DAY FIFTY-TWO We were away from the quarry by 8. As the heat came into the day, so the storm clouds gathered and by 9:30 we had battened down, endured a torrential storm and rolled the sides up again.
The country we passed through was the same as Northern C.A.R., that is, rolling plains covered with subtropical forest.
We had planned to change money in the first town we came to but we discovered that Friday is the first day of the Muslim weekend, so all the banks were closed and in fact we had to take a detour in one town to avoid a crowd of people kneeling on rugs facing Mecca!
As we drove through the afternoon, we rose up above the plains into high rolling foothills, the cover giving way to less dense bush and jumbles of rock outcrops. We camped the night in a roadside quarry at the top of a ridge overlooking a wide plain, on the other side of which a range of broken hills lay, brown and rugged in the evening haze.
Two herd boys drove their mob of cattle past us, one of them strumming a 1-string guitar. They paid us virtually no attention and took their charges away into the trees to a hidden corral.
Ian and I walked over to an outcrop of rocks and watched the evening draw to a close. The rock we sat on was smooth and warm from the heat of the day and faced due east. The ridges of bush rolled away into the haze and we stayed until the fiery glow of the sun had disappeared behind a huge cloud that sat on the horizon, and darkness had lowered it’s great bulk gently onto the land.
After a yummy tea of curry and mash, we slept well with a breeze sighing around the tent.
CurseOfTheTraveller 