Last Chance to See - Douglas Adams [30]
Zaïre, incidentally, is about eighty times the size of Belgium.
Like most colonies, Zaïre had imposed on it a stifling bureaucracy, the sole function of which was to refer decisions upward to its colonial masters. Local officials rarely had the power to do things, only to prevent them from being done until bribed. So once the colonial masters are removed, the bureaucracy continues to thrash around like a headless chicken with nothing to do but trip itself up, bump into things, and, when it can get the firepower, shoot itself in the foot. You can always tell an ex-colony from the inordinate numbers of people who are able to find employment stopping anybody who has anything to do from doing it.
Five hours of sleepy bumping in the van brought us to Bukima, a village in the foothills of the Virungas which marks the point where the road finally gives up, and from which we had to travel on by foot.
Set a little way above the village, in front of a large square, was an absurdly grand ex-colonial building, empty except for an absurdly small office tucked into the back where a small man in an Army uniform pored over our gorilla permits with a grim air of bemusement, as if he’d never seen one before, or at least not for well over an hour. He then occupied himself with a shortwave radio for a few minutes before turning to us and saying that he knew exactly who we were, had been expecting us, and that because of our contacts with the World Wildlife Fund in Nairobi, he was going to allow us an extra day with the gorillas, and who the hell were we anyway, and why had no one told him we were coming?
This seemed, on the face of it, to be unanswerable, so we left him to try and figure it out for himself while we went to look for some porters to help us with our baggage for the three-hour walk up to the warden’s hut, where we were to spend the night. They weren’t hard to find. There was a large band of them gathered hopefully around our van and our driver was eager to know how many we needed to carry all our bags. He seemed to emphasise the word all rather strongly.
There was a sudden moment of horrible realisation. We had been so keen to clear out of Goma as fast as possible that we had forgotten a major part of our plan, which was to leave the bulk of our gear at a hotel in town. As a result of this oversight, we had more baggage with us than we actually needed to carry up to the gorillas.
A lot more.
As well as basic gorilla-watching kit—jeans, T-shirt, a sort of waterproof thing, a ton of cameras, and tins of pears—there was also an immense store of dirty laundry, a suit and shoes for meeting my French publisher in Paris, aftershave, a dozen computer magazines, a thesaurus, half the collected works of Dickens, and a large wooden model of a Komodo dragon. I believe in traveling light, but then I also believe I should give up smoking and shop early for Christmas.
Hiding our considerable embarrassment, we chose a team of porters to carry this little lot up into the Virunga volcanoes for us. They didn’t mind. If we were prepared to pay them to carry Dickens and aftershave up to the gorillas and back down again, then they were perfectly happy to do it. White men have done much worse things in Zaïre than that, but maybe not much sillier.
The trek up to the visitors’ hut was strenuous, and involved plenty of stops for sharing our cigarettes and Coca-Cola with the bearers, while they frequently redistributed the bags of Dickens and computer magazines among themselves and experimented with different and novel methods of keeping them on their heads.
For much of the time we were tramping through wet