Kampala, Entebbe, Jinja… Yip, that was it.
Day 169:
It was amazing how light the ground tent was inside. We were not close to a light as such, but the campground globes could definitely be seen through the thin nylon rip-stop this tent was made from and I kept waking up wondering if the sun was up. Our trusty roof top tent was made from heavy canvas and when you closed the windows and doors, it did not let much light through.
It was still a quiet and relaxing night’s sleep and we both woke up refreshed and ready for the day! To be honest, we had decided previously to do very little that day and we got right to it! By mid day we had done nothing worth mentioning and after lunch we carried on doing pretty much the same. Catt was over the moon that her Mac was fixed, so spent most the day speaking to it, stroking it and I swear she was making it other strange promises as well.
Evening arrived with only minor precipitation which we were well prepared for and after a scrumptious dinner we went to bed again. It was deemed a very successful day of achieving exactly what we set out to achieve.
Day 170:
Another peaceful night later we woke up to bird song, the bleating of the two local goats outside our tent and a grunting noise we could not place. Once outside the tent I saw a three legged cat we had named “Tripod” but refused to believe he could make that sound. When I walked to the back of the car to make the coffee I spotted the culprit! It was the single biggest pig I had ever seen and it was having a mud bath where the ladies were doing to laundry. When I stopped laughing I called him Christmas…
Shopping was on the day’s agenda as our stores were running very low. It was with a little shock that I noticed that we still had a meat supply from Arusha we bought more than a month before but very little in terms of fresh produce. Kampala seemed a good place to fill both the fridge and freezer again though. Our first stop was a supermarket called Game that we recognized from South Africa. It was absolutely and utterly astonishingly amazing to walk through a warehouse sized store and seeing how much they had on offer. It was the first time we had experienced anything like that in five months and we were dumbstruck! They even had a hardware section and camping section! The best part for me was that they had our new found favourite wine on special, so we bought 10 litres of the good stuff!
The next stop was the Shoprite next door which was equally well stocked and big. There we mainly got some groceries, but also bought enough meat to last us for more than a month. We found great quality chicken for the first time since Zambia and Beef Fillet was about $6 per kilogram. To the great delight of the security guard, we repackaged some things in the car park to make them fit into the fridge and freezer.
Our last mission was vegetables and as it had become our custom, we found the local market. This market was huge and had everything from motor spares to building supplies, whole carcasses of beef, goat and sheep and more vegetables than you could imagine. There was a football sized area dedicated to bananas! The produce looked fantastic and we managed a fortnight’s worth for a little less than $5.
Back at camp, while looking at the day’s successes and washing the fruit and vegetables, we calculated that we could easily eat for a month from what we had in the car at a cost of about $8 per day. More points for Uganda!
The late afternoon saw the arrival of a fantastic looking 4 x 4 truck and Robert and Clary (http://www.doubledutchworldsafari.com/) We had communicated via email about plans and places before and I had been wondering if we would actually bump into each other. They used to own a restaurant in Australia and had retired to do a 5 year round the world trip. They had raced from Tanzania to Kenya to sort out visas and admin and were backtracking to Uganda and Rwanda. We could obviously share valuable recent information with them about the places we had experienced, as they could with us about Kenya. The friendly chat turned into a bit of a party and the consumption of way too much of our freshly acquired wine! We eventually lit the fire at 22:00, ate at 23:00 and crashed into our bed (Fortunately this was still on the ground) just before 23:30
Day 171:
The Americans arrived at 4:00. That’s 4Am! Their loud voiced carried across the camp site and they decided, in their wisdom to have their early morning discussion about the day’s program while standing right next to our tent! I was not impressed! I was also hung over and not in the mood for confrontation to tried to ignore the surroundings for the 45 minutes it took them to decide what time to have breakfast! Catt was also just a little annoyed.
