My turn. The vines creak as I place my right foot carefully in the thickest place and grab somewhere above me. My hands sweat and they slip off the first vine. I reach again and grab another vine with more grip. But it seems I’ve placed my leg too high and now it just looks like I’m doing a very deep stretch for my left hip and groin. Repositioning my leg a little lower, I heave myself upwards with a loud grunt.
Where do I go next? My right foot is wavering about and I know I must put it somewhere, but suddenly there doesn’t seem to be any more footholds. The vines look like sluiced grasses on a wet day, and my foot will just slide right off. I’m stuck. I hear a creak and start to panic. Is the vine breaking?
All politeness forgotten, Jonste places both his hands on my rear and pushes me up from behind. Rudi leans over and reaches for my left arm. Sturdy as he is, he uses every ounce of muscle power to pull me up by my hand. My fingers feel as if they could dislocate at any moment. I gasp, red-faced.
And then suddenly I am up and the vines are holding us all at the top, on a flat surface about a metre deep, as easily as a rock ledge would.
‘I don’t dare jump on these ones,’ I tell Ant.
She smiles at me before doing a little jump. I lean out to the wall of vines and grab hold of them.
With the vines below, and the jungle spreading in front of us, the view is quite stunning. But we can’t stop here. ‘There is much more to go,’ Rudi says.
We plod upwards, back on terra firma thank goodness, sticking in mud and undergrowth and leaning on the vines that hang from tree boughs when we need to breathe. The air seems thinner now. We fill our lungs but little air rushes in. I’d always imagined jungle forests to lay low to the earth and sea level, and mountains with high altitudes to be covered in Alpine fir trees and snow (even in summer).
Us Australians seem to be struggling the most to find our breath out here. I suppose it’s not a surprise given the relative flatness of our country and how most of us live on or near the coast, with only gentle slopes to roll down to the beach. The tallest mountain we boast, Mt Kosciuszko, wouldn’t even rate as a hill here. In fact, the top of Kosciuszko is closer to sea level than the farmland we first walked through to reach the Sabyinyo.
Rudi machetes a new pathway. I squeeze my shoulders in so as not to touch more prickly plants. Two get me. They burn, a hot sting that makes me want to slap my skin for a full minute. We climb upwards, the mist grows, and everything feels cool and moist.
We climb more vines. I’m hanging onto my camera with one hand and a very thin vine with the other, jutting off the rock at a strange angle like I’m about to abseil back down it. You think I’d know what to do by now – we’ve been trekking for at least three hours – but I have little energy left to haul myself up. Jonste assumes the push position and Rudi pulls again. Finally, I’m up. Rudi clicks his tongue once against his teeth and nods. A silent thumbs-up. We have their scent.
At the top of the next incline he stops abruptly, sending a few people into his back. He points ahead: a tuft of black fur. Moving. Slowly. A human hand with fur reaches up out of the grass and grabs a branch. The familiar sound of snacking, like someone slowly munching on a large stick of celery.
Gorillas.
The black head turns. Two eyes stare directly at us. Wide, beautiful eyes. His nostrils flare with each breath. He smells of jungle and sweat – or is that us? We watch him watching us.
He sits up quickly, crosses his legs like a flexible yoga teacher and reaches for a piece of wild bamboo, ripping it off a tree and holding it aloft for a few seconds like a sword, a call to battle.
He opens his mouth so wide we can see glints of milky calcium teeth. The bamboo disappears quickly inside, and again the sound of munching. When finished, he rolls onto his back, and lets out a grunt as the air escapes him. Distinctly human.
It’s a photo frenzy of lenses, zooms and continuous shooting. I’m amazed the gorillas seem unperturbed by a dozen white people clicking at them like demanding paparazzi. Photos of little baby hands picking up bamboo. Click. The back side of the silverback vanishing under leaves. Click. An adolescent climbing quickly in the trees. Click. A gorilla aunt staring straight at us. Click click.
We move to sit in front of a sedate mother and her young baby almost a year old. We watch them eat. The baby eats and plays and climbs, then eats some more. Pulling at grass with hands that look similar to yours or mine. After snack time, the baby runs up a nearby tree trunk then drops onto his mother’s head, over and over, which he finds hilarious. She seems, as mothers do, to be used to this bopping of her head.
