North to Goma, Zaire Again

I walked and waded through the mud on the trail heading back North. I tried to skirt around the bigger mud puddles because I didn't want to get stuck in the mud and sink quicksand style like the truck had done. Walking alone in the jungle I started to notice more wildlife.

There were monkeys and loud birds daily. Sometimes the monkeys caused me some problems. One morning I was eating my breakfast and drinking my hot tea when a solitary monkey snuck down and stole a large tin of margarine from me. I had the cover off because I had put some on my oatmeal along with cinnamon and sugar. The stupid monkey took the full tin up the tree and started to gobble it up. I was pissed at him for taking it and I was throwing sticks up the tree but I had no way of ever hitting him and he knew it. Even before he finished eating it all he started to get diahrea. He never vomited but his other end turned into a gusher in less than a half hour. He was feeling terrible and I was laughing at him. I had nobody to talk to or anything so I was ranting and raving at him like he understood everything I said. He must have felt the same loneliness because he stayed right there in the tree spray painting it for about an hour. I finally left him there and continued walking.

I had seen no people or signs of people in two days of walking then there was suddenly a Pygmy standing on the trail looking at me with a stunned look on his face. I stopped walking and talked to him in English and in my limited French but he never responded. I slowly walked up to him talking calmly the whole time and he never moved or said a thing. When I got close enough to reach out and touch, he suddenly reached out and fondled my long straight black hair. My white skin wasn't so rare in Africa because there are quite a few albinos everywhere I went but none of them had long straight hair like I did. I frequently had people wanting to run their fingers through my hair. I often let them to easy tensions or to show that I was friendly. This man looked to be in his thirties or so but they tend to look older than they really are so he may have been younger. After a few minutes of me trying to talk to him he finally started communicating with me. He was out hunting and he went over by a tree and showed me his prize. It was a Dikdik. They are very small antelope about the size of a small tall slim dog. I had to laugh to myself that the little Pygmy hunted for little Dikdiks. I started walking and we walked together for a while. Then he showed me that if I walked in the jungle it was actually an easier walk. Not right along side of the road where the jungle was thick right down to the ground because the road let in light but instead he showed me how deeper in the jungle it was actually easy to walk because there was very little vegetation on the ground and almost no mud either. My only problem with that is without him showing me where to walk out in the jungle I would just get lost within a short time.

We met up with his friends in maybe an hours time and through sign language and some Pidgin thown in I figured out that they were inviting me to come along with them on their hunt. So I followed them. One of them had an old rifle and while we were walking a couple of them stopped to listen and then pointed up in the canopy. I looked up and saw nothing but the one with the rifle took aim and squeezed off a single shot and a monkey came tumbling down to the ground. They seemed happy with their catch of a few Dikdiks, the monkey and some things wrapped up in leaves that one of them was carrying. We walked almost until dark and came upon their encampment. There were thirty five or so people in total with a few kids running around and about half men and half women. All of them were almost totally naked. The men sat down and started to smoke while the women started to prep the game to eat. I set up my tent. They were very interested in my tent but by the sounds of them talking back and forth they didn't like it enough to want to sleep in one. They preferred their temporary grass and branch huts. This was just a hunting camp I think but they didn't have really permanent housing anywhere from what I gathered over my time in Africa. These Pygmies acted and looked very similar to the ones I had met over in Western Cameroon. They were still the original hippies, happy go lucky, averse to work, trying to get high all the time and enjoying unbridled sexual freedom. They tried to get me to take one or two of the women into my tent but I turned them down. I couldn't see any health problems in this group of people but I was just a chicken over STDs.

I stayed with these Pygmies for a couple of weeks until my food was running low. I ate the roast monkey and Dikdiks and things with the Pygmies and even tried eating their grubs and things but I still needed my tea or coffee and my oatmeal every day. We had been moving North very slowly over the course of this two weeks or so and they led me to the road and I started walking alone again in the direction of Goma. There were more and more slash and burn farms so I knew I was getting closer to Goma.

While I was walking one morning I notice a young women using a hoe basically out in the middle of nowhere. I looked around and I didn't see any farm or people or anything but here she was hoeing away. Then she stood up and looked right at me looking at her. She was very pregnant! She bent back down over her hoe and every few minutes stood up and looked at me. The look she gave me kept me there but told me not to come any closer to her. I kind of walked back and forth wondering what was up looking over at her working. Then she went behind a downed log right near where she was standing and working. She didn't stand back up for about ten minutes. When she did stand back up, she was wrapping her newborn in a cloth. I was caught off guard by this. I went to walk over to her and she made it clear to me not to do that so I hesitated and walked back to the trail. She put the infant on her back and went back to hoeing furiously. I know now that she was delivering the placenta the next time she stopped working. Then she stood up and smiled at me and just walked away into the jungle with her baby. I went back to my walking. I finally arrived back at Goma almost a month after I left my buddy there. I stocked up on beer and slept like a rock that night.

Goma seemed to have a lot more people and activity this time. I couldn't figure out what was going on. I talked to some local people I met there including one man that was a school teacher. He spoke some French and some English so we were able to communicate quite well together. He was concerned about my walking through Zaire alone.

He kept telling me horror stories about things happening to people out in the middle of nowhere. He told me stories about the history of Zaire and the early days of the Belgian and French presence. I didn't like hearing the parts about torture and people getting their hands cut off. The Belgians started the practice of cutting hands off from what he told me and now it is a widespread practice as a sort of terror weapon. (even now in 2010 this area is fighting the longest and one of the most bloody wars the world has ever seen and cutting hands off is common practice as is mutilating females of all ages to prevent them from reproducing and to cause terror. United Nations says the genicide going on in this area today has claimed about 6 million lives so far.)

My teacher friend didn't like Mobutu the leader of Zaire but he did not tell me why. He also told me about Idi Amin in Uganda and that many of the soldiers here in Goma fled from Uganda because of Amin. I didn't know most of the history of this area and that was maybe a good thing because if I had know just how violent Africa really is I probably would not have come here like I did.

I enjoyed meeting and talking to this man. We hung out together for a few days before he had to leave to get back to his teaching job. I resolved to try to act a little safer in my choices of things I did in the future but since I was already here there wasn't much I could do. Even if I wanted to leave Africa now getting out of involved getting to the bigger cities in the East or South. No airlines flew into this part of the world yet in 1972.

I wanted to go see the mountain gorillas over in Rwanda and Burundi that I heard about and the plains in East Africa with the huge herds of animals. Over a year in Africa and I had seen very little wildlife. I was disappointed by that. I started to talk to the trucks coming and going through Goma for a ride to the highland mountain areas East of Goma. I finally found a truck that offered to let me ride up on top of his load so I headed East with him early in the morning and left Goma behind.

Heading South in Zaire

Our missionary friend had us jump in the Landrover right after we finished our breakfast. We were all ready to go with freshly cleaned clothes, a nice shower and full bellies after a good hard six hours of sleep the night before. No visit from the daughter the second night but I didn't expect one either. I think she might have been locked in her room or something. We didn't talk much on the ride South. He drove us about two hours and we were maybe thirty miles from his church when he found a wide enough area to turn the Landrover around. He dropped us off in the middle of no place and nothing but thick jungle in sight. We told him thank you as well as we could considering the circumstances and then he was gone.

We kind of looked at each other and started swearing and laughing our asses off. I think we may have been laughing more out of fear for the situation we were in than anything humorous. I got blasted for my little escapade with the daughter but come on what healthy 21 year old male could have fought her off. We decided to just put up the tent and hang out for the day. We put the tent up right in the middle of the road so that we wouldn't miss any vehicles for potential rides South. Our plan was to hitch hike but there was one little flaw in the program...there were no vehicles for the next several days. We decided to start walking down the road to see if there was something we could find to eat and we needed more beer because our stash was gone.

