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Returning is only over when you are back at a place you recognise as home, waking up in a bed that remembers how you like to spread out at night, for more than a week. By that yardstick, I’ll be home on Wednesday and you will get delicious audiovisual treatery soon after. For now, though, a brief storytelling interlude via some quick stats written on the dirtiest back pages of my journal.

Delicious beans eaten. So very, very many. I miss them so. These fine specimens from a market in Fort Portal. Where there were, alas, no portals. Only very fine tea.

FARDC roadblocks run: 2

FARDC roadblocks screamed ‘bonjour’ from: 1

Bribes paid: $0

Km driven on a small Indian motorbike: 45

Rides in UN vehicles: 1

Vegetarian burgers eaten: 1

Cost of a night in a Bunia ‘hotel’: $25

Cost of a night in a real hotel: $65

Nights spent in a real hotel: 0

Cost of a night in a cheap Bunia hotel: $10

Probability that the cheap hotel was a brothel: 100%

Immigration stops: 2

Nutella found: 1

Nutella found to cost: $6

Wheels of cheese found: 1

Wheels of cheese found to cost: $8

Average litres of water drunk in a day: 4

Average miles on a valuable used car from the US: 500,000

Average miles on a valuable used car from the DRC: 50,000

Cost of a 1.5l bottle of water: $1

Cost of a beer: $2-3

Primus beer labels collected: 10

Total video and photo material returned with: 600Gb

Great memories returned with: so bloody many.