At times the gorillas talk in muted grunts to each other, which the guides interpret. Before we started the trek, Rudi taught us how to grunt Hello in gorilla. Just in case the silverback came at us, thinking we were enemies, or the tribe felt fearful and we needed to do our best to calm them.
The young male juveniles pound their chest several times, which Rudi whispers, as well as saying hello, is their way of keeping warm. They fart many times too, but after being on a confined truck with boys, this is neither surprising nor a revelation.
It’s hard to locate the silverback, the patriarch of the family, in the dense undergrowth. We’re told to keep ten metres away at all times, especially around him. They’re territorial and the protectors of their family. Rudi points. He’s found him.
We climb under tough branches and swing out over short crevasses exposing our bodies to a possible freefall into nettles and vines to get closer. Closer still. The silvery coarseness shines in the light reaching a pointed V at the lower lumbar of his back. He’s munching on greens and wild celery.
Our cameras are poised. Our breaths held. I drop my camera quietly to my side and cap the lens, preferring to watch in real time.
Jonste leans over quietly and unhooks the camera from my shoulder. ‘I carry,’ he whispers and pushes me forward, putting his hand on my lower back, guiding me to a better viewpoint.
Someone gets too close. A branch is knocked. Leaves rattle. Does a flash go off? We were specifically told no flashes.
The silverback stands. A mountain of muscle. His chest enlarged, no-one moves. We stand stony as statues. He drops to all fours and with the force of a truck, lumbers quickly past our group. So close to Ant his breath snort tosses her fringe in the air. Quickly, he slips between some trees and vanishes.
Rudi points to his watch. Jonste nods. Our short time with them is already up. We begin the three-hour return journey through the jungle.
Arriving back at the base we’re sweaty, dirty, tired and immeasurably hungry. We devour the cheese sandwiches and apples from the guides, munching like the gorillas beneath the shade of trees.
We’ve been up since dawn, so it’s no wonder that as soon as I’m back in our minivan, I sleep the entire way back to Lake Bunyonyi.
I dream of a place without maps. And even so, finding my way.
I WAKE unsettled back at Lake Bunyonyi. I hadn’t dreamt of anything at all but when I wake, just before the alarm, something feels off. Amiss. Strange.
The alarm clock reverberates against the tent and pounds my head like a gong. Before I even unzip my sleeping bag the cold eats at my bones and makes my knees creak. The alarm goes off again, reminding, punctuating, striking.
Lake Bunyoni is pitch black at 4.30 in the morning. The dock creaks somewhere in the inky blackness and the lake’s tide brushes the sand in rhythmic strokes. We throw backpacks into Matilda’s belly and our own bodies, still soft with sleep, huddle under open sleeping bags on the faded seats.
It’s not even dawn and too cold for hellos. There are many miles to cover today – our longest route of the entire trip. There’s no time to even stop for breakfast. Matilda jerks quickly out of the camp. Her wheels sliding on the muddy banks and the unmarked roads out of town.
Everyone dozes except for me. Have I forgotten something? I mentally check everything – toothbrush, clothes, backpack, tent. Yes, all stowed below. Diary, head to
rch, pens, iPod. Yes. The world whips by below. We reach a corner and the driver slams on the brakes. We take it too fast, like a rally car.
Pip is jolted awake. She leans towards the window and watches what I am watching – outside is a blur. We must be doing at least a hundred. Another corner. Why aren’t we slowing down? We look at each other and without words I know we’re thinking the same thing. Too fast. I pull the doona over my head, blocking out the views, and try to sleep. We’re going too fast. A gnawing in my stomach.
There is nothing I can do so I cross my fingers, and my legs and my toes, and just hope we get where we are going safely. I hope my prayers will make a difference.
I doze, and when I wake the sun is almost up. There is something about the light that makes things less scary. Pip smiles at me.
We start to unload the food at the back of the truck for breakfast. Bruised apples are passed out. Stale bread that needs lashings of butter to be edible, and even then, it’s still rock hard. Shamil grabs the knives, walks down the aisle, handing out.
