‘Incredible!’
I was freezing but now...
How little it takes to turn the day around out here.
Before we leave, the engineers among us pull their wet clothes from their packs, tie them to each other, and anchor them onto a stick they hold out the window.
Nothing makes an entrance quite like Matilda’s blue face caked with dirt, her tyres heavy with mud and a multicoloured ribbon of underwear flying through the conservative religious streets of Jinja.
The campsite is lush, green and spacious and stretches about a mile. We construct tents quickly. We know exactly how the poles meet. Where I pull down, when Ant pushes up – the right amount of weight and tussle to get our tent, standing in minutes.
Sarah tells us to take a motorbike, boda boda, into town. She points down the campground driveway to a cluster of men who wait at the stone gates with their rusted bikes.
The boda boda man insists he can fit both Ant and I on the back of a bike that wheezes and has rusted springs. I am slightly perturbed by his optimism. Ant swings on first and I slip in behind her. The bike creaks and dips under our weight.
The man lifts his leg, kicks down fast and guns the bike with a putter and a plume of smoke. No helmets. Excitement flutters in my stomach.
The day is bright and warm. Sun filters down through magnificent tall trees. We ride past large houses, estates really, dilapidated, tilting at treacherous angles. There are gaps between houses and blocks where crops were once sown, but now wild plants have taken over. Left to grow and twist together. Broken fences and gates and crumbling tall stone walls are wrapped like presents in ribbons of creeping fuchsia bougainvillea. There are fields growing nothing, grazing nothing. This place has space. Could I live here?
We zoom past kids throwing around an empty Coke bottle over a stone wall, seeing who can catch it first. The day smells of ripe mango and freshly cut grass. Feeling more confident, I let my hands go from Ant’s waist and spread them wide like a bird. The warm breeze hits them and bounces off me as we zigzag around other bikes.
We attract a fellow boda boda man carrying a large clump of bananas freshly cut from the tree, sap oozing out the end. The fruit, still green, with yellow ripening tips. He waves hello then speeds off around a corner, down a narrow, unpaved laneway with a sheer drop on either side into overgrown plantations.
In town, we’re dropped at the corner of the main road. Street signs point to the bank, the grocery store, the town hall, but the rest of the signs state in large black print, God is Great with an arrow to the nearest prayer house. Muslim women shuffle past us wearing burkhas and chadours. We feel naked in just cotton tops and shorts.
Further up the road we find a lady selling racks of hand-stitched dresses and skirts. Ant tries on an oversized white slip with blue flowers. She needs to triple in size to fit into anything. I, on the other hand, fit perfectly into a flowing black skirt with pink and red lace flung in bolts at the bottom so it looks like the sun is setting across my calves. For only three dollars, it’s a bargain. I buy two and wonder how to keep them from getting dirty.
Next door the local internet kiosk still has dial-up internet. Signs around the shop in bright red warn, No Pornography. Some are even taped over the computer screens. The internet, not unusually, isn’t working. ‘No connect, no connect,’ the man keeps saying.
At a roadside cart we browse through locally made jewellery. Dried banana earrings, banana twine rings, even banana-shaped banana string necklaces. If I get hungry could I nibble on a banana anklet?
The shopkeepers, mostly women, sit on fold-out chairs and wooden benches eyeing us curiously. Further down we browse in a thatched jewellery store for ten minutes before a voluptuous lady strolls over to us, her large hips swaying in a multicoloured skirt of chartreuse and mustard silk falling to her calves.
She points to the pair of earrings in Ant’s hand. ‘From banana.’
Ant holds them up to her ears, ‘What do you think?’
‘They’re lovely,’ I say. And they are. The banana twine has been rolled to fine thin columns, which has dried a dark straw colour, almost black in some places, and each column has then been twisted beautifully around itself like a snail shell.
The woman rushes over, filling our hands with banana necklaces, shell bracelets, glossy mint-green seeds strung on leather and zebra-print earrings.
‘Look at this,’ she says giving me a zebra-print brooch. ‘And this.’
