We suggested (an important word) that our boat crew be on the bank at 5.30 for the return trip. To our surprise they chugged to a stop at 5.35. Not so surprising was the fact that we had some extra passengers. You grab whatever lift you can around here. A girl about 18 and a…
After shaking off my arbor instructor and his insistent “write it down” I piled into the runabout with Russell and some of the lads for a run to Melut (meh-loot) about an hours north of travel. There are no roads so it’s the best option. Pretty much the only one actually. But the wind is…
Where did I get to before I was distracted by the hippo? Church service… one of the lads took us to his family compound afterwards and to his tukel. We sat in there making polite conversation, the only light being that which threw in from the door. As you might expect in this part of…
How can I begin to tell you how good today has been. With apologies to the Bard “let me count the ways”. The sun has been gone only twenty minutes or so but that old cliché about darkness falling fast in Africa is true. The arms are click with sweat and mozzie repellant as I…
I woke from a lucid dream of trying to fit level guttering on curved Dr Suess houses – and laughed. I had spent yesterday putting guttering on a building that had some “level challenges”. There is a hint of blue sky and the breeze is down a little but it is decidedly cool. Armed only…
I have forgotten how stifling a mozzie net is. If there is any puff of air out there it is obliterated by the net. At the end of a windy day there is no breeze and I lie in the open stripped right off (sorry sensitive reader) leaking more sweat than water drunk today, of…
A 44 gallon drum is manufactured in the USA in a highly automated production process that sees no human involved, from the arrival of the rolls of steel to the packaging of the empty drums onto pallets. Only when the pallets need to be loaded on to trucks does a human appear, in the form…
The breeze I was looking for last night is here this morning, cool and steady, stirring up the reeds along the riverbank and creating a noisy chop on the river. There is nothing to hint at the 40 degrees to come. There is no one about as I park on the bank and watch the…
Our resort on the banks of the Nile is a small compound about 25 by 25 metres. It is hedged by a stick fence, mostly falling down though on the outside there is a jumble of thorn bushes as an extra layer of deterrence. Integrated defence some might call it. Peter, already introduced, keeps the…
(As I tap this out in the back blocks of Sudan from my hand written notes I see it is 4.45pm on Sunday and the Writers Group will be wrapping up their monthly session – writing, worlds apart in so many different ways). Ribbons of black streaks stain the grasslands below, the result of burning…