I first met Wayne in Tamanrasset, Algeria in the middle of the Sahara, near the end of 1983. He wasn't much more than 20 at the time, while I was about ten years older. We were both looking for a ride, five days through empty desert to the next town, Arlit, Niger. We bumped into each other again in Lome, Togo, and he told me about his adventurous trip up the Niger River, when for several days he was the only tourist in a small boat with three or four other people. Except for his red hair he was an ordinary looking guy, not big or tall, didn't come forward in a group but was obviously resourceful. He had been working at a resort in the Rockies in the summer, but instead of staying in the workers' accommodation, he had dug a pit in the woods and put a tarp over it and lived there. It was cheaper, but I guess he also liked the independence.
We got on the same flight to Douala, and camped out en route at the airport in Lagos
. Finally we joined forces, along with two others, in Bangui, in preparation for the transit of Zaire. By all accounts, Zaire would make the foregoing seem like a pleasure cruise -- and it didn't disappoint.
Currency declaration was a tricky business at the border at that time. It was a good idea to hide some of your currency, not so much to get a better rate on the black market, but because banks were few and far between, and you might be forced to change money informally. Then upon exit, your official exchange transactions had to tally with the money you had declared.
There were four of us travelling together, but from Bangui you had to cross the river to the outpost of Zongo in small boats that could only take one or two at a time, so we arrived separately at the Zaire entry point, which was a little hut, not even room for all four of us to sit down at once. Because we hadn't thought the currency thing through properly in advance, we had to try to remember how much money we had in which pocket or pouch, so we could accurately declare most but not all of it
. (If you were found to possess more than you had declared, it could be confiscated -- and with the demands Mobutu and his family were making on the national treasury, the country couldn't afford to actually pay its government officials.) As the next person arrived, those of us already in the hut would discreetly try to bring him up to date with the business at hand, while the two of us who spoke French were filling out forms, negotiating, and translating for the other two. That took up most of the afternoon, but thankfully it was all cordial, no threats or brandishing of weapons.
We then headed for the bank, and because the largest banknote in circulation was 5 zaires, worth only 15 cents US, we had to stuff piles of currency into our backpacks. The accommodation available in Zongo was unappealing to say the least, so that night we tried to make do with the one small tent we had between us, three people and the luggage inside and one sleeping across the entrance. What we had forgotten was that a knife can quickly and almost silently create a new entrance
. Among the things that disappeared before we knew what was happening were some of the cash and Wayne's glasses.
It took over a month to cross Zaire by truck and riverboat, a trip I've referred to in the "Smoke and pigeons" blog. And that was lucky -- when it was raining, it wasn't unusual for the road to be impassable for a month at a stretch. You could spend several days digging your way around a single mud-patch. In Kisangani Wayne and I went to the post office late at night and he tried to phone home. You had to wait in a booth and the operator, who was sitting at a desk, would signal you to go ahead, and then you would hear at least two or three crossed conversations, seemingly at various degrees of remoteness. We tried several times, and one time Wayne said he thought he could hear his father's voice, just for a moment.
One truck ride gradually turned violent after a Zairois citizen was badgering the four of us about taking photographs (which indeed may have been technically illegal since we didn't have permits), only to have a group of his fellow riders (of a different language group I assume) turn on him, ultimately tossing him out of the truck from a height of at least three metres while the truck was still moving (slowly of course)
. One evening after two days on a truck, all four of us washed as best we could with in the single basin of water we managed to get hold of. Near the eastern border, we passed through a national park that still had some wildlife in it, before the years of conflict wiped out most of the animals. In Goma we stayed in an upstairs hotel room with a hole in the floor large enough to jump through. And by the time we reached the border, most of us had by necessity overstayed our one-month visas, and we had to negotiate our way back out of the country. In Rwanda, I headed south and the others continued east.
I kept in touch with Wayne. Three years later he had been to India, liked it a lot, and was now living near Victoria BC where he had bought a boat, which he was living on and was fixing up. We went out there on our honeymoon and looked him up. He was planning to sail across the Pacific to the Philippines. I think I heard from him at least once more, from Australia, and then lost touch ...
The New Zealand Department of Conservation does a great job of providing visitor centres throughout the country, and naturally one of the best is at Mount Cook. There were a lot of interesting photos and artifacts from early days. One display had a series of binders, one per decade, with a page remembering each person who had died in the park. The death rate seems to have been consistent at about twenty or thirty per decade. We leafed through the binders and read some of the tributes. Frances opened the most recent binder, looked at the first page, 2001, and said, "A Canadian." I started to say, "I knew a guy named ... " and immediately realized it was him. The photo was not a close-up. He was standing at a distance on a snowy slope. But I'm pretty sure I could see his red hair.
Wayne Nichols
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Aoraki / Mount Cook National Park, South Island, New Zealand
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