We bump over a pot hole in the road. We jar and shudder. Simon hits the brakes. Some grab onto seat armrests like we’re going through strong turbulence in a plane. It’s over as quickly as it began and we smile at each other. Shake it off. It was just a pot hole, after all.
Shamil hands me a knife. And then, seconds later, Matilda loses her grip on the Ugandan roads and starts to slide out of control.
CAN YOU feel something is off in the air? Do we know when something terrible is about to happen? When I was sixteen I changed schools, and the only person who befriended me was a strange, red-haired boy called Toby. He was loud, but sensitive. I watched him at lunch and everyone pretended to like him, but no-one actually did. They laughed at him. I’m not sure he ever realised.
In English class, he asked what I was doing one weekend and if I wanted to go for a bike ride or a walk. Craving new friends, I said yes. But as soon as the words were out of my mouth I had friendship remorse, the cruel kind that teenagers often have. Would people find out? Would I become a social pariah too?
I started to think how I could get out of it, but the lies just wouldn’t come out of my mouth. Instead I began to wonder if perhaps he would change his mind, but he wouldn’t, so I thought instead about him not being able to come – a cold, the flu, a sprained ankle. Every chance I had, I imagined him lying in bed too sick to move.
Saturday morning came and I woke with a sense of dread. It was raining. And cold. I couldn’t eat. Something was off. When midday came and went and Toby didn’t arrive, I felt strange. As though too many thoughts had appeared in my head at once and like helium, they had the power to lift me into the air. I could no longer feel the ground.
When the phone rang, it struck through the silence like a gong. Toby’s mum. There had been an accident. In the rain, Toby had spun off his bike and crashed. He had lacerations and gashes, and places where the bone had broken through skin and needed to be pushed back into place. All that morning, I had felt something was wrong. And afterwards, with childish guilt, I worried that I had somehow caused it.
I was thinking about all of this, and Matilda was still sliding.
IN ENMORE I rented a house, a townhouse, long and narrow, connected by brick on both sides to identical townhouses, each with the same red door and white window frames I called home. Enmore lies in Sydney’s inner west directly under international and domestic flight paths, and the first sound of morning, before the sun arose, was of each individual window pane shaking and rattling as if in an earthquake.
If I’d stood outside on the small strip of grass and a side bed of wood chips that the real estate agent called a manicured garden, I could have reached up and almost grazed the bellies of those metal birds with my fingertips. We were so close, I could count the nuts and bolts fastening the engines to the underside wings. But it was the sound that jarred the most, a whining of metal as the wheels unfolded, a metal on metal grind that seemed to cover the row of townhouses in invisible sound soot.
It is the same sound, metal on metal, that screeches now from the underbelly of Matilda as we fly about inside her berth like the souls in Dante’s hell, without place or root or record.
Something in Matilda buckles. Her engines wheeze and she almost gives way, snapping in the middle. Whining like a hurt dog, under the pressure, we jerk suddenly. I drop my apple. Buttered rolls are going flying. We lurch again. Are we up on two wheels? Everyone is flung about. Tiff’s head makes the sound of a broken egg shell as it cracks into Matilda’s metal roof. When the brakes finally kick in, we skid to a stop. Tiff holds her head, whimpers slightly, and when she needs to catch her breath, she holds it, and we all sit there silent, in shock as you do after an accident. Shamil is lying in the middle aisle still carrying – of all things – a bunch of knives ready for breakfast. He is face down and not moving.
Sheer terror makes my heart pump. This can’t be happening.
We take seconds, or is it minutes, to know what has happened. We have crashed. Or hit something. Or something has hit us.
Sarah frantically bangs on the outside door to our berth. ‘Are you okay?’
Someone with a dazed voice – God, I think it’s me – shouts hoarsely, ‘Yes.’
‘Simon’s not okay.’ We hear the waiver in her voice. ‘I’ll be back.’
We are locked inside. The only key to our door is tied around Sarah’s wrist, and she has quickly disappeared into a stranger’s mud cottage a hundred metres up the road. She has no mobile reception, and no-one else can drive us. Are we stuck here? It could take days for a new driver to reach us. To find us.
