Africa – Teacher Of My Heart

One woman’s story of how and where her love of travel started, Rhiannon Sully-Newman, as told to Tracey Ashford, recalls her first days in Africa and her meeting with the mountain gorillas.

“Nairobi seems rather scary – I think I am best off staying around the hotel today really…” So indeed, to my amusement, read the words of my journal entry, 4th September 2004, my first day ever in Africa…

As I re-read my diary, hauled from the back of the shed while the British winter starts to chip away at my spirit, I am reminded that this young woman, really just a girl, who looked over the balcony, contemplating a dip in the hotel pool as her brave move for ‘day one’, was once me. A small town Somerset girl, who’d barely had a holiday without mum and dad, certainly never left Europe, somehow became trekker and traveller; a Maverick Mum, wanderluster, an elephant fanatic joining groups of the finest trackers, charity conservation volunteer and now, at last a trainee field guide; quiet listener to her own soul. My soul which I found, 6500 kilometres away, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There, amongst the last surviving Sabina mountain gorillas, there was where my love affair of a lifetime began.

I am currently, like most in this year of Covid, in lockdown; unable to take my planned all-women’s wilderness trip tracking the elusive and iconic desert elephants of Namibia, I am giving time to learning how to teach meditation and to reflecting on all my journeys – literal and metaphoric – that have brought me to where I am today.

Let me start at the very beginning: like all good tales of strong women who don’t get rescued by a prince nor live happily ever after chained to the sink, I was licking my wounds from what seemed like the heartbreak to end all heartbreaks. In retrospect of course, the painful process of an early dose of being cheated on saved me from a mediocre relationship and led me to dream of visiting the home of the world’s last surviving mountain gorillas.

From poolside beach holidays to the Congo! Even in moments of deepest thought I still have no clue where that desire came from but it is has set the tone for my life ever since - all I know is that to fully live we must do what drives us, be honest and authentic and live who we really are.

Perhaps I was an unworldly 23 year old as I boarded a Boeing 777 for Nairobi but I had at least packed my malaria tablets and, it turns out quite importantly, just one book, a copy of The Alchemist by Paul Cohelo. I had, smartly, pre-ordered a taxi at the other end to take me to the meeting point for an arranged overland Africa trip. An exciting, fully guided two week adventure which promised a chance to meet the Maasai, take a balloon trip over the great plains of the Serengeti and, my dream at that time, a holiday of a lifetime that offered a sighting of the endangered mountain gorillas of the DRC (or indeed the gorillas of Rwanda or Uganda… if you’re a great ape the laws of border and visa do not apply).

As the plane completed its early morning descent I was able to see from my window seat the mist on the grassy hilltops of the Ngong Hills. Well known as a location for the film ‘Out Of Africa’, I suspect that any woman heading to Africa must surely have a little bit of Karen Blixen in her soul. I quickly cleared security in a modern airport much like any other until the doors opened into a world of busy noise. Not the bustle of a familiar Europe but an overwhelming chaos of shouting and dry, hot air with crowds of people all of whom seem to be saying they were taxi drivers. Names were held up in scrawl and in print, names that I’d never seen before, called and waved. Behind them a sea of hands and arms beckoned as people shouted to me “Jambo, jambo, welcome, welcome, taxi, taxi”. Of course, knowing I would be landing in a new continent, young, blonde, female and alone, I had planned ahead and could ignore the offers as I scoured the cards for my familiar English name. My own name was nowhere to be seen… on any card or any board. My driver wasn’t there. I waited. My heart sank. No Car.

Surely spotting my now concerned green English eyes out on stalks, a woman from the crowd stepped forward, phoned the Hotel Boulevard on my behalf, confirmed that there indeed was no car booked in my name and offered to drive me. Unsure if she even was a legitimate taxi driver, I took the gamble that I was generally safer with a woman than a man and jumped in to find my seat belt was broken. Anastacia cheerfully promised faithfully she that she would not crash and set off with a warming and very African cry of “You are with Mumma, now!”

Step one achieved; in the quiet heat of the car, tired from the overnight flight, I stared out of the window, seeing my first zebra and beautiful storks in the open landscape as well as three very serious-looking car crashes. I was yet to realise that over the weeks to come, staring out of the windows of moving vehicles and just letting my mind wander for hours would become the meditation that would lead me to a stillness that I had never before known.

