Hungry hungry hippos

Evelyn and I are in the home stretch of our Congo trip. Both of us can't wait to get home. She's trying a new diet and is having a hell of a time finding anything to eat. I haven't shaved since leaving Nairobi, a record for me, because we've had so many early mornings and the places where we've stayed have had no or unreliable hot water. We're tired, cranky and already thinking about our first meal back at beloved Java House (a Nairobi chain that rivals anything in the U.S.). In short, we look like we've spent a week in Congo.

 

The main purpose of our trip was to report on the visit to Congo by two U.S. Senators, Sam Brownback (Republican of Kansas) and Dick Durbin (Democrat of Illinois). We're mostly interested in Brownback, a presidential contender and religious conservative who's been among the most prominent (and unlikely) voices on Africa in Washington lately. Because our company owns the two largest papers in Brownback's state, his people were more than happy to have me along. I went with the delegation on a visit to a gorilla sanctuary, where a bold female eastern mountain gorilla greeted the senators and the UN's top official in Congo, William Swing, by taking a giant crap right in front of them.

 

The gorillas were cool (the crapper had made some international wildlife news last week by becoming the first gorilla to properly use a nutcracker) but I was more impressed by the hippos we'd seen the day before. We went to Virunga National Park, which straddles Congo, Uganda and Rwanda, and has seen its hippo population decimated by poachers. We and a park ranger took a boat out on a lake with several dozen hippos and carefully balanced Evelyn's need to get as close as possible for photo purposes with the ranger's need not to have us mauled to death. Hippos are apparently very gentle unless they feel you're disturbing their space, in which case they turn into the hungry, hungry hippos of that board game.

 

Nearly everywhere we went in Congo, Evelyn and I were a huge attraction. The villages we visited haven't seen very many white people (I qualify), so we were typically followed around by village kids like a pair of pied pipers. We were like a circus act. Evelyn yawned and the little girls let out peals of laughter. I said "good morning" and suddenly thirty kids were trying to mouth the same words. It was actually very sweet -- when our boat was coming back in, kids in the village gathered at the water's edge to watch us come in. A few of them did a dance. But mostly they watched us -- two weird-looking, weird-talking animals ourselves.