Food was fairly easy to find in the jungles of Zaire because for generations people have been practicing slash and burn agriculture. In slash and burn, trees are cut down and piled up then set on fire. The ashes are then used as fertilizer and it is spread over the poor soil then things like corn, peanuts, papaya, bananas, mangos and other things are planted. In a couple of years they move a little and do it again because the soil is too poor to keep producing after a couple of years. The jungle grows back over the abandoned farmed area. Some of the agricultural products they planted do survive for years until the jungle again steals the light. So there are things to find that are edible all over the jungle. We would roast the corn we found growing, eat the fruit and we had to boil all our water then put purifiers in it in order to safely drink it.

We walked for a few days then came to a small village. When the people saw us they started a loud commotion. I got a bit scared at first. They ran up to us and surrounded us jumping up and down and hooting and hollering then they very excitedly led us to one of their little thatched huts. None of them spoke French or English or even Pidgin so we could not use words to communicate. Inside the thatched hut we found a middle aged man with an injured leg that was infected. It was swollen to the size of the man's abdomen. It stunk like death in the hut. My friend immediately turned and left the hut. I figured out that they wanted me to cure the man. I was a white man and all the white men they had ever met were either missionaries or doctors and most missionaries know a lot of first aid. I didn't give the man a very good chance of surviving with the raging infection and fever he had. I did not see any gangrene yet but it was only a matter of hours from what I saw and smelled.

I got the people to make me some boiling water and bring me some clean clothes. I had a first aid kit with me but this man needed a hospital not a little kit. I gave him some oral antibiotics that I had with me. Then I did some surgery. I very carefully found the center of the infection and I lanced it with my knife all the way down to the bone. There was almost no bleeding because there was no blood flowing in the swollen leg. Then I wrapped some hot wet cloth around the leg for a couple of hours. The hole I had opened up was oozing pus by then. I showed two or three of the men how to help me squeeze out as much of the pus as we could. There was a lot is all I can say. I had them throw the pus in the burning fire pit. I left the man to sleep and I went out and found my buddy. I told him what was going on and told him we had to get out of there before the man died which I was quite sure he would pretty soon. The people were elated that their friend was already feeling better and they were exceedingly friendly to us and tried to give us food and women and whatever they had. The man must have been popular is all I could think. We whopped it up with them for a couple of hours and I went to check on the man. He was sitting up and feeling better. I was kind of surprised by that. I gave him some more antibiotics and then left enough antibiotics with the man's friends for a couple more days of treatment. Then we hightailed it out of there. I think we might have been running for a bit. I wanted to be as far away as possible before the man died. The last thing I wanted to deal with was an angry village of people armed with machetes. I think we walked about fifteen miles before we put our tent up again for the night.

The next morning we were eating oatmeal and drinking tea when we heard a vehicle coming. We quickly took the tent down and got ready for a possible ride. Unfortunately for us, the vehicle was going North not South. We stood in the road waving and it roared right past us without even slowing down. It was one of those tour vans full of people with a guide and a driver that you might find advertisements for in the classified area of the travel section of the New York Times or London Times. They could have at least stopped to ask us if we needed any help. We grumbled about their rudeness and inconsiderate attitude with a few choice stings of four letter words. We walked on.

We started to see more and more slash and burn farms. We stopped and traded with them a few times for some peanuts and fruit. We found a few bottles of beer at one farm that I traded aspirins for. That was an unexpected treat. We put up the tent just down the road and got drunk. The next morning we heard another vehicle coming and it was going south. We got ready just in case it would give us a ride. It turned out to be a 34 foot truck with a Greek driver and a couple of workers packed into the cab. There wasn't enough room left on the overloaded truck for so much as a single fly. At least the driver stopped and talked to us for ten minutes. We understood he was full and he went on without us. A few hours later we saw him parked on the road. We caught up to him and all of the men were standing on the bumper looking at the engine except for one man turning the key to try to start the motor. I asked what the problem was and the owner operator shrugged with a very worried expression on his face. I had rebuilt a couple of engines in my day so I asked if I could look at the problem for him. He agreed to let me check it out. I pulled the fuel line off and had the man turn it over. Nothing was coming out. I followed the fuel line back to an inline fuel filter and took the filter out. This time when he turned it over fuel surged out. I took the filter and banged it on the frame and washed it with some gas and blew the dirt out just like WC did in Bonnie and Clyde. I put it back together and it started right up.

The driver was ecstatic. He got his helpers to move a bunch of things around and then had two of them ride on top of the truck and we jumped into the cab. It felt good to have a ride. He took us all the was to Goma. I had thought that Goma was going to be a town or at least a village but it turned out to be just a crossroads with a little tiny store and a large building that looked like it should have been sitting in a European town instead of out in the middle of a jungles of Zaire. It was two stories high and maybe 150 feet long by 100 feet wide. The large colonial design was made out of what looked like stone. It was a bar and whore house!

We had lunch and quite a few cold beers at the little store with our driver before he left us at Goma and continued on his trip to Burundi. We put up out tent a couple hundred yards from the bar. My buddy wanted to go have some fun with the girls working in the bar. I wanted no such action. So he went in and I sat out in the tent listening to all the commotion going on. There were a lot of soldiers walking around and going in and out of the bar. There were a few fights between the men and a few between men and women and a few women fighting with each other as well. It was a pretty rowdy scene. I was a bit worried about my friend in there with all these rough looking soldier types he was hanging around with. He came out a few hours later drunk and happy. He told me had fun and that he got everything he was looking for and only spent a total of ten dollars. I told him it might be the most expensive ten bucks he had ever spent when his pecker starts to rot away. He just laughed. I think he was still pissed that I had the affair with the blond girl.

We didn't get along very well the next morning. He was hung over and grouchy and I wanted to go south to see Victoria Falls at the Southern border. We ended up going different ways. I found a 34 foot truck going South that would give me a ride so I took it and said goodbye to my buddy. We talked about meeting up in Kampala Uganda or Nairobi Kenya in the next few months. It was raining a lot as we headed South.

Right near Goma the roads were pretty good but the further away we got the worse the road got. It really could not be called a road any more but was just a trail cutting through the jungle. It was just mud, mud and deeper mud. The rain was coming down like crazy. We had to stop many times during downpours because there was zero visibility. We got stuck many times but the helpers would jump out and rock the truck back and forth until they got it free again. This went on until the next mud hole and the next.

We stopped the truck for a few hours at night to let the driver sleep. Three or four days down the road I started to get worried that we would get totally stuck. I guess I could see into the future. We finally hit a large pond sized hole and the truck got stuck right in the middle of it. The wheels just spun and threw up muddy water sucking the truck deeper and deeper into the mud. Then we just sat there. As we sat I noticed that we were still sinking. I though when we hit the axles the sinking would stop. We hit the axles and it kept sinking. Then I thought it would stop when it hit the floor of the truck. Nope. It kept sinking. I decided to bail and took a running leap after throwing my bag into the clear. I landed without injury and stood back to watch as the others also decided to get clear of the truck. They all just waded through the mud with great difficulty to get to the "shore." Unbelievably to me the truck just kept sinking. It finally engulfed the cab and eventually even the high back disappeared from sight. To say that the driver was distraught would have been an understatement.

Then seemingly out of nowhere, about thirty to thirty five men with shovels and ropes showed up ready to negotiate the labor needed to get the truck out of the hole. The driver had no choice but to pay them their ransom demand to get his truck out of the muck. It was now clear that the reason the mud was so deep was that these men dug the hole to start with to capture vehicles so that they could then rescue them for cash. It discouraged me and I turned around and started walking back toward Goma. I wished the driver good luck before I left. As I turned around I could see the workers starting to dig his truck out. The load and the inside of the cab would be coated with mud. The best he could hope for is that the vehicle would start after getting cleaned up a bit and then run long enough to get someplace to seriously clean and fix it. Needless to say the it would need more than the fuel filter getting blown out this time.

