Returning is only over when you are back at a place you recognise as home, waking up in a bed that remembers how you like to spread out at night, for more than a week. By that yardstick, I’ll be home on Wednesday and you will get delicious audiovisual treatery soon after. For now, though, a brief storytelling interlude via some quick stats written on the dirtiest back pages of my journal.
Delicious beans eaten. So very, very many. I miss them so. These fine specimens from a market in Fort Portal. Where there were, alas, no portals. Only very fine tea.
FARDC roadblocks run: 2
FARDC roadblocks screamed ‘bonjour’ from: 1
Bribes paid: $0
Km driven on a small Indian motorbike: 45
Rides in UN vehicles: 1
Vegetarian burgers eaten: 1
Cost of a night in a Bunia ‘hotel’: $25
Cost of a night in a real hotel: $65
Nights spent in a real hotel: 0
Cost of a night in a cheap Bunia hotel: $10
Probability that the cheap hotel was a brothel: 100%
Immigration stops: 2
Nutella found: 1
Nutella found to cost: $6
Wheels of cheese found: 1
Wheels of cheese found to cost: $8
Average litres of water drunk in a day: 4
Average miles on a valuable used car from the US: 500,000
Average miles on a valuable used car from the DRC: 50,000
Cost of a 1.5l bottle of water: $1
Cost of a beer: $2-3
Primus beer labels collected: 10
Total video and photo material returned with: 600Gb
Great memories returned with: so bloody many.