Ruwenzori

2 days and a night in the Ruwenzori, Africa's greatest mountain range, this week-end fulfilled a long felt wish. For 7 hours each day we scrambled through bracken, bamboo, and deciduous forest, balancing on precipitous ridges and crossing rushing streams. We climbed from 1,600 meters to almost 3,000. Opposite our mountain hut we looked up at a 4,700 meter peak (6,000 ft above us), and in the morning it was bathed in sunlight.

The forest is an incubator of living things with no sign of humans, apart from a path. We oohed and aahed over so much – including 40 ft heather trees, whispy lichens 8 feet long, ferns 12 feet high, the cries of chimpanzees. At one time we were surrounded by a troupe of monkeys. The roar of thundering waterfalls was in our ears for most of the time, water that will flow 2,000 miles down the Nile to Egypt.

Thank God for good weather and Helen being fit for such a climb. A year ago her knees and spine would not have stood up to it. Back in Kagando Dave now takes over clinical seniority for the next six weeks, till we go on leave.