Zaire

After crossing the wide Congo River we headed down a one lane dirt road through thick jungle. The road was more of a trail consisting of two ruts with grass growing between them and regular holes filled with water and mud, lots of mud. About a half hour after it got dark, and I mean inky black darkness illuminated only by the headlights of the Landrover, we arrived at a compound that reminded me of a family farm back home in Wisconsin. If not for all the dense jungles, it would also have hinted at a fort from the old west.

Our missionary called this his church. There was a nice large American style two story house with shutters on all the windows. It was surrounded by a very large garden filled with banana, mango and papaya trees, neat rows of vegetables and large amounts of flowers. In the dark it was impossible to see the tended corn and peanut fields behind and surrounding the area. Then there were a few smaller out buildings and one large barn type structure and another smaller barn. There was a very stout fence made of hardwood saplings about 10 feet tall placed side by side and tied together into more of a wall than a fence. We were greeted by his beautiful very young looking wife and his four hot looking daughters that all looked to be teenagers and an obviously local black man that approached the Landrover with a very concerned expression and started talking very quickly to our driver. We parked and entered one of the smaller buildings to clean up because we were covered in mud. The bucket shower sure felt good after such a long grueling day.

While we were getting cleaned up, I politely asked about his all blonds family but all I could think about was the hot wife and oldest daughter. I found out that the oldest daughter was nineteen and the youngest was thirteen. I put on my cleanest clothes but they weren't exactly fresh from the French laundry clean. They were more like the least sweat soaked clothes I had with me. The local man helping us out offered to take all our clothes and bring them back cleaned tomorrow. I jumped on that offer. My friend and I were both still dirtballs to be blunt about it. We also were having a real hard time not continuing our little game of swearing incessantly and the missionary was repeatedly asking us to clean up our language.

When we entered the immaculately clean, well kept house, there was a huge table being set up with dishes and all the girls were busy helping out. We were offered a drink right away. One of the first things I learned traveling in Africa was that all the missionaries seemed to have large, very well stocked top shelf liquor cabinets. They tended to use them often also, but more importantly to me, they also shared them generously. I chose brandy and a beer. I got Hennessy cognac and a Belgian dark ale that was a real treat for me. I kept catching myself checking out his wife and daughters and I think he did too.

I was pretty horny by now. The only white women I had seen in the last six months were three Irish nurses when I was in the hospital in Nigeria and a couple of peace corps workers here and there. One of the peace corps girls I met tired me out for a week and she was the last partner I had been with. That was six months ago now. Did I mention yet about all the hot blonds in the house? I am not racist by the way, but I refused to indulge in the local African women because there was just too much STD evidence visible everywhere I looked so far in Africa. The victims were easy to identify by the open sores all over their bodies and their general unhealthy appearance. I had no condoms so I passed on all the locals.

The entire family spoke perfect English as well as French, German, Flemish, Spanish and Dutch. They probably spoke all the local dialects also. I was impressed by that since I could barely speak English without swearing like a sailor. It seemed to me that every town I had been to in Africa spoke their own language. No wonder the colonialists were able to take over so easily. The locals could not communicate with each other to organize any resistance. Teaching a uniform language actually seemed to make it easier for these countries to gain their independence later on. We talked about that a little while waiting for dinner.

Finally the dinner was served. I can not even come close to describing this meal. Remember I lived on mangos, bananas, pineapples, peanuts, oatmeal some bread here and there and lots of beer. I saw several types of roast meats and poultry, baked and mashed potatoes, gravy, a variety of vegetables, melons, grapes, apples, oranges, cheeses, milk and juice, condiments, fresh breads, several desserts and did I mention the hot looking girls sitting on the opposite side of the table when they weren't serving something?

We kept getting in trouble for swearing. I was really trying but I kept slipping up but not as much as my friend was. Over dinner we talked about our African experiences. The story of my arrest in Nigeria was a popular topic. I kept quizzing them about Zaire and what was safe and what was not, where to go and what to see. When the meal was over, we were quickly escorted out of the house and put up on cots in one of the barn buildings They had already been readied for us by the time dinner was over. I think our poor choice of words was the reason for our quick escorted exit. But it may have also been that his daughters were too interested in us and he didn't like the looks going back and forth across the table.

I was so full. I felt like I had just ate three or four Thanksgiving meals in a row. What a day so far. Bloody mayhem for breakfast, bloody bus accident for lunch and then this latest overdose on food. I was going to sleep well for sure after all the food and excitement. I was also planning some nice dreams involving blonds.

As we were sitting around on the cots rehashing the day, the oldest girl came out to the barn where we were. She asked my friend to go outside to smoke his cigarette and to take his time with it. I got excited immediately. She wanted to talk to me in private. My friend looked at me with a roll of his eyes that screamed out, "YOU WOULDN'T DARE!" and I gave him a look that said, "DON'T COME BACK TILL I COME TO GET YOU!" He went outside and left the two of us alone. She walked over and attacked me as soon as my friends back was close to the door. MMMMMMMMM did I like that. It wasn't what I would call a marathon session but it was one passionate moment that would last me for months reliving it every single night. It took all of somewhere between ten and fifteen minutes start to finish. She knew just what she wanted and made sure she got everything she wanted. Afterward, she calmly redressed and casually asked what my plans were the next day before walking out with a mischievous satisfied smile on her face. I was just in shock. Satisfied but shocked none the less. My rule of not touching the locals had just been obliterated by a single horny 19 year old blond bombshell from Belgium.

My buddy came back into the room when he saw her leave and said, "I can sure smell what you just did. You bad boy. I don't believe you. You are going to get us both killed."

I was ready to sleep. I just smiled and said, "This has been one really really long day. How can I get myself killed? I am totally dead already. I think I am in heaven. Now shut up. I want to savor this. Good night" He was just as tired as I was, I am sure. Within minutes we were both asleep.

The next morning we had breakfast brought out to us. I think that was because the missionary did not want us around his family any more. I think he might have known what his daughter did the night before but I am not sure. Maybe he could smell it on her like my friend did on me. He acted very different than he did on the ride to his compound than he did now. He briskly told us to rest up today and that in the morning he would take us down to Goma the closest town in the area. So we hung out and checked out the compound until the next day. The girls were not to be seen other than a quick glimpse here and there through the windows. Our meals were brought out to us in the barn. We both chuckled over our banishment but we still enjoyed the food. I never did get to say goodbye to her before I left the next morning.

Some Background

I was asked why there are no pictures included with my blog. Well all the pics I took were stolen from me in Addis Ababa Ethiopia. The pics I took after Addis Ababa are in the possession of a friend I was traveling with at the time. I am trying to find her to obtain them but we have lost contact so far. I have lots of other pics available online from Asia, Southeast Asia, Central America, South America and other places and family pics at:

http://picasaweb.google.com/jimfrogs098

Feel free to look at them whenever but I will blog about those places later and include pics when I do. I thought about finding pics on the web from Nigeria, Cameroon and the other places but decided it was not worth the work of obtaining the copyrights for pics. There are also great articles on the web about the major events I mentioned such as the Biafran War or the turmoil in Central African Republic caused by the dictator Jean Bedel Bokassa on Wiki at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_Civil_War

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-B%C3%A9del_Bokassa

I started blogging in Calabar Nigeria but I traveled for two years before I got there. I just picked it as a place to start because so many people wanted to hear about my experience getting arrested. I got arrested three times for being a spy, once in Nigeria, once in Ethiopia and once in Laos. I will talk about the other two later on. I went through active war zones or serious civil unrest in Spanish Sahara, Spain, Ireland, Senegal, Gambia, Mali, Upper Volta, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria, Central African Republic, Zaire, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Ethiopia/Eritrea, Somalia, Djibuti, Turkey, India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Mexico, Argentina, Nicaragua, Columbia and Guatamala. I was shot at a few times in Spain, Uganda, Eritrea, Burma, and on the Mekong between Thailand and Laos. I was lucky that I was never injured or killed on these journeys.

