I went to Africa when I left Alice Springs, on the rough-and-ready version of a Contiki tour. I paid $1500 to travel across the continent in the back of a four-wheel drive truck for twelve weeks, camping each night in a national park or bedding down in a backpackers’ hostel. Each day, our tour group would go to the market and shop for food. At night, we’d each take turns making the group dinner. It was my first overseas trip, the first A on my list: Africa, Antarctica and the Amazon. I wanted to see the places that were changing most rapidly while I was still young enough to manage the journey. I could see Europe when I was old, I figured. Africa on a truck took stamina.
My journey began in Kenya, looping up through the Rift Valley to Uganda and down through Tanzania. We ate in iron shacks with mud floors in the middle of African slums and visited villages on the edge of vast plains, riding the bumpy roads in old bus seats bolted to the truck floor. The truck walls were made of canvas, which we rolled up on sunny days so we could watch the world go by. There were no iPhones then; no distractions. No two places felt the same.
About eight weeks before I arrived in Africa some tourists had been shot and killed in Uganda while trekking up the mountains to see the gorillas. The national park was closed, so a lot of people had cancelled their trip to that area. There were only six of us on the truck, and we were the first group after the shooting to return to the site. We set out the day after the park reopened, with an armed security escort, following the new safety protocols.
I was an enthusiastic amateur photographer—I’d done a photography course in Alice Springs—and I made the hike up into the jungle weighed down with analogue photography gear, hoping to get that perfect shot of big apes in the wild. I wasn’t disappointed. At the top of the mountain we found a troop of gorillas, including two silverbacks eyeing each other off. It was really unusual to see two dominant male gorillas in one troop, but the son had just overthrown the father as leader and the old man was still lingering around.
I watched both animals through my hefty telephoto lens, shooting click click click through a red lens filter, which heightened the contrast of my black-and-white film. Through the viewfinder, the filter turned the apes and the jungle around them a monochromatic red. As I snapped photos I saw a man with a machine gun step out of the jungle, three other men appearing quickly behind him.
For a split second, I thought we were in trouble—people died here—but the gunmen made their way towards us calmly and our guards didn’t flinch. The men I’d seen in the distance were on patrol for poachers, too, part of the security contingent that was meant to keep us safe. They didn’t seem aggressive and our guards weren’t tense; on reflection, their body language told me everything I needed to know.
I would think of that moment in years to come, when I returned to Africa. It was an interesting lesson in risk assessment. Just because someone is holding an AK-47 doesn’t necessarily mean you should worry. On the other hand, as I would learn much later, being surrounded by guards with guns doesn’t mean you can relax.
Later on the truck tour, we visited a Maasai Mara village in Tanzania. The villagers ran to their huts when they saw us coming, kicking off their Nikes and replacing their regular clothes with traditional woven blankets. They gathered around us, leading us from hut to hut and showing us their community, and as we walked I noticed a young girl with an ear full of pus. I was travelling with antibiotic eardrops—always carrying a first-aid kit—so it was easy to treat her. I cleaned her up and gave the drops to the girl’s mother, explaining how to use them. The family was so grateful they gave me a ceremonial spear.
Ironically, those villagers and most of the others I encountered in Africa were in much better health than the people I had cared for in Alice Springs. They lived in mud huts with mud floors, but they had fewer skin and bowel infections, no scabies or runny noses. The children had clear eyes and shiny hair; they were nowhere near as malnourished as the kids in Alice.
I paid closer attention. I began to notice mothers by the side of the road, scrubbing their children in makeshift baths made from plastic buckets; mothers combing their children’s hair, no matter how matted it was. The level of care those mothers took made a huge difference to the wellbeing of their children. It was healthcare that started in the community, not in a hospital or clinic, and it gave me some insight into what we were missing at home.