Ant gets a handful of wooden beads tied on banana string.
‘Or this!’ An elephant shaped magnet.
‘You are my good friend. You make me happy, I make you happy. I give you good price.’
Up close I can see her coiffured hair, perfectly sprayed and straightened into a beehive standing ten centimetres off her head. A mustard-yellow handkerchief tied tightly around her head comes to two perfect points framing her beehive, like wonderfully exquisite extraterrestrial antlers.
Ant points to a small beaded crocodile. ‘How much?’
‘Four thousand.’
Indeed. That’s two dollars.
‘One thousand,’ I say boldly.
‘Oh friend, no no no, too little.’ She answers smiling as we begin the necessary bartering dance. ‘Really, how much?’
This goes on for another five minutes. Finally, we agree on 2500 (just over a dollar).
‘You are good to me.’ She nods slipping the beaded crocodile into a bag for Ant. ‘Wish you both good luck.’
At an outdoor market Ant and I find pendants, hearts and globes with wire shells firmly clasping a jewelled crystal inside. Tiger’s eye for protection, blue lace agate dug from deep within Namibia and South Africa, and lapus lazuli, a midnight glance streaked with gold flecks. From every angle it looks like a recreation of the universe.
Business is heaving. Everyone wants to touch these beautiful creations, and not one is the same. Ant has struck a firm relationship with moonstone from her days in Jordan and Petra, and she selects a dainty, milky white ring that slides easily onto her right ring finger.
‘In flow with the moon, the cycles,’ the wise lady with grey hair in a side plait says, her wiry fingers quickly replacing the moonstone gap with a pair of square citrine earrings.
I take my time choosing. Some feel hot in my hand, and others freezing cold. I wonder which one I’m meant to be choosing. Should I just close my eyes and pick one at random? I hold an amethyst up and the dangling pendant catches the November light, splaying it forth tenfold, the rays landing on my chest like a squashed grape.
Ant drifts off towards silks and shawls. She is happy to linger there all day wrapping them around her neck. There’s plenty of time to choose.
I see a pendant I hadn’t seen before. Was it always there, or did it just appear? The wiry fingered lady is quick. Without the wire casing of the others, it isn’t held by a globe or a heart or metal-wired square, but is simply threaded on a silver chain via a small hole in the top of its spherical body. A round, smooth simple stone, with layers of gentle pinks, brown and grays, it looks like a soft winter blanket you’d want to be wrapped up inside when everywhere is raining. Botswana agate.
The lady nods as she watches me touch the other crystals underneath the thin warm pads of her fingers. Lining them up. When I clasp it around my neck it sits warm and light, just above my heart, as though I’ve always worn it. The lady says, ‘That’s a stone for healing.’ She pauses. ‘But mostly a stone of possibility.’
I laugh. Fate seems to have found me, even here, on a dusty street in Jinja. Nothing is by accident, is it?
I show Ant. ‘Beautiful!’ she exclaims, examining it in the light. She steps back and says, ‘It suits you.’
Does it? I’m pleased. I pay for the necklace without bartering. I’d pay any price for something that feels it’s always been mine.
As we leave the markets Ant hooks her arm into mine, tilts her head to the blisteringly blue sky and says what fine luck for both of us to find exac
tly what we needed here. Yes indeed, what damn fine luck.
We wave a boda boda down the street, like we live here. We climb aboard with ease, and this one doesn’t dip. The breeze feels glorious against our skin, the afternoon sun weakens. Some kids playing by the side of the road, tossing an empty cola can, stop to wave frantically at us. ‘Hello!’ they shout. We wave back.
The streets are full of palms but emptied of people. The sun hides for a second behind a passing cloud. The wind pauses. After that the whir of the bike is the only sound on the still street.
Back at camp, there is already a haze of voices over the rice and stew dinner. People share photos of their days – some have shopped, some walked, some took a kayak onto the rushing rivers below. Everyone has tales to share. We drink cups of tea. We dunk stale biscuits into them, until they drip with milky heat and we shove them into our mouths before they disintegrate. Everyone falls exhausted into sleeping bags. The smell of toothpaste. The sound of tent zips done up tight.