I came closer to death from health reasons. I spent three weeks in the Hospital in Lagos, Nigeria for intestinal infection, almost died in Ethiopia from Malaria, and had a relapse of Malaria in Australia, was hospitalized in Argentina with my back out, caught Dengue fever twice in Central America and was very ill more than once in India as well as regular bouts of stomach problems in most of the third world countries. I was in vehicle accidents several times with only minor injuries which was lucky considering how the driving is in counties like Nigeria and Costa Rica or Mexico. There were lots of very close calls. The worst was in Mexico when I was riding shotgun on a bus at 60 miles per hour plus that decided to pass a slow truck on a blind curve and another bus was doing the same thing in the opposite direction. How we all avoided hitting I will never understand because it was just impossible that we didn't hit head on. I don't think you should ever ride where you can see the road ahead of you in these places especially if you have a weak heart or bowels.

Feel free to ask me questions in the comment section if you want clarification or anything. Tell me if you like something or if you don't. You can believe my writing or you can take it as fiction I don't care either way because I am writing for my pleasure but am sharing it with the world. I encourage two way communication here. To leave a comment just click at the end of each blog where it says comments. I can sometimes forget that not everybody knows the history of these places and I talk about things or people like Idi Amin assuming people know about them. I will try to keep my writing as clear as I can. I may skip around the world and not blog in a straight date line because Africa might not interest one person where India would so I plan on just writing as I feel like without regard to linear events. I may write regularly or I may take long breaks. You can sign up for notices when I post if you like. Look in the upper right side for the notification link.

Enjoy yourselves. PURAVIDA paparoach

Cameroon to Zaire

I left the palm farm after a few days rest and headed to Yaounde the capital city. Cameroon was much different than Nigeria was, the people were calmer and there were way fewer of them. My French was poor and my Pidgin was comical but I communicated quite well with everybody. The people were very patient and friendly with my attempts at both languages. Pidgin is mostly a collection of sounds for words like choo choo for train etc and that is mixed with lots of hand movements. It was fun playing around with the combination of methods to communicate with the happy people in Cameroon.

I didn't want to spend much time in the big city. Big cities are not my first choice for spending a lot of time. They are only good for catching up on all the foods that are impossible to obtain out in the boondocks or jungles and for a few museums or whatever other historical or cultural highlights there are for that particular area. I spent a few days in a hotel and walked all over town and then headed out toward the Congo which was to the South. The roads were terrible, rutted, muddy, narrow and dangerous but still safer than any road in Nigeria ever was. People were not rushing around like in Nigeria. Traveling in these conditions always ended up getting you covered in dirt and bruises. It was tiring, body abusing work but I loved every minute of it. My ears and eyes were always peeled for any movement that might be an animal or a snake or a bird, whatever. I was very disappointed by how few animals I had seen so far and I had been in Africa for almost nine months. If an African sees any animal he kills it to either eat it or sell it or just because they all hate snakes. So the amount of animal life on the continent was going downhill quickly. Birds were still fairly plentiful.

When I got to the border of Cameroon, I ran into a problem. I had no entry stamp into the country so technically I was there illegally. The border guard started to raise a stink and I quickly had to pull him aside and offer a small cash cadeau or gift to him to work out the details to allow me to exit the country. It took us about five minutes of animated discussions and we came to terms at eight dollars American to overlook the missing entry stamp.

The minute we crossed over the border, everything changed dramatically. The people just were not happy like in Nigeria and Cameroon. Lots of single men were standing around looking like thugs and I did not feel comfortable at all. I left the country of the Congo again as quickly as I could heading toward the Central African Republic.

On the road to Bangui, CAF, we ran across the first Pygmies of my trip. They were selling chunks of game meat wrapped in banana leaves along the road. I jumped off the bus and tried to get to know them better. They were very friendly and nonchalant at the same time. They did not try to sell very hard but instead just stood there and if you wanted to buy it you did if not they didn't really seem to care. All the packages stunk to me. It would have to cook for a long time to make sure it was safe to eat. No wonder the people used so much spice in the stews they all ate. I stuck mostly to my fresh fruit and nuts with bread and peanut butter and jelly most of the time. I did also eat all the local foods but in moderation to try to minimize my stomach problems. Since the water was not potable unless huge amounts of chlorine were added to it, I mostly drank great Belgium style beer all day for hydration after my morning coffee. Liter sized green bottles of Star beer became one of my favorite parts of this area of the world.

I got the Pygmies to take me to where they lived just off the road. They tied bunches of the tall grass into a knot at the top and then just pushed an opening into the bundle of grass and spread it out into a temporary shelter. They built a fire either just in front of the opening or sometimes right in the shelter itself, talk about a fire trap. The Baka as they were called were very friendly. I think that they are the original hippies of the world. They refused to work or go to schools instead choosing to hunt and gather then trade their game and other collected items from the forest for whatever they wanted from the rest of the world. Their wants were minimal to say the least. They didn't seem to care about anything. A few minutes after I started showing friendliness toward them, they offered their wives for me to play with sexually. They were not monogamous amongst themselves either. I saw no sort of animosity from any of them in any way over anything. They were incredibly calm. I turned down their offer for sex. There was just too much sexually transmitted disease around for my tastes and I had no condoms either so I just smiled and told them how nice they all were. I spent a couple of nights with the group. They loved to dance and partied late into the night. They appeared to be trying multiple different substances to get high. I tried one ground up mix that they were snorting and it just about blew my head off when I took a hit. I didn't get stoned but it was more like snorting horseradish or wasabi then anything else I can think of. They all laughed their asses off at my response to their drug of choice whatever it was. No idea what it was but I did not do more.

I finally headed out to Bangui and easily crossed all the borders. Every time I came to a border I pulled out my huge book, War and Peace, and tried to look like I had all the time in the world to cross the border. I almost never had to pay cadeaus or bribes because since I looked like I was not in a hurry they had no power over me. The people that approached the borders in a big hurry paid a big price and usually took longer to get through the customs and immigrations than I did. I checked into a small French hotel that had a cafe in the front and kicked back.

While eating dinner in the cafe, I met another American traveler. We talked and laughed for hours drinking our beer and eating while checking out the girls walking by. We shared our travel experiences and plans and decided to travel together to Uganda. We partied in the hotel and wandered around Bangui for about a week. We both had foul mouths talking gutter trash constantly. We tried to actually communicate using only swear words and we got pretty good at it. When one or the other of us came up with a good long nasty string we would both laugh. Once we started it was very difficult to stop our little dirty talking habit. Then in a matter of seconds everything changed dramatically.

We were quietly sitting at the cafe drinking our morning coffee and eating our French bread with jam on it when we heard rifle shots fairly close by. Then some cars and trucks went tearing past the cafe driving insanely. The shots were coming closer and we could hear horns honking. The cafe/hotel owner came out and told us to hide behind the hotel. We crawled under the hotel thinking about snakes and peered out at the road as a bloody parade went by.

The "king" of the country decided that it was too expensive to house and feed prisoners in the country so he had the military take all the prisoners out of the jails and whip them on trucks while driving all around the country. His plan was to save money by not having to feed prisoners but more importantly he wanted to intimidate the citizens so much that they would never want to challenge his rule. So the military was driving down the road stripping the prisoners naked and then with them tied up spread eagle to the side of stakeside trucks, they then began to whip, beat and torture them until near death. They next tied them to ropes and dragged them behind the trucks bouncing down the roads screaming until dead. I could not believe what we were watching. The sounds of these men screaming was way beyond Jamie Lee Curtis screaming in Halloween. The soldiers looked like they were enjoying doing this. They would shoot their guns right next to the ears of the prisoners or just wing them in the arms, legs, genitals or maybe just shoot their guns randomly in the direction of people and buildings as they drove down the road. It worked as planned. Everybody was intimidated big time.

