FLY ME BACK TO KRIBI, PT 2
We’re off on a mini break next weekend, down to the place that we love, Fishguard, Pembrokeshire. If anybody else fancies a similar mini break, here’s where we go, it’s absolutely stunning and has been in Bee’s family for over a hundred years. As a result, we’re having a week off the fresh take away meals, but you can buy and collect anything in the frozen range until Thursday 22nd April.
Back on the stoves ready for the 30th April
http://quaystreetcottages.com/
In the meantime, here’s the end to last week’s story
FLY ME BACK TO KRIBI, PT 2
We swung into Kribi via the petrol station where Jimmy was bartering with one of the locals over the price of our dingy. The taxi pulled up and I waved to him from the back seat, he sauntered oved surprised to see me. Not as surprised as he was when he looked in the back of the blood soaked taxi and saw me in a pair of swimming trunks with my foot hanging off. He put two and two together and came up with shark. He jumped in the front and we screeched through town to the ‘hospital’
I say hospital, I mean corrugated tin shed that wouldn’t look out of place on the side of a Welsh mountain, but would look a bit weird in the grounds of Salisbury District Hospital. Thank god they had an x-ray machine and could reassure me that the leg was broken. No shit sherlock I’m thinking, have you got any pain killers. They didn’t even have Asprin, but they did shove a needle into me to ward off tetanus, then bunged me in a room with a mattress, no bedding or food.
Other patients had their families camped in the grounds of the hospital with wood fires cooking food for their patients, passing bowls in through the window. I had Jimmy, who to be fair did scoot back to our campsite and return with provisions and a blanket, before I settled down for the night, exhausted and frankly, quite frightened.
There’s no shortage of improvisation in Africa. There were no splints or plaster casts, so the doctors had fashioned a leg shaped mould out of chicken wire, which, for my comfort, they had lined with thick layers of cotton wool. The leg, still bleeding was lowered into it and I was left in my cell until the morning.
Another bright, sunny day, I’d had some restless sleep and was just waking up when the door swung open and a couple of doctors walked in, followed by a couple more, and a few orderlies, eight in total. ‘We’ve come to clean up your wound’ they said. I’m thinking, ‘eight of you that’s a bit of overkill.’ Firstly they had to take off all the cotton wool which had stuck to my leg, had welded itself to my leg I should say. If my mum was doing it, she would have had a bowl of warm water with a bit of Dettol and a sponge. She wasn’t doing it.
One of them grabbed my toes and lifted the leg out of the chicken wire, another one of them, possibly a doctor, possibly the local blacksmith, grabbed the cotton wool with both hands and proceeded to rip it down my leg from toes to knee. It didn’t go smoothly, it went in a jabbing, jaggery motion, bit by bit. I’d never wanted to know what being skinned alive felt like, suddenly I was starring in a John Wayne movie being scalped by an Apache Indian.
Blood once more rose through the meat that my leg had become, they dropped it slowly back onto the bed, then all drifted off into a huddle in the corner of the room taking Jimmy with them. They came back, Jimmy leading the way, he looked at me briefly with such sadness and pity in his eyes, then looked away as he laid his full body weight across my chest and grabbed a wrist. The others quickly swarmed around me, holding me to the bed, pushing me down.
I was completely befuddled, everyone was totally silent and then I caught a glimpse of what was coming. I hadn’t noticed it when they all came in, I didn’t even see the trolly, let alone the innocuous white plastic washing up bowl and the giant bath sponge and the gallon of deep silvery blue liquid, sloshing about inside with the distinct smell of pure iodine. The next minute, pain, so intense engulfed every fibre of my body. Pain beyond any measure coursed through me and literally separated me from my body. I lifted up and up, drifted up until I was about twenty meters above my body, looking down at a cluster of bodies below, lying over me, on the bed, and I, looking up at myself looking down.
Kribi was a hundred miles from absolutely nowhere, but as luck would have it, a local Catholic priest had managed to get himself smashed up on some rocks, my luck, not his obviously and I managed to hitch a ride, courtesy of the Church in the back of a 2 seater Cessna taking him up to Douala, the economic capital of Cameroon, where they had a five star French hospital, into which the priest was booked and as a result, so was I. Jimmy struck camp, flogged the dingy, and hailed a bush taxi to join me about four days later.
We had a suite, the finest French food, wine with every meal, fresh fruit for breakfast and Jimmy on a camp bed in the next room. Better still, it was a proper hospital, pain killers and a plaster cast up to my thigh, I was in heaven. The doctor came to see me though, really concerned about cross infection which was rife in the hospital, especially amongst Europeans, of which there weren’t many in those days, so he advised me to get repatriated at all haste. A French guy had been in the previous week with a broken arm and went out feet first, five days later. The consulate came to see me and although I was fully insured, asked if I knew anyone in England with access to £1000. I didn’t see it coming and said yes, to which he replied, ‘great, when the money arrives, we’ll let you go.’ If I had said no, they would have had me on the next plane out. I was in there for 10 days.
I did get out alive obviously and ended up in Bath hospital in an isolation ward with a massively infected leg, pustulating blisters and a bruised ego. The blisters needed sorting out though and if my mum was doing it, it would involve a bowl of warm water with a bit of Dettol and a sponge. I had an Israeli doctor, just back from the front line of some war or other and in no mood for warm water. I survived though, the human body is a beautiful thing, a mere six months and two operations later, I was back on a plane heading out to meet Jimmy who by this time had hitched across Africa, through the middle east and was hanging out in Delhi. Imagine the fun waiting for us in the Himalayas.
The ‘out of body experience’ wasn’t my first by the way, I’d had one before, in the desert a thousand miles North of Kribi, I’ll tell you about it next time, it’s not remotely grim, quite funny actually.