Trip to Apoka... in a gonzo style

Well that was close, thought I was gonna lose it there for a second. The Entebbe road is not for the faint hearted. Great fucking armed convoys ferrying who knows what from fuck knows where to god alone knows who… What’s in those trucks? Plundered Congolese gold,  mutant child slaves, Shape-shifting, reptilian tele-evangelist preachers, come to preach fire and brimstone to the spiritually susceptible masses?
I don’t want to think about it, it’s making me feel ill, I can feel the sweat pouring down my back, foul rivulets of bodily waste. Vodka, rum, a skinful of tusker and some cheap cut cocaine… Stop these thoughts… I must stay focused.
This is all Danny’s fault, dodgy two-bit dealer:
“if you gonna cut the gear, please! Use anything but speed!” Didn’t sleep a wink. Bastard! Note to self: Find Danny upon return and kick him in the bollocks, what a cunt!
I am on my way to an “extremely, very” ( I have lifted this wonderful description straight outta an ad I have just heard on some local radio station… ‘these women are extremely, very dangerous!’(?) Wicked.) remote lodge up in the north east of Uganda on some assignment for some two bit publication over the plight of some poor two-bit displaced tribe that well honestly in my opinion just couldn’t cut it anyway…
Survival of the fittest baby. In the words of that chop di caprio: TIA… Eat or be eaten. Bas.
Right now, in order to survive, I seriously need to pull over… I stop @ a kobil (?) garage, is that like Mobil, but with dyslexia? What’s with this place? Fuck, I need medicating!
These sweats need to be stopped, I see my driver eyeing me disapprovingly as I rummage through my hastily packed hold-all. I never let him drive! He must think I’m fucking weird.
“Where the fuck is my Ativan?”
“There shall and must be Ativan” I feel the desperation of Withnail, from the 90’s cinematic bomb ‘Withnail and I’ rushing over me, coursing through my veins…
“Don’t suppose they got any anti freeze here”, I think, being on the equator and all! I can’t even follow in the steps of dear Withnail and recklessly start downing the fucking stuff…
Shiiiit! Clips from the cult classic fill my mind… Withnail was freezing his bollocks off… anti-freeze is useless! I’m not even cold! The exact bloody opposite!
“At Last!”
“I bloody knew it…”
“Gotcha baby”, Two of the little suckers, Two milligrams of peace and serenity… I love you benzodiazepine…
Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpse something that startles me, I choke, reeling in fascinated horror: Peaking out from the under the hard cardboard lining in the bottom of my black Reebok hold-all, is one of those tiny little bankies that any self respecting junkie knows and loves so well, and in it, grinning out through the murky plastic film, just like his Cheshire cousin; none other than that free-wheeling fiend… Fat Freddy’s Cat! Cheeky bugger! Three little stamps of some of the god damn strongest Acid ever synthesized…
I lost that baggie months ago!
I hastily make a decision… the temptation of some kick ass acid, whilst cruising over some seriously remote terrain all just seems like too much of a good thing to pass up on. I feel better already, a little anxious, but better. I’m definitely gonna need the Ativan later, so I carefully stash it in a side pocket along with my toiletries.
“Back in a tick…” I say chirpily to my driver, he hardly looks at me, he knows I’m up to something… Poor bastard, I suspect he is one of these pious, god fearing church going types. Not that I don’t believe in God, oh, on the contrary, it’s just my god is somewhat more oblique, nebulous. I have no time for lowly fucking creator gods, imposing their twisted vanities on mankind, handing down commandments, a jealous god that loves with a knife!
No way! Behind all the maya and illusion of the god for-bloody-saken material plane, beyond this mortal coil, that’s where my god lies, eternal and forever.
“Christ!” I muse, I haven’t even taken this shite yet, and look how I’m thinking!
I lock my self in the cubicle of the toilet at the garage and unceremoniously dump a pile of the shitty vim I have left over from the previous evening’s debauchery on top of the cistern. I absently chop at the lumpy charlie with a battered credit card whilst taking a piss. The chopping motion causes me to piss all over the floor.
“Shit”, I mutter, oh well, hardly the cleanest fucking toilet I’ve ever visited…
At least I’m wearing closed shoes!
I quickly roll up a 50k note and vacuum up the dirty, snowy speed bump…
“whoo!” Well that certainly tickled the old sinuses! Wake up the bloody dead!
I glance at the time… I’m about 10 mins from the airport, it’s gonna take 20 minutes to check in if all is running smoothly, which is unlikely…
“Aw, what the heck,” I think, and throwing caution to the wind pop one of the innocuous looking little blotter stamps under my tongue.
