Me, Ad and Lindsay (hereinafter Muriel) went East together this week to climb a volcano and look at a pretty waterfall, and I got the opportunity to take lots of photos of the sort that make other people jealous, a much abridged gallery of which you may peruse herein.

Working Hours

You could be forgiven for thinking that I seem to be doing more holidaying than working at the moment. However, this holiday’s crowning feature was a magnificently glittering climb to 4321metres, which was so strenuous that it qualifies for inclusion in the present section.

Also adventuring on the great Mount Elgon were some gap-year teenagers. As with so many of their ilk, they were paying some cynical organisation for a year’s worth of warm fuzzy glow helping poor black children (while stealing jobs from poor black adults who could really do with the money). Feeling older and wiser, we were determined not to be upstaged in our ascent by these “what-did-you-get-in-your-A-levels-I-got-four-As-but-a-B-in-General-Studies” young whippersnappers. Me and Ad had our masculine pride at stake, and even Lindsay was to be heard at one point expressing concern at being beaten up a mountain by someone born in the 1990s. In reality, though, there was no major risk to our collective ego as we did in one day what had taken them two, and on our way to the summit the next day we caught them up even though they’d left an hour earlier (OK – it was on the way back down – but we’d still caught them up).

Despite this, as we were in the process of overtaking them, we passed the path to the second highest peak, and me and Ad, as if to cement our victory, started egging each other on to climb that one too. We did this under the pretence of the Adam-and-Nigel tradition of death-by-exercise, as neither of us would have dared admit that we just wanted to reassure ourselves that we really were superior to the nappy parade. However, they must have seen the game we were playing, as when we started up the path to the second summit, they were hot on our heels. Even so, once we’d all done that one, me, Ad and Lindsay still had to descend to the lower camp that same day while they got to nurse their aching quadriceps at the high camp. So there was no real doubt that we were the winners, although the fact we’re becoming paranoid about being beaten by youngsters when we ourselves are merely in our mid twenties is a great testament to the painful awareness we all have of life’s transience in this modern era.

Friendometer

Next stop was Sipi falls, an altogether more relaxing destination whose big draw was a stream which toppled down the mountain in a sequence of three boundless cascades. They got better as you went up, and my guide for the top one was a soldier on leave whose family happened to own the bit of land over which the cataract tumbled (not that the land was much use, being vertical). After he’d shown me their backyard’s ornamental water feature, which would have made any suburban housewife delirious with envy, he offered to take me to taste some of the ‘local brew’ (and he wasn’t talking about brewing tea, nor any other herbal infusion).

When we stepped into the pub (mud hut) I was taken aback – three old ladies with toothless grins were huddled around a rusty old teapot full of steaming brown gunk, from which they were taking it in turns to take deep draughts through the spout. In fact it was just like I’d walked into the village production of Macbeth. The three witches wanted me to take a photo of them, and asked me to give them five hundred shillings for it, which seemed like an economic transaction in reverse to me. And besides, shouldn’t they have been telling me I’d be king one day and then disappearing into the mist? I think their script was missing a page.

The maize-and-sorghum based cocktail tasted uncannily similar to the smell of the beer you find in half-finished cans after teenage house parties. It felt strangely illicit to be sucking it through the spout of an enamel teapot. I drunk enough to convince myself that Uganda’s bottled offerings were superior, and left my soldier counterpart to get tipsy on the rest. At this point, he offered to take me back to his home and show me photos of his circumcision ceremony – a local rite-of-passage conveyed upon Sabine teenage men (at twenty, he’d obviously been putting it off – can’t think why). If I claimed herein to have jumped at the opportunity, I would be bound to cause raised eyebrows amongst my loyal readership, but I can’t deny a certain morbid curiosity. My guide even proposed I take one of the snaps away as a souvenir, but I couldn’t really picture it on my mantelpiece, so I made an excuse about not wanting to deprive him of his memories. How else would he remember the small part of his being that has since probably been tossed perfunctorily into a pit latrine? After all, I doubt he keeps that in the photo album.

Close Encounters of the African Kind

Our mountain guide’s imaginative attire provided a fantastic showcase of mix-and-match accessorising that would go down a storm on the catwalks of Milan:

Chillin' Lakeside

I am now hosting a visit from my old cycling buddy Adam and his girlfriend Lindsay. Adam was the inspiration for my crazy trip across the Andes (which by the way was far less crazy than the things he used to get up to, before he met Lindsay). Lindsay suggested Adam use his artistic skills to paint a Muriel at one of our schools – I think she meant mural, but has now earned herself an endearing (and enduring) sobriquet.

Close Encounters of the African Kind

I caused much embarrassment to Adam and Muriel on their first night in Kampala when I vociferously challenged a minibus driver who attempted to short change my girlfriend by 200 shillings, when he’d already overcharged us by double. It wasn’t much money, but he soon discovered that he wasn’t getting away with stealing it.

There’s a lot of that about in Kampala – underhand theft. Basically, if you’re caught stealing then members of the general public will beat you up and run away with all your clothes. So if you’re the sticky fingered type, or, as is the case with some Kampalans, utterly kleptomanic, the trick is not to get caught. Which is why people do stuff like falsify receipts or bodge jobs or overcharge or, if they’re in government, demand bribes. Instead of stealing, it then becomes ‘cheating’ so is OK. It’s just the way things are done. I cheat you, you cheat him, he cheats me, and the world goes round. Many people don’t really see how honesty would bring about an improvement. Just don’t say the word ‘theft’ or someone’ll lose their pants.

