Paul meets Bruce in Sudan
With the recent peace accord between North and South Sudan, efforts to make this country more liveable have stepped up. Amongst these efforts, New Zealander Bruce Burnett leads a specialist de-mining crew of humans and dogs. Over ten days we venture with Bruce through isolated villages to establish, detect and blow up the many landmines still buried in the war-torn region.
Getting to Bruce and travelling with him around Sudan is a story in itself. After much negotiation Paul manages to charter an old Russian freighter plane to go into the south of Sudan.
Bruce Burnett served 22 years in the New Zealand army before taking a contract with an American firm. He's been living in war-torn countries for four years, with Iraq his most recent home prior to the Sudan. In Iraq a fundamentalist Muslim cleric placed a US$50,000 bounty on Bruce's head - something he "tried not to get worried about".
Bruce is a self-confessed explosives freak - like firemen who become transfixed by the power of fire. The list of countries he expects to live in the future read like a list of places to avoid - Angola, Afghanistan, Mozambique&
We leave Bruce as he and his team head off to further areas of the Sudan and Paul and the crew travel onwards to Uganda.
We're crossing into Uganda to hitch a ride with Rotorua boy Cam McLeay who now calls the central African country home. Cam is a professional river rafter and has been living overseas for 14 years rafting first descents on every continent bar Antarctica. But on the banks of the Nile Paul meets Cam and his team, encountering them midway in their extraordinary attempt to be the first to ascend the world's longest river and to discover its much-debated source. Cam is adamant they will find the source of the Nile, but after a year's planning Paul meets them at one of their biggest hurdles yet, the largest rush of water in the world - Murchison Falls.
This world first attempt to ascend the Nile will take three months out of Cam's life - crossing five countries, and into areas white people have not been for two decades, on a challenge of arduous rafting up river from the banks of the Nile in Egypt through to the presumed source in Rwanda.
Because of the upriver attempt and the fact the whole Nile dashes through a five-metre gap and plunges 45 metres, the team have devised a unique way for their boats to scale the infamous Murchison Falls. A flying boat will hopefully lift their inflatables and transport them high above the wall of water.
"Ascend the Nile" is a fulfilment of Cam's life's ambition, he
laughs "to go where no-one has been before - and there's probably a
good reason why they haven't". It's a culmination of 20 years
as a professional rafter, first in Rotorua, then the US, throughout
Eastern Europe and now Uganda - home for he, his Australian wife
and their two children (they now have three).