After the parade passed we packed our bags as quickly as we could and headed west on the road to try to get to the ferry to cross the Congo River over into Zaire for what we hoped was some security. We walked for hours before a bus stopped to give us a ride. The bus was already packed with people, goats, chickens, pigs and every other farm animal or whatever so we rode up on top with the luggage. We had a great view of the countryside as we sped along the road next to the river. Everything went fine for a couple of hours until we came to a hill. The bus labored up the hill with its heavy load with us chanting "I think I can. I think I can." and then crested the top very slowly. As we started downhill we cheered thinking we were almost to the ferry. Then the bus started to pick up speed. Then it started to bounce up and down as it roared down the hill faster and faster sans brakes. All of a sudden it flew up into the air and came down hard into some wet muddy ruts and the undercarriage of the bus just stayed right there in the mud and the upper part of the bus flew down the road until gravity sucked it back down to earth with a loud crashing thud. We went flying off the front of the bus and landed down the hill in the soft muddy road without getting hurt. The people and animals in the bus however, did not fare so well. There were a lot of injuries like split open heads and broken limbs. To our amazement everybody that could move starting running down the road away from the crash leaving all the injured people behind. The driver quickly told us to start running or the army would kill us when they caught up to us in a few minutes time. We looked at each other and at the injured people and animals in the twisted heap of a bus and thought we need to help these people but the morning parade was still very very fresh in our minds and (to my dismay in retrospect) we took off running with the rest of the able bodied people.

This has haunted me for years that we left those people behind but we were victims of the violence that day too. Our perceptions were altered, even if only temporarily altered, they were still altered. We had a gut reaction to gross violence and we really can't be faulted for it. People stampede in fires and we were literally under fire. We hurried down the road as fast as we could in the heat and humidity of the equatorial jungles we were traveling through. With our youth and light loads we quickly left the crowd behind us.

About an hour later a land rover came down the road going East as we walked West. We flagged it down and told the driver and his passenger what was happening down the road in the direction he was heading. The driver was a missionary from Zaire going to Bangui to buy some supplies for his church and family compound on the other side of the river in Zaire. He turned around and decide to go back home to his family to protect them and offered us a ride to his place in Zaire. We quickly accepted his offer to get us the hell out of there.

We drove for a couple of hours. It was getting to be mid to late afternoon now. We got to the ferry crossing and had to go through immigration and customs to cross the border. We did not mention what we were fleeing from and the officials did not seem to know about the days events. The border stuff went fine until we got to the ferry. The ferry owner told the missionary one price, my friend another, and me a higher price yet to cross the river. I balked. I refused to pay more than the missionary was paying to cross. They were asking me to pay about twenty bucks while he paid two and my friend only paid five. The gross unfairness of the whole thing just pissed me off after the stress of the day so far. I told them to go stick their ferry boat and I would swim across the river. I walked out to the end of the dock and started to disrobe. I was handing my clothes to the missionary and he was telling me I should not even think of crossing the river by swimming because of crocs and snakes and worse than either of them the rapid current that would push and pull any swimmer, even Johnny Weissmuller to a certain date with death. I continued with my show of swimming. The owner of the ferry saw a quick five dollar profit going down the throat of a croc or down the throat of a river but he still saw his money floating away from him so at the last minute he capitulated and we negotiated a quick deal. I paid him two bucks and ten aspirins to cross on his ferry. He was happy. I was happy and everyone was ready to get the hell out of there.

The ferry pulled away from the shore and when were about half way across a large dugout canoe with about twenty or more people on it came floating by. The men with the paddles were madly swinging at something in the water and all the people were standing up and screaming. Now what the hell was going on? We looked and then to our amazement we saw the snake. A huge snake was trying to grab a quick easy lunch off of the canoe. We watched it float by as the fight went on but before it played out the canoe went around a bend in the river and we never saw what happened. Did the snake get a meal or did the people beat it off? I never found out. I just could not believe that one more insane thing had happened in this already crazy crazy day. But at least speculating on the outcome distracted us from the day's death and destruction that we had already experienced.

We continued down the road in the direction of the missionary's place after breezing though the officials on the Zaire side of the river. In the tropics it goes from daylight to night in about ten or fifteen minutes and it was that time of day. I was still wired up as we twisted and turned and bounced down the trail of a rutted road through the dark jungles of Zaire. It was Conrad's Heart of Darkness in real life. I could not stop thinking about the African Queen and all those stupid poorly made Tarzan movies as I experienced the real thing. I was riding shotgun, hoping to see the eyes of a lion or something in the headlights of the Landrover. I was getting tired physically but I was just so full of adrenaline that I could not relax. What next? Blow darts or painted faces hiding in the dark bushes. Do elephants really respond to Ungouwa like in those Johnny Weissmuller movies?

Calabar, Nigeria

Calabar

I stood still where the heavily armed guard directed me to stand while the “judge” announced his decision about the charges against me. He sat at his makeshift judicial bench in his silly looking gray wig and judicial robes and smirked at me while he announced his decision. He addressed the nearly empty room as if he was the Pope delivering an Easter sermon to a crowd of adoring worshipers instead of the jerk he really was speaking in a room that was empty except for the young guard and myself. He looked around the room with his hands folded reverently, his eyes fixed and his head bobbing as if he was silently acknowledging invisible accolades. “This court finds you guilty as charged for the high crimes against our country and our people. For the crimes you have been convicted of today, this court now pronounces your sentence. You will be executed at dawn tomorrow morning by firing squad.” He then looked directly at me and flashed a purely evil smile at me before he quickly stood and left the room. A door slammed behind him.

The words reverberated in my brain without sinking in. How could this be happening? It couldn’t be true. Lynching no longer exists. The only difference between this execution and a lynching by the clan back in the days was the clan wore white gowns with pointed hats and this guy wore a black one with a gray wig. This is nothing short of a lynching except it is by a firing squad instead of a noose. The guard shot me a sheepish apologetic look as he nudged me with his rifle barrel to get me walking and then led me out of the room in silence at rifle point. The guard looked to be very young. Too young to be carrying a weapon and leading people to their executions. He glanced up at me with more nervous sheepish looks as if to say I am sorry. I understood him. He was just doing his job. There was nothing he could do to help me at this point. He wasn’t responsible for this atrocity happening to me and who knows how many others that were murdered by this madman. Guards just doing their job and following orders need to start accepting responsibility for their actions at some point and despite his young age my guard knew I had been shanghaied by his C.O. so he should have done something besides shrugging to prevent the execution of an innocent man. Now it looked like I needed a miracle to save my life.

Nigeria can be a brutal country. The Biafran war was a good example of pure human cruelty. Reliable estimates are as high as three million casualties including both the military and civilian population. It started from a dispute that was basically just about the distribution of oil money to different groups of people that were not getting along. It escalated rapidly into a death zone, mostly for young children and poor defenseless people that starved to death due to a blockade of supplies. It only lasted a few years and then just as quickly as it started it suddenly ended. I entered the country just three weeks after the official end of the war. I expected to see a country in ruins and the people full of animosity. Instead for the first part of my journey I saw a bustling energetic mix of differing ethnic people getting along and going about their day to day lives with little signs of the recently ended war except for some blown up bridges and occasional blown up tanks or military trucks along the sides of the roads. That is until I went to the Southwestern corner of the country where I was arrested for spying.

I was a couple of days out of Lagos walking along the road to the last place I wanted to visit in Nigeria, the small town of Calabar, which is close to Port Harcourt and Ikang in the Southwestern corner of the country near where the Biafran war was mostly played out. I stopped for a cup of tea and a sandwich from a roadside café. The café was a typical palapa for a roadside in Nigeria, just a rough, hand sawn plank for a counter and a couple of more planks propped up on blocks for tables all under a simple thatched roof. The tropical hardwood the café was made from would have been worth a small fortune back in the States, but here it was just cheap practical wood. The customers just stood up or sat at the tables family style. I ordered my tea and sandwich and instead of sitting on the ground, I stood up leaning again the tree growing in the middle that supported the simple thatched roof. I was enjoying the showmanship of the man pouring the tea while he held the pot and the cup as far apart as he could stretch his arms. He never spilled a drop. He enjoyed showing off his talents as much as I enjoyed watching him perform. He was all smiles and positive energy. Then I heard a vehicle pull up out in front of the café and I slowly turned my head in the direction of the entrance when all of a sudden everyone in the café disappeared including the young man operating the café. I was alone in the café as a tall, large and very imposing Nigerian soldier stepped into the scanty shade wearing the imposing ostentatious ribbon and medal covered military uniform of a high ranking officer. He looked at me looking at him and he instantly pulled out his very large chrome pistol and fired directly at me. I had no time to move or anything. The large caliber bullet struck the tree I was leaning against about two inches or less above my head and wood splinters showered down on me. My ears were ringing and my brain was racing trying to figure a way out of this situation I was suddenly thrust into. My tea and bread were full of splinters and it was too late to run. I reached up and calmly and casually brushed the splinters out of my eyes and off my face. Fully expecting another shot to ring out and take me down, I decided to just keep drinking my tea. I had to sip the black tea, sweetened with condensed milk, between my teeth to filter out the splinters. The soldier didn’t shoot but instead went around the counter and poured himself some tea without taking his glaring dark eyes off of me or lowering his pistol. The hate he exuded was palpable. He was tall and heavy without being overly fat. It was obvious that he was very arrogant and loved to bully by using his power over weaker individuals. I briefly thought about running but he would clearly have been able to shoot me before I could get away and being the only white person for a couple hundred miles didn’t help me either. He came around and stood right in front of me glaring with a furrowed angry brow and snarling with the corner of his mouth. What an asshole is all I could think. His reputation clearly preceded him the way everybody ran off into the jungles.

Finally he spoke. “What are you doing here in Nigeria?”

“I am a tourist.”

“There is a war going on. There are no tourists here, only soldiers and spies. If you are not a soldier then you must be an Israeli spy.”

“No I am neither a soldier nor or a spy. I am an American and the war has been over for several months now.”

He was just being a jerk. “Where is your vehicle? Where are your supplies and radio?”

“I don’t have a car. I am walking. The roads here are very dangerous in cars ever since they changed which side of the road to drive on back on Easter Sunday. I prefer to walk. It is safer than riding in a vehicle. I don’t have a radio or supplies of any sort. I only have my one bag here and nothing else.”

He just grunted like a wild pig. It was obvious that my casual insubordinate responses were not what he wanted from me. There probably was no response I could have said to appease this bully. I was not going to show weakness because that too would have infuriated him and encouraged him to stomp on me. I briefly thought about cracking some kind of joke to try to break the icy standoff between us but decided this guy had no sense of humor with anybody at any time. When he finished his tea and some already made sandwiches he found on the counter, he ordered me at gun point to get into his Jeep. I calmly complied by finishing my tea in a gulp and placing the tea cup on the counter with the money to pay for it, before lifting my pack off the floor and following him to his Jeep. On the walk to the Jeep, I had to spit out the wood splinters I got in my mouth from gulping my tea.

He drove south at breakneck speed. I had to hold on tightly or be thrown out of the vehicle. There were often farm animals and kids on the little used but rutted dirt road we were on. He never slowed down when they were on the road ahead of us. He just plowed through at high speed. Luckily he didn’t hit anyone or anything but only because they all ran or jumped out of the way. I could hear their obviously profane screaming at him as he proceeded on, oblivious to the dangers he presented to others. He didn’t care about anybody that was obvious. It took us about 45 minutes of driving in silence to get to his military compound.

The military base was out in the jungle away from any civilian buildings. It was enclosed by a high fence made out of stout hardwood saplings woven tightly together. There was a clear area with no trees or any other obstacles and finally a cluster of adobe buildings in the center. A soldier swung a gate open with a salute and we entered as the gate swung shut behind us. I thought about the compound in King Kong as the guard slipped a large log into a slot in order to lock the gate. The officer parked the Jeep, drew his pistol and at gun point ordered me out of it. I complied as calmly as I could under the circumstances.

He took all my things away from me and went through my pockets and cuffed me behind my back with some old rusty handmade hand cuffs. I wondered if the cuffs were left over from the slave trading days, they certainly looked old enough. As he went through my things he made comments here and there like, “Why do you Americans treat blacks in your country so badly?” Or like these, “How many blacks have you helped to lynch?” “Why do you work for those Jewish madmen?” “What were you spying on in my country for those stupid Israelis?” “We will find your vehicle very soon.” “How many of you are there out there?” I said almost nothing in response to his idiotic statements. When he finished rifling through my things, he left me with the guard then disappeared for about twenty minutes. When he returned, he looked ridiculous. He no longer was dressed in his military uniform but instead was dressed in the attire of a British judge, wig and all. A horse’s ass of many colors I thought to myself. The guard led me into a makeshift courtroom with the officer acting as the judge and a couple of other soldiers guarding the doors and no one else. He addressed the empty courtroom like it was full of important people. He told all these imaginary people I was an Israeli spy and he was going to preside over my trial. He read the charges he had just written down and then glared at me. He asked me a couple of stupid questions, “Why are you working for the Israelis?”

“I am not working for anybody?”

“Is your passport real or fake?"

“Of course it is real. I am not a spy so why would I need a fake passport? I am nothing but a tourist interested in Nigeria and Africa in general. I am not out to hurt anybody or anything. I just want to learn about African culture and its people. I am a student. I have my student ID card in my bag that you took from me.”

“We don’t need to see any more of your fraudulent documents. We know the truth. We know why you are here. We will find your supplies soon enough.”

He smirked at me and started ranting at me, “Very many black men like myself are treated very poorly by you and your fellow Jewish, white, friends. They have lynched many innocent black men for no reason except for their own entertainment. They treat us like animals. Black men got lynched in the US without a trial but I am fair. I am giving you a fair trial.

“Right! This kangaroo court isn’t exactly what I would call a fair trial. Where is my defense?”

At least I now knew his motive, revenge for crimes of the father. He convicted me of espionage for Israel without allowing any defense for me and no evidence presented to verify his accusations. He then sentenced me to death by firing squad execution at dawn the next morning. The whole trial was less than five minutes start to finish. Then the soldier walked me out of the room and showed me a post that was full of bullet holes with dark stains on the surrounding ground. The so called Judge had told me they would execute me in the morning, this was obviously where. If they were trying to intimidate me, it was starting to work. Then I was taken, speechless, to a holding cell where the rusty handcuffs were removed and the heavy wooden door swung shut and was locked with a loud clunking noise. I was left alone in a room about eight feet by ten feet with a single window up high on the wall. There was a crock of water and a crock that was obviously the toilet by its smell. No chair or bed or anything else including any type of light was in the room.

I stood there in shock for a few minutes. I had been warned about Africa being the white man’s graveyard but I didn’t think I would go out like this…executed at dawn as a Jewish spy no less. As the sun went down and my cell went dark with no lights around, I realized that I had to do something besides sit there crying and feeling sorry for myself. I wasn’t going to sit there quietly and let them shoot me in the morning. I started circling the room. There was a small window about six feet off the floor blocked by more hardwood dowels built into the walls that were made out of what looked like adobe. I wiggled the wooden bars but they were pretty solid. One would move just a bit. I dumped out the water and stood on the empty upside down pot to reach the window. I started digging at it and wiggling it. I worried that someone would hear me working away but what the hell, they were going to kill me one way or the other so I kept at it. I have read many times that your life flashes in front of you when you are going to die. My life was not flashing by. I was concentrating on getting the window bar out. My hands were getting sore and bloody from digging away but I had to keep going. It took me about five hours but with constant effort and the motivation of being executed if I didn’t get out of this little cell, I managed to make a hole big enough to get out though the opening. I poked my head out the opening half expecting to get hit by a rifle butt or something like that. I did not see anybody around in the dim moonlight. I climbed out. I stood outside the cell for a minute to get my bearings in the dark.

The compound consisted of a group of buildings clustered in the center with a well lit clear area about 50 yards or more wide surrounding the buildings and then finally there was the ten or twelve foot tall fence. The clear area was being watched by guards when we arrived and I assumed they had a night shift working too. I decided to just walk, not run, across the clear area. I made it to the fence and started examining it for a way to climb it or go through it. I found an area where water ran under the fence when it rained and within a couple of minutes work with the softened earth, I was on the outside of the compound, free to go.