As the morning settled in I braved a short walk to the museum and rapidly learned that a woman does not go out on the streets of Nairobi wearing unwanted attention-grabbing ‘inappropriate shorts’. Returning to the safety of the hotel I teamed up for beers with the others taking the same overland trip, eager to get started on our adventure. It is almost unthinkable now that I was so naïve at the time but, for anyone wondering about what makes shorts inappropriate, it is the word ‘short’.

The next morning we loaded up and jumped into the ‘truck’: sixteen years on, things have changed surprisingly little. Ex-army vehicles, packed with bed rolls, our bags, cooking equipment and water; roll-down, plastic-glazed sides for when it rained. Our group, literally from aged 17 to one man in his 70’s took our places. I picked a table seat, facing backwards and watched as the high rise modern offices and the colonial style buildings, a reminder of the footprint of the British, became distant, giving way to the wide open spaces of Kenya. Staring out of the window, or sometimes just out of the open sides, warm draughty air brushing my face, the truck found every single bump in the road as the landscape turned into the green and red mountains of the Great Rift Valley.

As we headed towards the Maasai Mara, each time we passed through a village the children would run out, waving and shouting ‘Jambo’ … which I quickly picked up as my first word in Swahili, meaning ‘Hello’. We saw hippos and crocs and monkeys and although the plan was for limited stops in the sweltering heat, the truck, for all its army past, broke down at some point most days, providing relief from the bumps and settling our exited group into a more, accepting, relaxed African frame of mind. While our driver calmly fixed each frequent breakdown I sometimes sat in the shadow of the truck and read my book, the tale of a boy on a quest to find to find an unknown treasure, guided by those he met along the way. The significance of the book, at that stage, not yet revealed to me.

Other than for mechanical hiccups, we stopped only for scheduled meals – lunches taken at the side of the road, much to the amusement of some Japanese tourists who, pointing and laughing, took endless photos of us eating bread and cheese.

Visiting the Maasai, being welcomed into the guide’s home which was a simple mud hut of two smoky rooms, I started for the first time to become aware of my, slightly odd position as a watcher, a viewer from another place. Some of the women of the village sang and danced for us; to this day I always make sure the sharing of stories, culture, song and dance between us is a part of any travel on which I lead other women. There is something universal that unites the female spirit and even then a tiny sensation, not entirely comfortable, was stirring. Even then I had started to sense that what unites us is as important as our differences.

I think I knew at the time, and I certainly know now, that as we drove away from the Masai, I had opened a door in my consciousness that I would never be able to close again. With memories of night time hyena howls and early morning lion calls, protected only by canvas, and the beautiful images of an dawn game drive, to my first sighting, from a hot air balloon, of a majestic Africa elephant family, we re-loaded our truck and settled down for the long, long days of driving towards the Sabina Mountains, home of the gorillas.

Staring out of the window, with my new-found patience and comforted by the grinding drone of the engine, we crossed the border from Kenya into Uganda, the vista becoming greener and lusher with each hour. My co-travelling ‘family’ were a lively and interesting bunch, with our evenings spent laughing in each other’s company, but the nature of these drives, although frequently punctuated with mechanical breakdowns, meant many hours were spent in comfortable almost dreamy silences.

I reflected then, as I do now, on the opening up of my youthful eyes – to the wealth that we have as Europeans; everywhere we stopped we were asked to buy goods or give money – all of us so cash rich in comparison to every person we met, regardless of our own status back home. Everywhere we went images of people ‘making do’, to the point of building homemade bicycles with solid wooden wheels, filled my mind; from villages of waving children and adults trying to make a living my sense that it was my wealth that gave me this extraordinary, slightly removed privilege of looking into another world and started to make me question if what I was doing was even acceptable.

We passed the banks of the stunning Lake Victoria, through Jinja, where the men openly carried AK47s obtained thanks to corrupt foreigners contributing to making this violent weapon the now-universal symbol of gangsters and guerrillas. Burned in my memory still are the pictures of limbless people, lives destroyed by landmines, as we had crossed the border earlier through No Man’s Land. Once you start on the road less travelled your soul as well as your eyes becomes opened. To close either again was, at least for me, not an option.

