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: