost to the world. But never to ourselves.

The idea of putting together a newsletter for the site has been something that has been kicking around in my head for a while now. Like wanting to go and see that really long train in Mauritania, for example, only easier to do without molesting my precious travel savings. What finally tipped me into putting it together was this excellent newsletter from BrookeVsTheWorld, which made me believe that it would be possible to build something that would actually be worth mailing out to you. Not that enlarging your penis or ripping off West African trust funds aren’t worth the occasional email blast, but we are a somewhat classier audience, are we not?

(hand raises)

“So what will be in it?”

An excellent question. I’m intending to use the newsletter format to do three things actually. Firstly, I would really like to use it to put out more photographs. There are a number of interesting/exotic/story-immersed  images from past travels that don’t quite warrant a full post’s worth of background, but would be great if put together with a short slice of life from when it was taken.

Then there are journal excerpts from Uganda and Cape to Cairo. Between them, I have something like a hundred and twenty thousand words of rough narrative from days spent in strange places. I’d really like to dig some of it out, make it shine, and dish it out nibble-size every month or so.

Finally, it would be great to put in a couple of retrospective pieces. Pointers to some of the better stuff that I’ve put on this blog in the past. The post on doppelgängers for example. The night train in the Karoo. And other, even older pieces. They are posts that you might just like, and I would love to sit both of you down and make the introductions.

So yes. Let’s try a most amazing little experiment in emailed joy, shall we?

It starts right here.