Eye openings and growing connections of the heart aside, our group evenings were filled with the laughter, food, cold Tusker beer and Amarula liqueur of many a ‘holiday maker’. As the driving days were so long, due not only to the distances but also the roadside pauses for yet another engine fix, we often set up camp after the sun had gone down. I had teamed up with Robyn and we soon became adept at pitching our very basic canvas tent in the dark before finding an occasional hot shower and gathering together with our group of 20 or so for meaty casseroles and traditional maize-meal pap, often eaten by torchlight.

Robyn was in her mid-forties and great company but would retire to bed at a reasonable time leaving me to behave like any newly-released 20 something should (or should not)!

I can only imagine that my youth protected me from hangovers back then as I would sit for hours drinking, mostly with James and Nick, also in their 20s. Although the nights were so very cold, we often chatted and laughed long into the darkness, with the scent of the kerosene-cooker in our noses and, I confess on one occasion, so with much alcohol in our systems that I actually failed to find my own tent in the darkness and had to sink my stumbling, happy body into a corner of the guys’ space for a very short sleep before dawn.

In the interests of transparency and whilst I am confessing all, readers might be interested to know that, through our shared love of Africa, my late-night chatting companion, James, later became my husband and father of our beautiful daughter Mia who now often travels with us, of course. A story for another time…

It is the 9th of September, at last, the day I have been waiting for: today is the day we will go in search of gorillas. We get up before the sunrise, pack our bedrolls and tents into the truck, eat breakfast, chivvy along the slowpokes. I am nearly bursting with excitement. With almost no window-staring today and a lot of chattering I cannot wait to see what is in store; we have crossed the border and are now in the Congo at the Virunga National Park. At the foot of the Sabina Mountain, a dormant volcano, the air is humid as we are entering the dampness of real jungle territory.

We have quite a wait as there seems to be some hold up with visas and permits. No doubt it will be sorted ‘Poly, poly’ (slowly, slowly in Swahili) as is the way, so I take in the images of the huts and the children of the village. So many children, children as young as 3 or 4 carrying babies on their backs and so many arms waving ‘Jambo, jambo’ but this does not feel right. This doesn’t feel like our meetings so far.

The adults and the older kids are all staring at us, reaching their hands out ‘You give me money’ is a repeated refrain. A line of eight or nine young, strong men in jeans and dirty T-shirts are just standing, smoking, looking right at us but with a dead-eyed quality that I have not encountered before. Something here feels almost dangerous but before I have time to work out where my fear is coming from our guides move us on, separating us into four smaller groups ready for the jeeps taking us into the jungle. We are off to find gorillas. As we leave, I lift my head up and the tallest man in the T-shirt line-up looks right into my eyes, stubs out his cigarette, lifts his finger and makes a long, slow slitting action across his neck.

Seeking safety with our familiar guides and my companions, I concentrate on being inside the vehicle. The guides carry machetes, to cut through the undergrowth, as well as knives and guns for protection against elephants and poachers. This is certainly already proving to be a very memorable day.

We drive to the start point and de-bus for a 2.5 hour trek, climbing higher by each few hundred meters. Our chatter lessens as we drop into silence apart from the soft sounds of chopping and swishing from the guides’ machetes forging a route through the thick forest. We are in search of the Mapua family; the guides know where these eight gorillas were just 24 hours ago but finding them today, looking towards their known feeding areas and following any clues in the dense foliage is an art and skill that may or may not produce a sighting. The entry permit price clearly explains there are no guarantees where these great animals are concerned.

Whispering and lulled by the thirsty heat, Daz, from Manchester, and I are focused completely on my camera, fiddling with how to turn off the flash when suddenly… there… right next to us… there he is, a huge Silverback. Oh my heart. Enormous beyond anything I had imagined, he had simply silently appears from the trees to have a look at what we are doing.

We follow him back up the hill where we are greeted with the sight of his whole family. We stop. Just one meter away. Two mothers, two babies and 3 teenagers are stripping leaves as they sit eating, noisily. When their great, leathery hands aren’t pulling at leaves and putting food in their mouths they are grooming and picking at each other. They know we are there, their beautiful eyes looking at us, we are told not to stare back and not to reach out or touch but to sit still at all times, whatever happens. And for some time nothing happens as I take in their expressions, their behaviour, they feel like the families I know. You will have heard people say this before, and you will hear it again, but the connection, the expression in their eyes is so human. I can hardly breathe. Am I even conscious that this very point in time, this one precious hour, is a seminal moment in the awareness of my own ignorance, my own humanity and my tiny place in this huge world?