Now here is where I finally got angry. I started to fume. My fears and anxieties all erupted into anger now. Young angry males can be really stupid. I was a very, very, angry young man and I did something really stupid. I went back inside the military compound to get my stuff. On the way back across the clear area walking towards the buildings clustered in the center I decided to carve a Star of David on the wall of my cell just to piss off the asshole officer. I crawled back into my cell. I picked up one of the bars from the window that had a point and I went to make the star. There was only one problem! I could not remember how to make a Star of David. Was it five or was it six points? Then I remembered that it was two triangles one on top of the other. I quickly scratched one into the hard adobe wall as visibly as I could make it. I crawled back out of the cell and snuck around to the room where my things had been left. I slowly opened the unlocked door and inside I found my things in the room I had been handcuffed in. I walked back out the same way again. Outside the compound once more, I looked my things over in the dim moonlight and discovered my passport and money were not in my things. Then I remembered that the officer had taken them with him when he left the room to change into his judicial robes. I needed to go back into the compound yet again and climb into the officer’s personal quarters to get my passport and money back.

“What are you doing master?” A young boy about 8 or 9 years old startled me in the dark.

“I am escaping from here. They were going to execute me in the morning but I got away. I forgot my passport and papers inside though so I need to go back in one more time.”

“That is very dangerous. They might catch you this time. You were very lucky last time not to get caught. I watched you.”

“I need my passport and other papers that he took from me. I have to go back inside to get them.”

“I know the compound very well. I will go get them for you. It is safer for you to stay out here and wait for me. Where are these papers and what do they look like?”

“They are in a black folder about this big and the officer took them into his quarters with him.”

“I know where he put them. I will go get them. You wait here.” He took off under the fence without any further discussion.

I waited a few minutes and then I suddenly realized that the young boy was going to tell them about my escape and lead them to me for a reward or something. I started to panic. I looked around for a place to hide but there was no place around and besides if the kid ratted me out the entire base would come searching for me and they would surely find me. So I waited and hoped I could trust the young boy. After about ten minutes he crawled under the fence and smiled proudly as he handed me my things.

“I climbed into the officer’s quarters while the officer slept, and got your things out of his desk and the officer was snoring loudly when I left out the window again.”

I gave him $10 for his effort. I was outside the compound with all my stuff and the young boy was showing me the way to the dock where I planned on stealing a boat and going straight to Cameroon. Stealing a boat is not something I would do lightly. I am no thief. Morality is not intrinsic for me. When it comes to survival I would steal or do whatever is needed at the time but only for survival purposes.

“Could you show me the way to the harbor or someplace where there are boats? I want to steal a boat and go off into the mangroves so the soldiers can’t find me.”

“Yes master, I will show you where you can find some boats. The swamps are very dangerous. There are very dangerous criminals living in the swamps. You will not be safe.”

“Ya well I won’t be safe anywhere around here because they will come looking for me when they find I have escaped. It is the only place they won’t look for me. I have no choice.”

He led me to and through the town. Dogs barking were my biggest fear. I thought they would wake someone up or something and I would get recaptured. When we finally got to the small dock I started snooping around in the dark looking for a boat to steal when I happened across two smugglers with a big load of kitchen utensils. I scared them as much as they scared me. “The police are chasing me and are going to kill me. Can you help me get away in the mangroves?”

They clearly did not understand me. The boy tried to say something also but he only spoke English too and these men did not understand us. I figured that they spoke some Pidgin and some French. They had reacted to the word police when I was talking and they figured out that I was running from the police from my sign language. I pointed to myself and said “No policia! Policia voudrais kill me!” I held my arms up like I had a rifle and sighted down it and pulled the trigger then I rolled my eyes back like I was dead. They understood me. They started laughing but told me to wait and they would give me a ride to Cameroon. They unloaded their goods with a young couple that suddenly appeared out of the dark and we took off with my heroic young boy that had helped me escape waving goodbye from the small brick dock.

We pulled out away from the small brick dock in the long dugout canoe which was hand carved from a single giant log and we quickly disappeared into the misty darkness of the mangrove swamps with me in the middle and the two young men paddling, one on either end. They were very good at controlling the canoe and we were cutting through the inky black darkness very rapidly. I was relieved to be away from the maniac military officer but I may have jumped into a canoe with two more men just as or maybe even more dangerous than he was. I had no idea if I could trust these two. I also had no choice but to take the chance or die for sure at the hands of the crazy officer. These men at least smiled a friendly genuine appearing smile at me which is something the officer never did.

I started to reflect on my journey so far. Without a doubt I had some luck on my side. Not all the luck just fell into my lap. I earned a lot of the luck. I could have been executed in Nigeria. No one would have known about it except for the officer and his lackies. I would have just disappeared like Dr. Livingston did--only in my case nobody would have written a song about it. I managed to fight my way out of the situation using only my wits and my hands and did not get executed. I am sure that someone was executed in my place for allowing me to escape like I did, maybe the guard that was supposed to be watching the clearing or the guard that was supposed to be taking care of the jail. For all I know the young guard that was guarding me in the kangaroo trial saw me escape and did nothing to stop me because he knew I had been railroaded. The only thing I know for certain is that the jerk officer will need to have someone to blame for his failure. Of course he learned that Israeli secret agents are some slippery well trained professionals.

We were miles away gliding silently through the water except for the sound of their paddles deftly dipping rhythmically into the brackish water. As the sun came up at dawn, I listened for the sound of rifles but even if he did execute the guards in my place, we were too far away by now to hear. I am sure there was a big search going on for me back in the vicinity of the military compound but they would never think about me going into the mangrove swamps because they were considered impassable. And I found out why as we pushed deeper and deeper into Conrad’s proverbial heart of darkness. The swamp could easily be its own executioner. I didn’t exactly trust my two young men that were taking me deeper and deeper into the darkness of the mangroves. It would be easy for them to get rid of me out in this wild, dark, and unknown place.

As I sat there balancing as best I could, I watched the shoulders and arms of my saviors working the paddles. They clearly did nothing else but paddle canoes fulltime because all the muscles used to paddle were glistening with sweat and were well developed, large, well coordinated and able to paddle seemingly forever. The rest of their bodies looked emaciated by comparison. I thought about Popeye’s overdeveloped arm. When we first started out I was moving around a lot trying to find a comfortable position to sit in and they were getting agitated with my disturbances. I noticed their frustration and stopped moving deciding that the ride was worth some pain. Controlling a dugout canoe with three people sitting in it requires a degree of balance and team work and I was a novice. The gunnels of the boat were only an inch or two above the waterline and if the canoe rocked even slightly it could take on water and roll over in a flash. How they navigated I never figured it out. We were passing through a maze of tree roots, trees, vines, canals, rivers, islands and swamp that to me all looked the same. They would turn here or there down small canals sometimes barely wide enough for the canoe to pass. They sometimes pulled on branches to get through tight spaces. Branches and plants hung down and we had to brush them aside to get under them. I was a little afraid of getting bit by a snake but I never saw one close enough to bite me. I did see snakes but mostly small snakes in the water that fled when we approached. I didn’t know if there were crocodiles around or hippos like I had seen killing people in Tarzan movies or the African Queen with Bogart. A lot of scenes from Tarzan movies were going through my head. I half expected to see painted faces suddenly appear and capture us or to have blow gun darts hit us. I had no idea what to expect so I just took it all in stride and tried to make friends with the two men.

