Bananas Bagrilla

This is how my poor little sister used to pronounce Bananas Gorilla, her favourite character in the Richard Scarry books. Well, now I have seen Bananas Bagrilla in real life. It was the most expensive hour of my life, and is even more than more than my ludicrously priced previous hourly rate as a consultant. But so worth it. I went to Rwanda and met Sharon and Fred in the Novotel in Kigali. I nearly didn’t make it: my connection from Dar to Kilimanjaro, from where Rwandair flies to Kigali, had a nice safe three hour gap between one flight landing and the other taking off. Except that my first flight was two hours and 58 minutes late. It was top quality drama. Because both airports are very small, they could be quite organised about it and I was whisked off the first plane, rushed through Immigration and rushed onto the Rwandair flight as they were loading the final baggage on. There wasn’t another flight from Tanzania for three days, so I would have had to have gone through Nairobi and got there a day late, with attendant grumpiness about missing out on fun. So I was very, very pleased indeed to get on the plane and just sat there feeling happy and relieved.

Rwanda was astonishingly beautiful, even by African landscape standards. I had a big blub in the Genocide Museum, but really, you would too. I was OK with all the history. I was even just about dry watching the footage of children with chunks carved out of their heads by machetes. I held it in for the darkened room filled with skulls and femurs. But this was a miracle for me and it didn’t last. The room of pictures of children with details of what they were like and how they died “Name: Fidelité. Age: two years old. Favourite food: milk. Characteristic: cuddly. How she died: head smashed against a wall.” absolutely did for me and I had to go and have a quiet moment in the loo. Strangely enough, there is not much of a gift shop there.

And it was marvellous to see Sharon and Fred and jolly intrepid of them to make such a trek. They brought me loads of presents, which was even better. After some cocktails and three coffee éclairs for pudding on the first night, we set off for the gorillas. Here I am at our lunch stop, with the Rwandan money safely in my bra.

Although I might look a little like a prostitute, it is very traditional to carry money in your bra here. For women.

And this is Fred and me in front of a spectacular view.

Rwanda is like this everywhere. It is wonderfully green and temperate, which after the heat and humidity of Dar was absolutely blissful. It is mountainous and the sides of the hills are all terraced to grow crops. You can look down and see hundreds of little lives going on, like looking into a picture coming alive at the beginning of a children’s film. And the roads are full of people walking from one village to the next, carrying their lives on their heads, babies in kangas on their backs, or men cycling with impossibly crazy loads.

Our trek to see the gorillas started at 5.30am, when we had to get up. This was quite painful but exciting: not like getting up early for a horrid train up North to be moaned at all day by the police or fire service. Stopping only for a laugh at Sharon, who was dressed for a day gorilla trekking in the jungle like this…

….(note the matching earrings and necklace set) we set off in our tour group of eight, flanked by two soldiers with guns. They said this was for buffalo, and I believed them, but Fred thought it was for Congolese guerrillas. They were jolly useful for suggesting the right path through the mud, anyway, although I still fell over three times. I just sat there the third time, until an outrider came and picked me up. Our guide was engagingly eccentric, and ate handfuls of unappealingly bristly vegetation to demonstrate what a gorilla’s life was like. And then the gorillas themselves! We spent an hour watching them, just a couple of metres away. The lead silverback was MASSIVE. He ran at us and Sharon promptly hid behind me, probably in case he tried to steal some of her matching jewellery set, or try on her vintage silk and lace top. I had misguided faith in a) having spent a lot of money, thus buying safety and b) being in a tour group. Surely nothing could go wrong! So I stayed still and it was all fine. I think the gorillas respecked my authoritah. There were two baby gorillas and I really wanted a human baby afterwards, if I could have had one with lots of hair and big canines. They were so lovely. They were cuddly and cute and fluffy and tumbled around furrily, rolling over and over and playing up for the wazungu. I could tell that my photos were going to be rubbish, so I gave up and let Fred do the work. This was great, because then I looked like I was really in tune with nature, not needing to justify it by seeing it through a lens etc etc.

Here is the main gorilla, though:

We went back to our lodge in a haze of love of nature, and in the afternoon went to a scenic beauty spot (it really was a guided tour!) which actually was properly good. I thought it would be a bit bor-RING, but it was extraordinary. We drove up to a peak of one of the hills, gazed at lakes and farms stretching so much further than I could ever see in Camberwell and then went to see some traditional dancing. I am a bit traditional-dancing’d out now, and was dragging my feet a bit, but this was super. It was on a flat area at the top of the hill, so you could see the views dropping away on all sides. The sky was bright bright perfect blue like Dar, but the light was much more gentle. It was how you might imagine a 1930s between-the-wars summer would look like. And a brave little three-year old boy slipped into the dancers because he obviously wanted to be like his big brother. He was a fine candidate for being a mini-warrior and pranced around with much brio.

Here I am looking happy in the lodge that night, with a huge warming glass of red wine just out of shot…

And this proves I really did go to Rwanda and not just to the zoo:

Then (Lisa, you must not read on) we flew back to the north of Tanzania. Sharon and Fred went off on safari and I went to stay with Max and Sam’s mum’s friend’s brother and his wife. They were great. I was only staying originally because my connections to Dar were difficult, but they were so welcoming that I stayed two nights and greatly enjoyed the (relative) cold. It was so blissful sleeping properly and not waking up disorientated from the heat. Derek runs a safari company that does real hunting. I didn’t know this still happened, and was amazed, but it’s all part of a bigger conservation plan with many certificates and permits and everything. I went to their offices and he let me hold a lion’s skull,





and he showed me his kudu head (that died a natural death, though)

and best of all, they were in the middle of preserving a huge bloody crocodile that they’d shot the week before. It was just lying there under sacks, covered in ordinary salt. He invited me to his staff Christmas lunch. We ate grilled impala. This was a first for me. I thought impala were for looking at and saying How Cute, not eating. It was tam sana, though. (Swahili for yum yum piggy’s bum, you can’t have none.) And then the next night, his wife roasted a chunk of eland that Derek had shot on camp and frozen. Also delicious, and, fabulously, followed up by butterscotch Angel Delight and marshmallows! As I’d eaten a few ants at the convent by mistake the week before, while scraping up the last peanuts from the paper bag in the storeroom, it was particularly welcome.

So now I am back in Dar, with Sharon and Fred, at their hotel. Tomorrow is Christmas Day: my first ever hot Christmas. I must remember not to drink loads and have a crashing dehydration-induced tropical hangover.

No news for you of Hot Date, I am afraid, because he has gone back to Sierra Leone for Christmas to see his family. However, everyone here except me seems fairly sure that we will be married pretty soon. Matilda (who loves Jizzus) said today “Well, if you marry an African man, you will have to eat more. Then you will get big and fat like a bouncer and you will look nice.”

We are off to Zanzibar on the 27th for five days, so I shall try to write more about my hard life when we get back. In the meantime – I wish everyone I like and love a lovely Christmas. I hope it’s cold and sunny if you’re in England or America and not too hot if you’re in Australia. If you were here with me in Dar, it would be perfect. xxx

(Ps my mother DIDN'T send me an Advent Calendar. But Max and Sam's mother did.)