Later, as I walk around the campsite, the moon barely a thumbnail scratch, crescent and thinning, grey moths flit near the overhead light. Brushing their bodies against the grate, lured by the lip of the light. Petite piebald wagtails glide under tree branches, like low-flying planes. In the near darkness, towards the edge of camp I can make out the soft nightglow of white wings, butterflies busy pattering their flighty feet into the faces of flowers.
THERE ARE days like this: it rains and our entire wardrobes, tents, sleeping bags are saturated; the fire won’t light properly; we run out of butter or fresh bread, or worse still, coffee; we must pee in a bush of thorns or in the open – still in the rain; someone accidentally smashes a glass of beer on the bus and all day the bus smells stale, like old pubs; we can’t sleep at night and counting sheep from 100 backwards doesn’t work; we lay there shivering; when the day comes we’re still wet.
There are also days like this: clotted cream clouds, sunsets streaking across the sky. Ant and I get the front seat on the bus, 180-degree views, the world opening up to us like a present unwrapped; a zebra stops long enough, close enough, for us to stare in its eyes; we find shade for lunch; we eat cucumbers that have been stored close to chunks of ice and are still crisp; there’s a toilet in town; we can get the radio to work and someone links their iPod and the entire bus starts singing, making up words to The Lion King songs. We hike in the giant wilderness that has been left to grow as it should; we spot meerkats and a baby giraffe; at night we watch the sunset in silence, all twenty of us, staring in delight as the sky begins her opus; we crawl together in a group, huddled, drinking powdered hot chocolate with boiled milk from the coals, and it tastes like the most expensive drink in the world.
I learn how to say hello in Swahili, (jambo). Thank you in Kenya (asante) and after we cross the border into Uganda (weebale). This is all you need for a quick exchange – buying bananas or a dry top.
I pencil African sayings into the cream pages of my diary. To get lost is to learn the way. Travelling is learning. Coffee and love taste best when hot.
And my favourite – if you think you are too small to make a difference, you haven’t spent a night with a mosquito.
IN KAMPALA we feel like ants among giants. I think I know how it feels to be in a city – I come from one after all – but really, I don’t. I come from the suburbs on the outer edges. A place of lawns and parks, a place that smells of grass cuttings and roadside freesias, where dogs bark to each other as the sun rises.
Once dropped into the middle of the city, we are devoured by peak hour. People hurry by. Shoulders of strangers collide. They shove and then recoil as if burnt. Heads are down. Bodies rigid as though about to run at each other in rugby tackle formation. Feet march quickly to keep up. The flow. Men yell to each other. Some wheel carts. Cars stop without indicating because drivers want to drop off packages, or pick them up, causing traffic jams where they shouldn’t. Stereos boom, speakers are frayed. Heels clack and click on cement.
I feel woozy. Had I once enjoyed this? Had I sought out the pulse and buzz?
We follow everyone on their way to work. Past laundromats. Churches with domed ceilings and large crucifixes. Cafes not yet open. Dusty supermarkets with dim lights, the musty smell of packet soup mix. Parks with no trees. Parks with one tree. Dented cars. Old trucks. Rusted vans. Somewhere the city is squealing with a fire alarm, smog a suffocating blanket of thick haze.
People walk into air-conditioned buildings and, already sweating in the heat, I want to follow them inside. We amble like tourists, and become lost several times. There are street signs and then none. In one area of town all the buildings look the same. The townhouses match each other; identical rusted roofs, front gates painted years ago a creamy white. Now flaking and peeling under the sun. Wooden porches with short awnings. In the winter they would be wonderful places to catch the sun fall in sprees.
We have a map, but I think little of using it. What good can come from following someone else’s lines? Find the church. The bridge. The hall. Now go left, now straight, turn right. Can’t we just walk? There is something so attractive about turning yourself over to the luck and mystery of this way. Letting the world decide where you should land.