Hangover day was Sunday and after falling back asleep with the departure of the Americans, we eventually woke up to the soothing and welcoming sounds of a church choir not too far away. It was after 8:00 and we were still feeling a little rough around the edges. Robert and Clary looked right as rain and after another short chat they hit the road towards Murchison Falls NP. We wisely decided to stay put for the day… again.
Day 172:
By this time we had learnt that the Pig’s name was Pig and Tripod’s name was Panda. This was a sure indication that it was time to move on. It took a while to pack up the tents and get stuff organised again, but we still drove through the gate by mid morning.
Our destination for the day was not far away at all. We headed towards Entebbe which was not only the Uganda’s International airport, but also the site of the world’s very first aircraft hi-jacking. It was June 1976 when some Palestine and German terrorists hi-jacked an aircraft and forced it to land there. Idi Amin offered to broker a deal, the Israelis duped the hi-jackers into releasing the hostages and shot them all dead. Those were the days!
Entebbe was also the site of the Uganda wildlife Education centre and this was of far more interest to me than dead terrorists. We arrived at the gates before mid day and was shown the modest, but pleasant camp site next door. The cost was $5 a person, so we signed up for the night. In the afternoon we decided to invest another $10 each to visit the animals, only our payment was refused. The theory was that because we were camping there, we had already paid enough money to enter. This made no sense to me as entrance was twice as much as camping, but I could see that I was not going to win an argument and walked through the gate smiling.
“Wildlife Education Centre” was clearly nothing more than a fancy word for Zoo. The animals on the other hand were mostly rescued from poachers and traders and not bread or bought to live their lives in Captivity. We walked past the first enclosure to see a Giant Forest Hog which we had never seen before and some Waterbuck and Kob before heading past the Lion enclosure to see two Servals. The forest walk took us past some Rhino and on to a huge aviary containing a lone Shoebill Stork, which was my main reason for visiting the centre. We missed Shoebill Island in Bengweulu in Zambia, we missed the Storks in Queen Elisabeth and Murchison Falls and this, by all accounts was the last place we could spot one. I could agree that it was cheating to visit a zoo to see a rare bird, but then again, I don’t think I had ever met anyone who had seen one apart from Mark Harvey from Kapishya. Besides, it was worth it! This dude was fantastically peculiar with a broad bill as large as a shoe box, never mind a shoe! He had to move his head slowly as the apparent weight of his bill seemed to pull him off balance when he moved to quickly. His spooky eyes scanned the little marsh for juicy things to eat and he expertly picked up snails with the tips of his beak. This astonished me greatly as I could not work out how he could actually see the tip of his bill.
We left Mr. Shoebill after a long while and headed to the Chimpanzee enclosure. This seemed to be the centre’s prized possession. They boasted a few photographs of a proud Jane Goodall with their animals which were all confiscated from poachers and illegal owners in the past. Every Chimp had a photo display with its own history and story as well. We watched the energetic and entertaining primates for a long time and they seemed content with their 5 star lodgings complete with artificial vines to swing from. The day close to the Equator was sunny and extremely hot, so we spent some of our entrance money that wasn’t charged on cold beer in the modest restaurant on the shores of Lake Victoria.
A quick walk past Mr. Shoebill saw us leaving the zoo and heading back to Maggie who were parked on a nice lawn for a change. We were, predictably the only people in the camp site for the night and loved every second of it. The weather had cooled a bit after sunset which made for a pleasant evening and the distinct absence of bugs meant that we sat outside, with our light on for quite a while before scaling the ladder to our fondly missed roof top tent.
Day 173:
Entebbe did not have anything to keep us there another day, so we decided to move on again. We considered visiting the Ssese Islands, but reportedly there is nothing to do there apart from lying on the beach and relaxing. We had had our fair share of doing nothing and it was hardly Likoma Island in Malawi!
