Travels With My Hat: A Lifetime on the Road. Christine Osborne
out here playing the Messiah and watching bushfires. Now don’t you be taking them Gujis lightly.’ He looked sternly at Lloyd.
‘You’re takin’ our friend here to the Neche Reserve. Well, that’s where we saw them. You ask Sister Shelagh now. She’ll be after tellin’ you. She and another of the good sisters went to a Guji village to inspect a clinic. Suspended on six trees were four legs, two torsos and three heads. Work that out. And only last week we found a young lad in the parish who had bled to death in the garden. Turnin’ him over we found he was missin’ his member. The Norwegian doctor here has treated several men who have had their penises amputated by the Gujis. Christine’s all right, Lloyd, but you’d better watch out. Ho! Ho!’
There are moments in travel to far-away places when the mind cannot keep pace with the physical flight—it may find itself in a body seated somewhere foreign, and while not exactly an out-of-body experience, the two are somehow separate. This was how I felt on hearing Father Gannon’s stories, but I’d seen so much since leaving London it was no surprise.
After a second night fighting Arba Minch mosquitoes, I was ready to leave long before Fineberg and a companion came to collect me. The plan was to do some crocodile-spotting on Lake Chamo and to visit the adjacent Nechisar Plains set on a plateau overlooking the Rift Valley.
‘You’re not driving through Guji territory are you?’asked Fineberg’s friend, a tall, lean Swedish pilot, known as Captain Karlsson.
‘There shouldn’t be any Gujis this far north,’ said Fineberg, strapping a canvas water-bag onto the bumper bar of the Land Rover.
Karlsson belonged to a church relief team making food drops to starving nomads in this remote corner of Ethiopia, abutting on the Kenyan border.
‘Around here it’s not so difficult,’ he told us on the way to the lake. ‘But elsewhere rivers and villages on our old maps can be as much as 15 kilometres (9 miles) off course and when this happens, without radio contact, we fly entirely by the seat of our pants.’
‘When we’re searching for a settlement, our routine is to pick a landmark, go left, drift for thirty minutes, then go north. Sometimes we land near a settlement only to find everyone has left because of the tsetse fly. It also hap-pens, like your own experience in the Ogaden, that we reach a place just on dusk. These bush strips are so short that in this event, we just cross our fingers and go down as fast as possible.’ He ran a hand through his blond crew cut.
‘Occasionally we also find ourselves carrying a patient or two. One man had been hit in the brain with an axe. Another, working for the Swedish mission, had his genitals hacked off, but survived a week lying out in the bush. We later heard he’d married and got his brother to fertilise his wife who had three children by him.’
The smaller of two Rift Valley lakes in South Omo, Lake Chamo is fed by a jungle-lined channel pouring into it from the higher elevation of Lake Abaya. Fineberg had organised a boat, but with room only for two, Karlsson agreed to wait with the Land Rover.
As I was about to step on board, a man popped out of the bush and unfurled a python skin twice as long as the jetty.
‘Souvenir, gimme twenty dollars,’ he said and I noticed tribal scars, like crossed bananas, on his chest.
Powered by an old outboard, we set off, travelling some way along the lakeshore before veering into a reed-lined channel where the propeller churned up clouds of insects. Wearing only a T-shirt and swimming costume, I wished I’d brought a jacket, but the thought had not occurred to me in the oppressive heat.
As we chugged further along the narrow waterway, the boatman pointed to the carcass of an enormous Nile perch washing among the reeds. ‘Dem grow much bigger dan dat. Bigger dan dis boat,’ he grinned. ‘Fishing easy here.’
To demonstrate, he swatted a dragonfly with his shoe, threaded it on a hook, and immediately pulled up a struggling tilapia. Then he put a finger to his lips, although it was him doing all the talking. Ahead a huge crocodile lay asleep on the bank. The world’s largest freshwater crocodiles are said to inhabit Lake Chamo: this one was no exception.
‘Easily four metres (fifteen feet),’ whispered Fineberg crouching in the bow.
As we drifted closer, terrified it would wake up and jump into our boat, I begged the boy to start the motor, but my request had the opposite effect. He picked up a paddle and slapped it on the mud.
‘Hey, wake up crocodile. Mister and Missus want to see you,’ he yelled.
Startled, the crocodile rose up and dived in, drenching us with water. Other crocodiles, disturbed by the noise, did similar bellyflops, setting the boat rocking and our boatman shrieking as only an African can. Lake Chamo was crocodile heaven. We counted ten more monsters, but by noon, all were cooling off with just their eyes showing above the surface. I longed to swim, but crocodiles apart, like most freshwater in Africa, the lake was teeming with the parasitic worm, bilharzia. I had to be content with Karlsson tipping the waterbag over me when we were back at the Land Rover.
The appeal of Nechisar is its proximity to Lake Chamo, but the track winding up was very rough. We stopped on several occasions for Karlsson to roll away rocks, but once on top we found ourselves in a stunning landscape of waving yellow grassland backed by blue-green mountain ranges.
‘Wow. It’s just like Nebraska,’ whooped Fineberg enjoying his day off.
Startled by the noise of our vehicle, a herd of zebra took to its heels while a nervous wart-hog, tail stuck straight up like a flag, made a dash for safety. Farther away, thick black side-stripes identified Thompson’s gazelle. Dik-diks and hartebeest grazed peacefully out on the savannah where a large eland raised its head in curiosity.
However it was the birdlife that fascinated us. Fineberg pointed out a lilac-breasted roller and a colony of weaverbirds, both inhabitants of high-altitude grasslands. We saw golden-breasted starlings, red-beaked hornbills, paradise flycatchers, shining sunbirds and others with equally brilliant plumage. I spotted a black-chested snake eagle and Karlsson saw a Kori bustard with a group of bee-eaters, riding on its back. Quails whirred out of the undergrowth and we disturbed a helmeted guinea fowl, which scuttled across the road, trailed by nine cheeping young.
Suddenly my attention was caught by a circle of bare-chested men, standing 300 metres (328 yards) away under a thorn tree. Focusing my binoculars on them, I saw they were clutching bloodstained spears and staring intently at something on the ground.
‘Guji!’ hissed Karlsson.
Gamewatching stopped as Fineberg drove on in silence. We needed to make our way back to the lake road without showing sign of alarm. From being one of joy at the wildlife, the atmosphere was tense and as we proceeded in a wide arc around the Gujis, no one mentioned a pair of giraffes that seemed to float across the horizon.
‘Want a smoke?’ asked Karlsson.
He passed a joint across to Fineberg, filling the vehicle with the sickly scent of hashish and convinced we’d all be hacked to death, I dictated a final message into my pocket tape-recorder.
Now we were passing the place where I saw the Gujis, but strangely there was only the thorn tree, pricked out against the blue sky. Where could they have gone?
‘Can we quickly go and see what they’ve killed?’ I asked.
‘They might be lying in the grass,’ said Karlsson. ‘Where else can they be? The place is flat as a pancake.’
Reaching the track again, Fineberg slipped into low gear and skidding and sliding on the muddy road, we began the descent.
Halfway down, a man clutching a spear, stepped up in front of us. ‘Shall I stop?’ asked Fineberg.
‘Keep going,’ yelled Karlsson.
‘He might want a lift,’ said Fineberg naively.
‘Let him walk,’ I shouted and pressing down on the accelerator, Fineberg shot past the man, showering him with stones.
Even back