Friendometer

Sunday saw a chilled-out trip to the beach. We left our cossies at home after a tip-off that were we to take a dip, we’d be swimming through a sea of floating turds, and the water would be warm not from the sun but from untreated effluent. Too much time in the company of Kampala’s stinking drains made this description seem utterly plausible. However, when we got there, Lake Vic proved utterly irresistible, just like the eponymous fat little queen must have been to hubbie Al. Adam and I decided we’d just have to plunge in in our boxers and hope nothing fell out.

Once we got in the therapeutically balmy waters, a kid called Maurice challenged us to a game of the thrilling see-how-much-sand-you-can-get-in-your-hands-from-the-bottom-of-the-lake. He went first, and I was disconcerted by the murky green hue of the sample of lakebed that he held in his fists. Maybe swimming hadn’t been such a great idea. Still, I was in now, and seemed churlish not to play the game, especially considering how absurdly easy it would for me to win and make him cry. So down I dived.

I resurfaced seconds later with a pitiful quantity of sand that wasn’t even half of Maurice’s entry, still lying there sloppily in his palms. I had also come back up minus my glasses.

As ideas go, diving whilst wearing spectacles is up there amongst my less inspired moments. After several endless minutes clumsily shuffling around the lake bed with our hands and feet, we started to wonder whether we wouldn’t do better to fly to Cairo and wait for the Nile to bring them to us. But no points for guessing who saved the day: Maurice, you’re a hero!

Cheeky monkey!

The week straddling the turn of the year saw me hosting a visit from my parents, who coped remarkably well with the more adventurous nature of holidaying in a developing country. Predictably, the bulk of my mother’s comments were “what beautiful flowers!” while my father’s revolved around the fact that nothing here quite works properly. Both were delighted by the range of goods and services rendered on the back of bicycles, and Ugandans didn’t disappoint with their efforts in this respect – we saw virtually every home furnishing, including the larger items like three-piece suites, skilfully poised atop the reinforced luggage rack behind the tottering rider.



We paid a visit to the modest Kibale Rainforest. It isn’t quite the Amazon but one thing it does have over that more famous tract of tropical trees is that it hosts an endangered but much-loved species of primate, the chimpanzee. They say chimps share 98% of their DNA with humans, but the remaining 2% must be the important bit because I didn’t really see the similarity, and that’s coming from a man who is unusually hairy. A couple of chimps high in the trees treated us to an amateur sex show but it lasted only four seconds, which I don’t think us lads would get away with in the human world. Still, our lady chimp didn’t seem at all disappointed, and who am I to judge?



Close Encounters of the Parental Kind (My desperation to make sure nothing went wrong during my parent’s visit has left me mercifully bereft of close encounters of the African kind, hence the slight change in emphasis).

I am lucky enough to have truly wonderful parents, but they can also be wonderfully insufferable. I feel licensed to say this by the knowledge that they would say the same about theirs.

As we packed up one morning, I kindly offered to put their suitcase in the van for them. However I was doing it, though, proved utterly unsatisfactory to my Dad – the wrong angle or orientation or off-centre or something – and as the bickering exchange reached a heady crescendo I considered it wiser to step out the way and let him do. But it had dented my patience severely and thus could be considered the precursor to what happened next.

All I did was ask if anyone had a plastic bag for my good shoes so the dust didn’t ruin them, and I set off a chain reaction of events that left me utterly exasperated. My mum suggested I put them in a nearby cardboard box instead, but I told her I thought I’d forget them there. Then my dad (still manipulating the suitcase) managed to produce a plastic bag for me, so I slipped the shoes in and then, out of respect for maternal advice, put them in the box anyway. This is when my mother communicated that she considered that an unnecessary risk now that I had a plastic bag. I sighed – not aggressively, but more of an involuntary exhalation of long-sufferance. I decided instead to tie the handles of the bag to seal it, and just as I began that action, she piped up with “why don’t you just tie the handles?” Patience ebbing, I was tempted to unleash a barrage of vicious sarcasm (“WHAT DO YOU THINK I’M DOING?!?”) but instead opted for a more politely diplomatic “please stop.” I tied the handles once and was about to tie them again to make sure when my mother came in with “once is enough.” My patience ran out. I launched into a lengthy diatribe on the theme of my ability, at an age of a quarter-century, to exercise basic common sense without close parental supervision.

My mother later blamed my request for a plastic bag as the reason for the unprecedented mollycoddling, but I consider this a poor excuse. The fact is parents never stop being parents.

Friendometer

The new year saw me receive an email from a former student of mine:

Alright dude, Mark here, your favourite student, just wondering how things are going down in Africa? Mosquito bites reached a thousand yet? i also hear you are chasing gorillas.. sounds fun. Holla back homie Peace

It may sound like it’s been lifted straight off the streets of Brixton, but that’s pure Salford, that is – prettily laced with irony.

Competition time

OK, OK, when I said misogynist what I meant was misanthropist. Totally deliberate, of course. Thanks Mum. You’re catching up!

Ben 2
Nigel’s Dad 2
Nigel’s Mum 2
Uncle Simon and the Family Hipps 2
Julia 1
Nigel’s Gran 1
Brother David 1
Volunteer Jo 1
Phil 1
Mr Ibbs 1

Some of you may have read Suzanna’s plea for pity points in the comments section. She thinks that as insignificant a gesture of friendship as visiting me is more worthy of points than the correcting the rare errors I’m prone to. Ha! What misguided nonsense.