It tastes of metal, mercury and ozone. 45 minutes till kick off.
The check in goes well, my long suffering driver helps me haul my camera equipment and associated paraphernalia through to the check in counter and makes sure I am through the check in gate with time to spare.
He worries about me. He is a good man. A little too god fearing! But a good man no less.
I give him a coupla fifties, tell him to remember to feed my fiendish cat whilst I’m away and tell him he is welcome to use the vehicle too.
I have about 15 minutes to kill. I order a Tusker and a toasted cheese and tomato sandwich. I’m not really hungry, but know I should eat whilst I still can…
Three lovely little Tuskers and one pretty average toasty later: We are on the plane!
It’s a ten-seater twin prop.  It’s Time to rock and roll.
As we bullet down the runway I become acutely aware of the elemental forces that govern nature.
My mind momentarily fusing with the combustion engine fixed to the front of the wing…
Take off in more ways than one.
I am the engine’s  alloy casing. The holy name AGLA resonates through me. The angel of the north…
The meta behind the physics.
Beneath my crackling metal skin: air, water, fire…The great Djinn provides the spark;
Synapses crackle, etheric sparkplugs of the mind:
I am a great galloping winged bull,
I am the angel of death,
An eagle chained, I struggle, I climb,
A gliding serpent, on fire…
An arrow hurtling toward the sun,
Rippling the fabric of space,
A fat glistening trout snatching a bug,
A Quivering high mountain lake

“Fuck sake!” everyone in the plane turns and looks in my direction…
“Sorry” I mutter,
“Musta dozed off…” I force a smile. I feel like a vampire, fangs bared, dripping with the blood of small innocent children, flesh smoking in the harsh light of day! Busted!
This is not good.
“Did I say that out loud?” I wonder, fighting off waves of crippling, debilitating paranoia.
Paranoia on a small plane is not where I wanna be!
Fortunately every one in the plane goes back to what they were doing and I’m left wondering what the fuck just happened.
I start rummaging about in my bag for one of the tuskers I bought @ the airport. I purchased them specifically for this purpose. To keep the fucking wolves at bay, to add touch of normality, take the edge off this vicious fucking LSD.
I crack open a cheeky “green coke”.(Tusker, the local lager in these parts comes in a tasty looking apple green bottle, and well, it’s drunk like bloody cool-drink, hence: ‘green coke’…) Below the scenery unfolds like a tapestry, a myriad of mossy green lakeside fields and malachite algae blooms, rusty red tilled earth and spinach green forested hills… I try not look too closely, getting into the stitch-work could be dangerous at this point…
The plane starts bouncing wildly,
“Bloody turbulence” I think absently as I continue to stare down below.
  Then I see them. Poking through the cloud tops, great coloured balloons, thick primary coloured stripy things, big, bright, super-real… Millions of the bastards… drifting ever upward,  and we’re heading straight into the thick of them! Bowler-Hatted men in tuxedo’s struggle with their charges, jettisoning ice buckets, cats and dogs, the balloons seem to have minds of their own. I see one hapless pilot firing up his burners;
“Perhaps hoping to get up and out of the thermal”, I think to myself… The balloon flashes iridescent, and in a blinding splash of light is gone.
“I must warn the pilot!” I think to myself. I make to get up. The bloody seatbelt around my waist prevents me…
There is a tapping on the window glass…
A severe pointing wing feather wags at me sternly, pointing like the finger of god…
“Oh No You Don’t!” It admonishes gravely… I stare dumbfounded.
The reassuring normal looking steel and alloy wing of just a moment ago seems to have mutated into a giant ruffling wind-sleeked feather foil and it looks very, very alive! The great bird gracefully recovers from the still resonating gesture. Transfixed, I watch the primary feathers respond to the bumps and pockets of air.
“that fucking thing just spoke to me”(?)(!)(...)
The nose of the plane turns and eyes me suspiciously, chimeric yellow eye and a cruel hooked beak…         
“Back in your seat boy,”
“It’s a Feeding time at the zoo…”
The great bird’s napkin, tied in a pretty bow around its titanic, powerful neck, flaps wildly in the breeze, it is splattered with bowler hats, tuxedo’s and splashes of blood. In its terrible claws the shrieking chimera wields a set of ornate eating irons with which it expertly plucks rotund, jolly looking men from their floating wicker baskets, slashing at balloons and swallowing men whole.
Down below it is raining cats and dogs. 
In the west, a rainbow slowly spreads.
I sit back in my seat and start to enjoy the ride.