Two fortunate turns and we find a cafe and order espresso. It arrives, a perfect, earthy mix of water and coffee, bitter with a hint of roasted nuts. We order another and shoot it back, like Italians do, before stepping back outside.
It’s impossible not to keep moving in this giant tide of people. At a nearby building site men are constructing a new tower. Jack hammers cut through concrete, the clank of cement blocks landing on top of each other. It’s almost lunch time and people descend from buildings, ravenous and thirsty. The hustle of people at markets. Bags of groceries. An old dusty computer store.
I’m surprised the familiarity doesn’t soothe me but rather, it jars. I’m coming to understand a city always moves. There’s so much to see; too much. No matter where I stand – in a cooled shop purchasing a pack of gum, waiting to cross at the lights, even in the park growing wild flowers – I can’t feel still.
Had it always been like this in the city? Had I never noticed it when I sat in Sydney’s Martin Place to nibble a sandwich, to get some fresh air. When I thought I was relaxing, had a part of me always been churning? Thinking about the next hour, meeting, appointment, deadline. Had I never stopped even when I thought I had?
Ant wants to find the fashion district and after wandering for a while, we do. She buys a new top in cerulean blue, silk with a ruffle, incredibly beautiful and impossible to wear on a camping trip. But if anyone can manage it, it’s her. At the next store I try on a pair of shorts, crisp white and perfect for summer, but they barely fit. I’m still carrying the weight of Sydney winter and, despite hoping, it hasn’t yet melted away.
In five hours we’ve explored all the streets our tired feet can. We find a park with a large overhanging tree. Men in crisp white business shirts come out for an afternoon stroll. A lady pushes a large blue pram. Some pigeons coo to each other from the top of power poles.
At a small cafe we share a piece of chocolate cake, the layers delicious and moist as though they’ve been made with double cream instead of milk, chocolate shavings rather than powder.
Before sunset (we’ll go home soon), we stroll for a while longer down the streets. They’re a nicer place to be without the heat. We find jewellery stores and a place that sells brass taps perfect for bathtubs with claws. An eager man wants us to buy a lamp, but we have no place to plug it in. Even still, he insists it’s a great bargain.
When we come out it’s almost dark. Perhaps I should be scared, but I’m not. The silhouettes of the city’s buildings rise like lumbering giants on the horizon. Cranes turned off mid-swing jut into the air like strange metal arms. The streets hold a sweet smell, the thickness of diesel and jasmine.
The taxi we order doesn’t arrive. We wait for an hour, watching the gridlock groan of traffic. Diesel fumes start a hea
dache. My sinuses, blocked, begin to have a pulse. We don’t know how to get home. This should scare me too, but it doesn’t.
We follow a street on a whim. None of the names sound familiar and that should worry us, but it doesn’t either. We meander around the city streets and it’s possible we go in circles for a while.
‘Are we lost?’ Ant finally asks.
‘Yes.’
We sit on a curb and share some water. Somewhere in the distance headlights bounce against the road and shine in our eyes before disappearing again.
I had thought being lost would feel like swimming into a dark ocean further than I could stand, my mind fearing the many things that could be lurking below. But I am learning how soothing it can be to encounter the world without knowing what comes next.
We walk past buildings with their lights switched off. Most have gates and some are broken and unhinged. The metal has rusted in places, and as we lean against them to catch our breath, my hands come away with the blood scent of old metal. I keep sniffing them, not sure if I like the smell or not.
We are humbled by the kindness of people who stop and ask if we need help, if we are lost. One man dials a taxi for us – but we’ll never know if it comes or not, the city remains at a standstill. We decide it’s best to keep moving. At the top of a hill, as if by perfect synchronicity, a stand of taxis sit outside a shopping mall.
On the drive back to our camp, I am full of gratitude. If we hadn’t got lost we wouldn’t have found the great coffee, the chocolate cake, Ant’s new top. The kindness of strangers.
Ways to Come Home Page 7
