FOLLOWING THE NILE
Levison Wood, author of ‘Walking the Nile’, speaks to JUSTIN FOX about his travels along the mother of all rivers
LEVISON Wood belongs to an intrepid group of adventurers who have made the wild corners of Africa their stomping ground.
Like Livingstone, Burton and Speke before him, this Englishman set off on one of the last great challenges of the continent: to walk the length of the Nile from source to mouth.
His book, Walking the Nile, is a compelling account of his long trudge to the Mediterranean. It’s an account of untold hardships and stoical endurance. He weathered sandstorms, rain storms and temperatures of more than 50ºC. His feet were often covered in blisters, he had guns pointed in his face encouraging him to leave; he even had to cut the end of a big toe off with a razor blade after a sand jigger laid its eggs under his nail.
Wood writes of having to eat boiled bush rat in peanut sauce, fried grasshoppers and roasted sparrow shot by a home-made catapult. He regularly walked more than 40km a day, every day; didn’t wash for weeks and substituted toilet paper for more rustic methods (“sand and grit goes along way”). T his month, Wood is in Cape Town attending World Trade Market Africa as well as promoting his book and the accompanying television documentary (due in South Africa in July).
I caught up with him for a chat while he was in the Mother City. Shorter and more modishly dressed than I expected, Wood is a focused young man with clean good looks and a steeling eye. His background is history studies at Nottingham University (he did his dissertation on the Anglo-Zulu Wars), Sandhurst, and a spell with the army in Afghanistan as a paratrooper.
Nowadays, he runs an adventure and expedition company and embarks on regular adventures of outrageous proportions. He has hitchhiked from England to India, travelled the Silk Road, traversed Iraq and Iran at delicate moments in their recent history, but his most ambitious expedition to date has been his long walk down the Nile.
His first African adventure involved driving a couple of ambulances from the UK to Malawi on behalf of a charity organisation. Wood bought second-hand Land Cruisers on eBay, converted them into ambulances, and set off across Europe and down the continent.
“It was during that journey that I realised what I wanted to do with my life, and that expeditions were in my blood,” he said. “We followed the Nile on that trip, which got me thinking about redoing it on foot.
“Driving is too fast. By walking, you really get under the skin of a country. Walking is the most authentic way of travelling, and of experiencing the cultures and meeting people along the way. You completely put yourself at the mercy of local hospitality and kindness. Walking exposes you to every possible risk… its also probably the hardest.”
I wanted to know why he had chosen the Nile in particular, as opposed to any other great river. “Firstly, it’s the longest. As far as I know, no one has ever walked it before. The old boys – the Victorian explorers – all came at it from the east. And it’s a river I’ve always been intrigued by. Ancient Egypt fascinates me, as does the history of exploration in East Africa. But, really, much of my motivation was selfish – to go on the greatest adventure of my life, to see what people can only dream about and test myself to the limits.
“Doing the walk renewed my deep respect for how hard it must have been for the Victorians. They were away for two or three years at a time; my walk was less than a
year. In many ways, things are completely different now. Places have become more accessible, communication is easy. In other ways, things have hardly changed at all, especially in places such as South Sudan.”
Speaking of war-ravaged Sudan, I wanted to know what had been the greatest hazards.
“Well, it wasn’t wild animals, as many people think. The biggest danger is other humans, particularly in the strife-torn regions we were traversing. I did get robbed, I did get shot at. You can do all the preparation possible and the unexpected can capsize all your best-made plans in an instant.”
Indeed, tragedy did strike the expedition in Uganda. A journalist, Matt Power, had joined Wood to cover part of the journey for an American magazine. During a day of extreme temperatures, he died of heat stroke.
“It all happened very quickly,” said Wood. “It was a devastating moment and I seriously thought of giving up.”
I asked, too, about the journey’s highlights.
“Arriving at Murchison Falls. It’s an incredible place. That’s the African dream of untamed wilderness. It’s the Indiana Jones shot right there! Also, the perfectly red dunes of the Sahara in Sudan, with the pyramids rising out of the sand, and not a tourist in sight. Few people realise that there are more pyramids in Sudan than Egypt.
“The people of Sudan were just the friendliest and kindest. It actually slowed me down. I’d have to avoid the villages as I was spending too much time drinking tea. On one occasion, I was camping, hidden away about a mile from a village, and this bloke spotted us and insisted we come to his home. When we declined, he returned later carrying his own bed on his back for us to sleep on. Bloody amazing.”
Apart from the death of Matt, I asked about other dark moments.
“A really low point was when I had to fly out and reroute from Bor, due to the fighting. I’d ultimately failed my objective of covering the entire Nile on foot. There’s that gap of 400 miles that I’d missed out on. I was gutted.”
I’ve spent time in Rwanda and found that its recent history can be overwhelming for the traveller. Had Wood experienced the same?
“It was, in a way, surreal,” he said. “Everyone you meet over the age of 20 experienced the genocide in some way. One of my guides never said it to me directly, but alluded to the fact that when he was 10, he’d witnessed his mother being gang-raped and beaten to death. How do you get your head around that?
“Another one of my team – one of the porters – was a perpetrator of genocide. We were all together, victims and perpetrators, chatting amiably, working side by side. Maybe it’s just skin-deep, but Rwanda’s reconciliation efforts are truly astonishing.”
How did Wood go about writing during the journey?
“I kept a handwritten diary: a page a day. Whenever I had a day off, I’d type up the notes and compile chapters which I sent to my publishers. They would edit them and fire back questions. As the deadline for the book’s publication was very tight, the thing had to take shape during the journey.”
“That must have been hard,” I said.
“Yes it was. One part of my brain had to be dealing with the present problems of the walk and another part trying to deal with an earlier period of the trip that was in a writing or editing phase. My publishers wanted the book and the television programme to come out at the same time, which gave me three months from the day of my return to put it all together.”
What did he take away from this year-long slog down the continent’s spine?
“It’s probably a cliched answer, but it’s the humility of the people that struck me most forcefully. Not always. In some places, the darker stereotypes were unfortunately true, especially in South Sudan. There’s deeply ingrained violence, endemic corruption and sloth. They are the first to admit that they do not work, that they are warriors who raid for cattle and fight.
“I found it tremendously depressing. But more than anything, I took away the stoicism of most of the people I met. Despite the incredible poverty and hardships they had to face, they just got on with daily life. Business goes on. Hospitality is still paramount. In Sudan, some would rather die than drink before a guest. In my own dark moments, I reminded myself of this. It showed me just how wrapped up in ourselves we are in the West, and how much we can learn from places like that.”
Finally, I wanted to know what was next on the bucket list of this white-walker extraordinaire.
“Actually, I can’t tell you. It’s still a bit of a secret. Let’s just say it’s another very long, very arduous walk.”