It’s humid, hot. The windows fog quickly. Shamil, thankfully with no knife scratches, has stood up shakily and, like a good doctor, is holding Tiff’s head, on top of her hands, as though they are both trying to keep pieces of her head together. I wish someone had their hands on my head keeping my pieces together.
Men from the nearby town have started to gather outside, they’re banging on the doors.
We stop moving. Perhaps they can’t see us? Thankfully, the windows where we have rubbed them to get a better view have fogged over. Behind steamed windows the men look like silhouettes, shadows. They all look the same. They grow restless and irate, some walk in dusty circles, kicking at stones, talking rapidly on mobile phones. Soon there are more of them; they’re calling friends. Then friends of friends.
Sarah makes a dash to the front cabin, and locks herself and Simon, with his limp back, tightly inside. We sit there going nowhere. Matilda groans as the heat of the day emerges.
I find Ant’s hand and hold it. Sweaty palms. Both of us. We gulp for air, our chins lifted to the ceiling as we drown in steam, only now and then the wind compassionately blowing through the propped-open sky roof.
Dear Lord, I pray, please please let us be okay.
Sarah rings through the walkie-talkie phone from her cabin to ours. Cheryl, a quiet Canadian, picks it up. Sarah’s voice bounces around the cabin, crackling and tight. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
Tour guide Sarah has been replaced by human Sarah. No-one knows how to answer her. The men below circle Matilda like dust sharks. Mobile phones keep ringing and they keep answering and talking words we can’t decipher. Jerry, Cheryl’s husband, takes the phone from Cheryl. I hear then, the most joyous words of that trip. ‘I’ll do it. I’ll drive her.’
‘Can you drive trucks?’ Sarah sounds nervous.
‘That’s what I do back home. I’m a truck driver,’ comes the solid, stoic response.
Silently, Jerry climbs out the left side of Matilda and carefully into the cabin below, the men with machetes gathered on the right, too angry to notice. He picks his way carefully over Simon’s broken back. We pause. Will Matilda start? The engine turns over. Once. Twice. Without catching. A small rumble. Silence.
On the third go, the engine catches. Relief. Matilda groans loudly as Jerry shifts her into gear. Tyres grip. We roll. And shudder. Stop. Jerry brakes.
Back to first gear.
The men assemble and watch us with their hands still slightly raised. Anyone watching from afar would think they were ceremoniously waving us goodbye. Matilda restarts, stutters back onto the road as Jerry gets used to the gears. We travel the entire length of the highway, for four hours, never going above second gear.
WE ARRIVE in Kenya much later than planned. The campsite is empty. Dusk is settling. No-one is hungry.
A few people skulk about smoking. Some swear and toss about blame – Simon’s driving and bad roads.
‘No road signs,’ they say. The culprit is finally named: unmarked speed bumps. Three of them in a row we encountered going over a hundred kilometres an hour.
Some are mad. Some cry. We’ll have to wait for a new truck, and a new driver, before we can enter Tanzania. I eat dry crackers. Everyone has stopped talking. We’re all silent. No-one knows how to fill the spaces. Ant makes me a tea later, before bed, and even though it’s a hot and sticky night, I drink it. We put up tents in silence and crawl inside.
‘What are we going to do?’ Ant asks in a small voice from the other side of the tent. She seems like she could be on the other side of the world. ‘Do we keep going?’
My mind whirls with thoughts. I’m scared. Let’s go home. Why don’t we wear seat belts? The roads here are too dangerous. God, it could have been worse. What if we had rolled the truck? This whole trip could end in disaster. I COULD DIE HERE.
Lying in the tent, I wait for noises to comfort us. But there is no traffic at this time of night, no birds calling to each other, no murmurs from the other campers. There is no sense of life outside the walls of our tent at all.
Suddenly, a gust of wind arises from nowhere, pushing the trees against the tent. We listen in silence as the leafless branches, stubs, scratch at the roof of our home. Like skeletal fingers trying to find a way in.
Ways to Come Home Page 10