In the morning dawn there were sounds of raucous birds calling and of monkeys howling. The mud which was exposed as the tide lowered was literally covered with holes occupied by bright colorful crabs and some small fish that walked out of the water on top of the mud using their fins like legs, sometimes even hopping along the top of the mud flats. There were also shrimp everywhere. We saw fresh water dolphins that playfully checked us out up close and then swam off squeaking their high pitched calls that reminded me of Flipper or maybe a laughing hyena. The monkeys that we saw were long lanky black and white ones that were very loud. There were lots of birds off in the distance but I only saw the ones that looked like some type of gull or the wading birds that were bold enough to allow us to pass close to them as they ate the plentiful shrimp, fish and colorful crabs whenever they could catch one off guard.

Bodily functions were a minor distraction in a small canoe. I was holding mine in the hope that they would have to go first and show me the technique required to piss and defecate from an unstable canoe like this one. In the end I could no longer wait and I had to go. I motioned for them to stop near the edge so I could climb out and take a piss and maybe drop a load while I was at it. They shook their fingers at me and said no with a very serious look of concern on their faces. I figured out from their body language that the problem is the mud is deep and it will suck you down. A few minutes later we pulled up to some mangrove roots and one of them showed me how to climb up on the roots and hang my ass out to shit. I figured out my own way to piss. They watched me dropping my load and they started to argue. I determined that the one in the front wanted to just paddle off and leave me there because they had all my things in the canoe. The one in the back liked me and did not want to abandon me out in the middle of the swamp which would have been a death sentence for me in all probability. I shot my load out with a big squeeze and got back in before they ended their fight with me losing out. I was lucky again that at least one of them liked me. I had worried a bit that this scenario was a possibility, but so far, I survived.

On the second day the tide went out so far we were trapped on top of the mud. Almost as soon as the canoe stopped the men quietly ate some cassava they had wrapped in leaves and went straight to sleep sitting up in the canoe. They had to be tired. They had been paddling nonstop since just before dawn throughout the day and night that followed and it was almost mid day now of the second day when we finally stopped. I tried to doze but my legs, feet and back were all killing me. I managed a bit of shut eye but could not get the kind of hard sleep my friends were getting. I had a little food with me, some crackers and cookies and some canned sardines that I munched on. I offered some to my guides but they seemed reluctant to take anything from me. They ate nothing but the cold cassava wrapped in banana leaves, which is nothing but starch. As soon as the canoe floated again we were off. We took a break from paddling several times as the tide went out and we balanced the dugout on the mud until the tide refloated us.

On the fourth day my friends suddenly perked up and started to increase the intensity of their paddling. I found out why shortly. We came to their home village in the middle of the swamps. The people that lived here earned their way mostly by smuggling, fishing and piracy. They were also known, according to what I heard later, for leaving the swamp periodically to go on raiding parties to villages and towns nearby the mangroves where they would attack and kill people to steal all their possessions and kidnap any young girls they found. They were a tough bunch that was for sure. They were well armed. When we approached they pointed their rifles at me and started to argue with my guides. I figured from the way they were talking that they were afraid I would bring the military or the police to their hidden village. My new found buddies defended me telling their friends that I was on the run from the police and military. The men with the rifles laughed and let me pass. We were finally stopped and after four days I got to stand up and move my legs. At first I just could not get up. My guides jumped out and tied up the canoe and the one from the back of the canoe helped stabilize me enough to get out onto the dry land. I stretched and massaged my sore legs and walked around slowly to try to get the blood flowing again. The young men went and hungrily ate some fish stew and some fruit and bread and went to sleep. I sort of stood around my things in the canoe, waiting, not knowing what was next. A few hours later my guys came back and we got in the dugout again. It took all day paddling but the man in front suddenly got agitated again. He and the other one argued about how to deliver me to the safety of the far side. The one in front did not want to risk getting captured by the police or military while dropping me off. I came up with a plan. After some very animated sign language with a few words of French and some sound imitations we agreed on a plan. We would wait until dark and then they would drop me off at the dock and they would leave. I would wait until it was light before walking away from the dock. It sounded good to me and they agreed. I stood on the small dock after they dropped me and searched in my bag for something to give them. I had nothing really except my clothes. I dug out my money and gave them $5 each and they were happy as hell. Not bad for me, $10 for a lifesaving canoe ride almost six days long through some of the most remote area in Africa. I was a happy camper.

I climbed under my mosquito netting and fell asleep. In the morning I started to walk up the trail from where this small dock was located. I heard a commotion in the trees and looked in the vicinity of the sounds. It was a family of gorillas. They were a long way away but I could see them clearly. Lowland gorillas were almost extinct. They were a rare treat for me to see. I tried to move closer but they heard or smelled me and they moved off quickly. I continued to walk along the faint trail and started to see palm tree plantations. Palm oil was going for a good price because it was used to make napalm for the war in South East Asia.

I walked about another mile and I saw a simple cabin with a frail looking older white man sitting on the porch drinking tea and eating bread. He jumped when I walked up to him and said, “hello.” He was very afraid of me. I put my hands up in the air and said “bon jour” to see if maybe he spoke French instead of English. I told him, “There is no need to be afraid of me. I am not here to hurt you. I don’t know where I am and I need to know how to get to the main road to get into a city or town.”

That threw him for a loop. He loosened up and started talking to me in British English, “I speak English. Not French. What are you doing here? Were you in a shipwreck or something? There is no place you could have come from.”

“I just came across the mangroves from Nigeria. I rode with some men that live out in the swamps. They gave me a ride in their dugout canoe. It took us six days to cross and they paddled day and night. I am totally exhausted right now. I haven’t slept for a week. It is a long story.”

The man looked confused by my statements. He gave me tea and bread with marmalade as he talked. “Well you are in the country of Camaroon right now. How did you end up in my front yard?” he asked again. I again told him the story from the tea shop to this point in time which in reality was only one week. He was stunned. “Impossible!” he said. “Those murderous sons of bitches that live in the swamps are nothing but killers and thieves. There is no way they would help somebody without cutting their throat. I live in constant fear of them coming up to me like you just did and murdering me. Why didn’t they just kill you and steal all your things?”

What could I say? “I am lucky I guess.”

“You are also lucky that I speak English because most people around these parts only speak French and Pidgin. How were you able to communicate with the thugs from the swamp? I know they don’t speak English, just that pidgin crap.”

“I was just nice to them.” Is all I could respond. “I gave them a chance to be nice and they were. I think we had a common connection in that the police were hunting for me just like they were looking for them which they could relate to.”

“Well you are one lucky son of a bitch if what you are telling me is the truth. Those blood thirsty bastards. Myself I have a hard time believing you. But where else could you have come from? Are you in some kind of military or something?”

I answered with what was becoming my standard response, “No I am just a tourist.” We then drifted into small talk as we drank our tea and ate the food. Later in the day after I rested a bit, he gave me a ride up to the company compound in his little Citron car. I met all the Europeans that worked the farm and a few of the Camaroonian workers. Afterwards, we had a nice French dinner. We all talked or maybe I should say I responded to questions all evening about my experiences. I was ready to die from exhaustion by now. One of the French women told me that the first man I met, Tom, was a complete hermit and lived down in that cabin alone never talking to anyone and only coming to the company store to buy enough food for a couple weeks at a time. She said this was the first time she had ever seen him be social. I somehow sparked some life into the old man. I ended up going back to his house for the night and then after a great night’s sleep and another continental breakfast the company offered me a ride to the nearest town in a few days time.

They gave me a tour of their farm. It was huge. Miles across in every direction! Palm trees everywhere. They had a factory where they burned the scrap branches for fuel to melt the palm nuts down into oil. The factory had a plume of rancid smoke billowing out of a tall chimney. Their biggest problem was they needed lots of help to climb the trees and harvest the nuts. A typical worker could not pick very many a day because it was too much exertion to climb the tall trees. They also wanted me to show them where I saw the gorillas. I know Africans well enough not to show them where an endangered animal is because often they will kill them. I showed them the wrong place and they got out and looked and didn’t see any sign of gorillas so they thought I was not being truthful. I just told them I couldn’t remember because I was so exhausted at the time. I was starting to recover from my intense week. I smiled and said, “Let’s look over there. Maybe that is where they are.” I was enjoying myself again. It is good to still be alive.