I had some photographs to mail to South Africa so went in search of the Entebbe Post Office first. This was found in an old house removed from the main street, manned by two ladies and no less than 8 computers offering Internet. They had no envelopes to sell, nor could they tell me of another shop that did. So after enquiring about postage rates, one of the ladies and I started an interesting process of manufacturing cardboard envelopes for my precious cargo. The process took about 40 minutes and the cost of postage of two CD’s was just over $2. The cost of the manufacturing process was about $0.20 for the packing tape I had used.
With responsibilities dealt with we pointed Maggie back towards Kampala and snuck in behind a truck or two to avoid being stopped in the road blocks. I had adapted this approach in Tanzania and it seemed to work well as a time saving exercise. Kampala’s traffic was out in force, but still no where near as mad as Dar Es Salaam. The millions of lawless “bodabodas” (Motorcycle taxis) were omnipresent but by that time I had learnt the art of ignoring them and simply driving the way I wanted to with great disregard for any other road user. It worked very well and I managed to cross the city in a fair time without being shouted at once.
I had to laugh at the concept though. I mean, let’s face it, any city that I had been to in the world had absolutely insane and mad taxi drivers who ignore as many rules as they can and are generally a danger to themselves, their passengers and other traffic on the road. Africa is no different and often at the very extreme end of mad drivers. East Africa looked at that concept and thought that they could do better though! They instated the Bodaboda, giving a motorcycle licence to mad drivers and decided, in their infinite wisdom not to enforce helmets for motorcycles. Fantastic! At least I was less scared of getting hit by a Bodaboda than a 12 seater minibus taxi.
So after surviving the carnival of the streets of Kampala with sense of humour in tack (More than what I could say for most other capitols in southern and east Africa) we headed further east towards the top end of Lake Victoria and the town of Jinja. We passed through the Mabira Forest Reserve with its larger than life trees and dense undergrowth and got spat out the other side with the view of a dam wall and a hydro electrical plant in the Nile. Before the plant came, this was where Speke discovered Ripon Falls and claimed that to be the source of the Nile. The locals would obviously argue that their ancestors knew this long before the Mzungu came. I find it slightly amusing that it was later found that the actual source of the mighty Nile was a tiny spring in Burundi’s Kasumo. To date, there are actually no less than three claims to the source of the Nile: Kasumo being the “southern most” source, Rwanda’s Nyungwe Forest claims the “longest” and Uganda’s blown up Ripon Falls claims the “major” source of the Nile with Murchison Falls being the most exciting thing to happen to the Nile in the totally of its length.. Having not seen anything apart from Murchison Falls, I couldn’t really comment on the correctness of any of these.
Outside of town and down stream of the plant our mission started to find suitable accommodations. Our first attempt failed miserably because the camp site had no access for Maggie and could not deal with the apparent new and bizarre world of the Roof Top Tent. I found this strange as they managed to build a Bungee jumping tower over the river, but failed to build a road into their camp site. We did enquire about their white water rafting… just out of interest sake.
Our second place for investigation was Nile Explorers camp site a little way down stream. As I drove in I saw a white 80 series Land Cruiser with Cape Town number plates and kitted out almost identically to ours. They had a fantastic spot with the rear of the car in the shade and the nose, with solar panel in the sun. I was sold! We were told that the camping would cost us $10 for the night and that we could even drive on the lawn if we wanted. They offered free internet on their computers and had the original rafting business in Jinja. I was impressed! Their rafting price was the same as Adrift, but included two nights of accommodation, three meals and a few free drinks in the bar. I ran out of excuses and signed up for the next day. It would have been rude not to as this stretch of the mighty Nile allegedly offered some of the best white water rafting in the world! Reportedly this was also the last season that the Nile would offer this excitement as the Ugandans had decided to build another power plant down stream with the unfortunate effect of turning world class rapids into a nice, calm, big lake…
We spent the afternoon stressing about dying and chatting to Brandon and Tam, the couple from Cape Town. They were at the end of their trip, heading back south after leaving home the same time we did. Once again we could swap valuable information about the countries we had respectively visited. If only guidebooks could be that up to date! An early dinner and some wine marked the end to our day and we nervously snuck up to bed, avoiding the bar and the rafting video being showed on the big screen.
