I’m driving down the smugglers’ route with Omar. We pass through the forest, down from the Gambia to Abéné, across the border in Senegal. After weeks in England it’s exhilarating to speed through mile after mile of vivid green forest and lakes of mud through which Kermit, my fluorescent green Land Rover, slithers and slides. As we cross an open patch of land, I spot two large birds pecking at the ground.

They’re huge – perhaps a metre tall each. Omar screeches to a halt, leaps out and runs towards them, flapping his arms and squawking like a bird himself. The two birds, Abyssinian ground hornbills, start running, then take off, and I see a flash of white beneath their black wings as they only just clear the trees. Bemusedly, for I thought I’d heard it all by now, I ask a slightly breathless Omar what’s going on.

“Simon, this bird is very special to the Diola people and we always make it fly if we see one; otherwise we will have bad luck.”

Not long after, I was sitting on the roadside while my Land Rover was being fixed. It was nearly finished when I felt a large splat on my leg. Africans aren’t the only ones with bird-related superstitions…

Back in Abéné, I go to see my African mother, Diatou. She will often explain the finer points of Diola culture to me and I want to check if hornbills held any deeper meanings for the Diola; they don’t – or if they do, she isn’t telling.

“But Simon, don’t you remember when we went to Ziguinchor with Tom?”

Of course I remembered that trip. Khady and I had taken a car with Diatou and her late husband Tom, who had died while we were there. Then Khady and I had taken a bus back, and it had crashed en route, nearly killing us both.

“Well, we saw that bird on the way there and I told the driver to stop, but he just carried on.”

We’d neglected to chase hornbills that day, and seemingly paid the price.

Over the coming months, when I experience tropical illness, near death, voodoo madness and seriously question my own sanity, I find myself wondering if I should have joined Omar and chased them today.