… continued from the last Congo Memoir … Things had been quiet. The research had gone well. It was getting very near time to leave The Congo. Biker had driven one of the vehicles out and caught a plane home. Only Joan and I were left among the Wazungu, and even the workers had dropped…

… continued … Kununzu was our new guard. Lula had gone on to another assignment, and since there were almost no bazungu (white foreigners) left, I suppose the park authorities figured Kunuzu would do. Kunuzu reminded me of Barney Fife in some ways, not the least of which being that he kept the one bullet…

… Continued from the previous installment … One day I left Kenyatsi in The Zodiac on a mission. My mission was to pick up the head of the park, who lived at Ishango part time, and drive him to the fishing village for the purpose of picking up some important supplies (beer). So I motored…

Condoms. Three or four varieties, about a hundred all told, all in their little packages, ready and waiting. For what, I’m not quite sure. One wonders what the boy was expecting… But enough of that. On to the next installment of the Congo Memoirs….

… continued … His name shall be Rudy for the present purposes. He was a kid who was sent by his big brother, a scientist of some sort, to join our glorious field expedition, to learn some stuff, have a good time, get his Wellies wet. He and I spoke on the phone at length…

… continued … Lula and I had two choices. We could walk way inland on relatively flat grassy ground, crossing the two or three tree lines that cut the savanna into large rectangular parcels at a place where the terrain would be easy, or we could walk a shorter distance, hugging the lake, but instead…

…. (continued) … The Rwenzori Massif, a giant mountain indeed, the largest single mountain on the planet, rose to our north this one fine afternoon, gloriously visible for the first time in months; Visible in fact for the first time ever for many of the people on the expedition and for some of the children…

Almost. Having survived the Peter Debacle, let’s move on to yet another debacle. Lions are much much scarier than snakes. But I think what I really want to talk about here is not so much lions or snakes, but fear itself. I never would have thought I’d be ‘fraid o’ lions. I’ve seen them on…

Aside from being the Bane of the Earthwatchers, Peter Williamson was a paleontologist, protege of Stephen Jay Gould, of British birth and, as I think I’ve mentioned before, the personality on which Monty Python … the whole Monty, not just the Python part … was based. I’m sure of that.

Dear reader, I know I promised you snakes in this particular post, but but before I get to the snakes, I have to make a digression to mention the elephants. The elephants in the Upper Semliki River Valley in the Eastern Congo at the time our expedition (late 1980s) are especially interesting because at the…

I call him Zorba because I don’t want to use his real name, and he reminds me of an extra savvy Zorba the Greek from the movie. But I should call him Ex-Zorba, because of the strange way people in this country were named over the previous few decades. When The Big Man took charge…

A waterbuck Let’s see, where was I. Oh, right, I was talking about Ishango. Ishango is the jumping off point for the whole upper Semliki area, as well as the focus of much of the research being done on this expedition. The trip to Ishango was long and harrowing. Everyone first traveled to Nairobi, Kenya.…

…. let’s see … where was I … Oh right, the crater and the crocodile. This is a long story. Six thousand years long. And it’s pretty gruesome. Everybody dies. Twice.

Continued from here. After slipping away from the dock in The Big Park, we motored down the channel a ways, and soon came across a boat heading the other direction. These were local fishermen heading back to the village in a typical pirogue, which is basically a very large canoe. But this was a bit…

… You may be wondering why we had to abandon ship to begin with. Well, it was the storm. Clearly, I’ll have to tell you that story soon … Well, OK, let’s move on and see if we can place the boat in the lake in the storm in some kind of context.