Hill.

After our little expedition at Kabala, we decided to spend the night up Mennah hill, this being equator line Africa we didn’t exactly need tents, which was extra ace. The climb was short and to be honest quite easy, even for a wheezing old queen like me, only sharp in a couple of places. But once we were up it felt like we’d scaled a mountain, the views and the feeling of being on top of the world were pretty indescribable (and sadly didn’t come out anywhere as near as impressive when photographed).

We had a bit of a mess about, I joined Michael and Kieran in doing the whole Rambo thing, scaling various rocks and feeling dead wild and that. The experience got even better when Michael fell into a cave like a big, curtain haired girl (mind it was quite good inside so we forced our way through and joined him).

We were just about sensible enough to collect firewood before it got dark (not enough mind, leaving our two army brats to go foraging for more later on, in the dark). It was fun sleeping up there, we had a proper African sunset - all ominous skies and a bloodied orb vanishing into the dusty horizon - and then after a while the stars began to come out. We had them for a few hours before the moon put in an appearance and hogged the light. Night time skies are magnificent in a country with such a sketchy power grid, because night time lighting is feeble at best, less competition so to speak. And the views were wonderful as well, it’s hard to appreciate just how green Makeni is until seen from above, then abruptly you notice it’s a leafy bloody suburbia when compared to pretty much anywhere else in the country.

Throughout the evening we could hear the comforting - and thankfully distant - sound of gunfire. Not Civil War 2: The Makeni Incident breaking out I’m very pleased to say (Makeni was at the heart of the last war, being the RUF headquarters, and hills like Mennah were very much a part of that); instead this was an army training range. My eyesight still being not the best (though much better than that of an elderly mole, which is what it pretty much was before the laser surgery) I couldn’t really see what was going on; however Michael and Kieran assured me the soldiers were standing so close to the targets they were aiming at that to miss would be pretty difficult. Not the most robust of training then, good news for any future rebels I’m sure.

The night went by pretty well, there was an absolutely beautiful breeze (one you don’t get in Makeni itself, presumably being stopped by all that wretched greenery you don’t really notice), the boys (when Michael and ‘K The King’ - as is Kieran’s preferred moniker - are together you tend to instinctively think of them as ‘the boys’) and I were in a fairly good mood and we had fun with the fire. Not as much fun as Kieran, who managed to set his sleeping bag on fire and spent the next couple of minutes squealing like a chimpanzee and flapping it about like Graham Norton on speed. Kieran also provided further amusement when he mistook a pretty tiny ant, carrying a twig, as a scorpion and had an (admittedly quite miniature) hissy fit about that also.

The problems came later on. It was quite difficult to sleep because the ground was very hard (note for next time, need more padding) and sometime in the early hours the wind disappeared. This both raised the temperature and required some last minute deeting up. This didn’t help Michael much mind, his hand was bitten at some point through the night and swelled to truly Rocky Dennis proportions. He was a bit of a Beadle for the next few days.