An early morning start meant that we all got to appreciate the sunrise which heralded a beautifully sunny day for our descent.

Nothing else went to plan.

We had always planned a slow descent. Sue, in particular, does not like coming down. Slipping and sliding, she spent much of the descent on her bum with Claire and Jonathan joining in occasionally to keep her company.

Nigel was fairing much better prompting Sue to comment that when he falls he will make a good job of it. He did. Falling onto a bamboo sapling and impaling himself on the broken stick. With blood pooling on the ground one guide helpfully presented an elastoplast. He was shooed away by Claire who stemmed the flow of blood with toilet paper and a generous amount of sticky tape.

Guide number 2 then took Nigel down the mountain ahead of everyone else. They practically ran and were down over an hour before the rest.

Minor surgery at the local hospital (the second that they visited – the first medical centre had no anesthetic) then removed an assortment of wooden splinters and debris and stitched the punctured arm and blood vessel.

An eventful day in which no one manged to find time to wash at the Trekkers Hostel as per the itinerary. So a very smelly team were collected by our long suffering driver, Daniel, for the long drive to Queen Elizabeth National Park.

After a slight detour to change Nigel’s antibiotics (another story), we crossed the equator, without performing any experiments to validate the Coriolis effect (much to Jonathan’s disappointment), and eventually arrived at the beautiful, but remote, Jacana Lodge.