As we sit in stillness the juveniles of the family become increasingly inquisitive, coming over to us, pulling at our shoes, our hair and even climbing onto the arm and then the head of one of the group. They are without fear but we were in no doubt that, as with mothers in playgrounds all over the world, we were being watched by maternal eyes. Mummas who knew, as did we, that one determined cuff around a human head from the father of the family would fell even the biggest man in our group.

Our time with the gorillas is over all too soon. None of us want to leave but we have to move at speed, taking a lot less time going downhill and aiming to make it to the vehicles before the rain. The other groups have not yet made it down from the mountain so we wait in the village under a shelter full of local children. I think it will take some time for this whole experience to sink it. As the drops hit the ground and splash back at us, it feels like something very important happened today.

At the time of my first visit to Africa there were less than 600 mountain gorillas still in existence. Hunted almost to extinction for bush meat, trophy heads, hands and feet, for babies for zoo exhibits and with their habitat being farmed and deforested for illegal mining, they were listed as ‘critically endangered’. Roaming freely between the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Uganda, thanks to the skilled work of groups such as The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, there are now about 1000 living and thriving in family groups. I can’t say with any certainty where the $250 we each paid to spend an hour with the Mapua family went over 15 years ago but I do urge anyone taking a trip now to question how and where their substantial permit fee is being spent.

After our meeting with the gorillas the whole group were in very high spirits and it felt like we had all been moved to connect more with each other as well as the outside world. Our travels back were precious days as the end in sight included camping at stunning Lake Bunyoni where we saw hippos, taking us via sunrise breakfasts, onward to Kampala and eventually ‘home’ to Nairobi for our goodbyes.

Not quite goodbye to Africa for me, I had pre-booked a trip to Zanzibar and Pemba Island. Joining a small group on what was rather grandly and incorrectly described as a ‘yacht’, I alternated between listening to the tapping of crabs in the lapping waters and boring the pants of a unsuspecting honeymoon couple by trying to endlessly express my new found love of Africa and my realisation that travel is a responsibility that brings with it the honour to give back to those from whom you are, in fact, taking.

Once I had started to voice the words out loud I knew that this was my chance to start to live my own truth. One page in my journal reads “I know I will regret it if I can’t finish the trip and see the rest of Africa.” So I did what, then, seemed like the most frightening and daring thing in the world. I phoned my boss. I had to steal up every nerve in my body. I had decided I was not getting on that plane to England. I was not going back to work.

For those who haven’t had the joy of reading it yet, The Alchemist, by this stage of my journey, well-thumbed and woven into my days and my nights, turns from a boy’s search for worldly goods to a discovery of what lies within. It is a literary tribute to the power and importance of listening to our hearts.

I keyed in the digits on the phone, my boss picked up and the words just poured out. Rosalie, MD of SHOON, to whom I will be forever grateful, promptly gave me five weeks fully paid notice and told me to go and make the life I needed to be happy.

And this is where I will pause in my reflection. Here, waiting for the ‘lockdown’ release in Somerset, as I muse on the days that started my current journey for me. A journey which has brought me, in practical terms, to working with the Namibian EHRA (Elephant-Human Relations Aid) and to hosting groups of women to visit the great desert elephants. A journey which in spiritual terms has connected me to the sounds of my own heart’s needs and taught me to give back, to return to the land and to the people gifts in gratitude for the privilege of being a fleeting part of their world.

As I close my old, first ever journal I consider the seemingly arbitrary choices I made; from the book I packed to the first taxi at the airport… even the decision to even set off in the first place I am now convinced that there was some kind of alchemy afoot all along. There buried within the pages of the novel it says “And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”

Keep up with Rhiannon Sully-Newman’s travels on Instagram @maverickmums or Face Book @maverickmumuk where she is very keen to hear your shared experiences. Currently collaborating with Tracey Ashford in compiling 15 years of travels into a book for 2021, Rhiannon will abandon the laptop and head up a women’s trip to Namibia, lockdown permitting, in May 2022.