Day 174:
We woke up way too early for Africa and managed a shower and multiple mugs of the good African coffee before the rafting truck started and we were herded into the back of it. I did notice that everyone else on the truck seemed to be either staff, or in relationships with staff, making us the only two in experienced tourists. The truck drove us to a backpackers lodge in Jinja and there we met a fe other nervous looking folks and managed a friendly chat to some of the staff.
Breakfast was served and it was HUGE and DELICIOUS and I got my money’s worth right there! Doug, our guide, introduced himself and after a short, scary and humorous briefing we were issued with life vests and crash helmets and piled back onto the truck to be taken to the river’s edge. On the way there we met and chatted to Anton, a Kayak instructor from Sweden and his girlfriend Rachel who were attempting a grade 6 rapid in a tandem kayak. This didn’t mean too much to me at the time, but I was impressed none the less. Anton noticed the GoPro camera I mounted on my helmet and told me a story of how he had lost his when his kayak broke into small pieces after tumbling down a waterfall two weeks before. I got a little edgy then, but the excitement definitely started to mound up.
Getting onto the water, our boat consisted of a team of five clients and Doug, our guide. Apart from Doug, I was the only male and was given the task of time setting, using my paddle in the front of the boat. We tested our skill as a team, practiced some commands, went swimming and got back into the boat and even flipped the raft on purpose before Doug deemed us ready and able to head down the river. He was fantastically entertaining, professional and fun all in the same time. He explained rapid number one to us and as we dropped into the leading rapid (Technical talk) my eyes got big and if I could have, I would have screamed like a little girl! We managed to power through it without incident and when we came out the other side we were told that that was a grade 2….
Doug explained that flipping the raft in a rapid for the first time was much like having sex for the first time. It was said to be over way too soon without you really knowing what happened, but you still found it to be kind of fun…We hit our first grade three shortly after and that was incredible! Riding the waves and plummeting down what he called “green tongues” was exciting and very scary in deed. As we were about to leave the white water we flipped…. Doug was right. None of us expected it; none of us knew exactly what was happening and all of us got back onto the boat with big smiles on our faces.
Our next grade 3 was easily done and that brought us to a thing they call “Silverback”, our first grade 5 rapid. This time Doug didn’t play around. He explained the dangers of the place and told us to get a little serious. We dropped in to his screaming commands of “HARD FORWARD” “GET DOWN” AND “HOLD ON” and like a well oiled military machine we managed the run without flipping again.
Our second grade 5 for the day was a place called Bujagali Falls. We patiently waited at the top of the falls, listening intently to Doug’s instructions and explanations of riding down a 19 foot high waterfall in a 18 foot long raft. It all sounded quite treacherous, but under his expert guidance and bombastic sergeant major voice we made it through without issue. He had us paddle back into the insanely strong current and we rode a rapid called “Chop Suey” and “50/50”. (Hey, I didn’t name them) In the former we hit a huge wave sideways and went limbs and paddles flying out of the raft and into the foaming white water. We all miraculously managed to hold on to the raft and by this time it took us less than 20 seconds to flip it back and get back in. One of the girls had taken a hit above her eye and was bleeding profusely. We all suddenly realized how serious our chosen adventure really was.
In a calm bit in the river called an “Eddie”, (More technical talk) our fearless leader patched her up and sent her to the clinic for stitches. So then we were four. As the day progressed we made new friends and saw the likes of Anton and Rachel running the rapids in their tandem kayak. We came to understand the severity of the grades of rapids and the insanity of attempting a grade 6. We passed a place called “the dead Dutchman” which marked a spot where someone (Guessing he was Dutch) drowned after making a fatal error. To pass this, we had to survive “The bad place” and “Jaws”.
Our lunch on the river consisted of a whole pineapple and a packet of biscuits each on a long calm stretch of water. We saw the place of the new dam and power plant which was destined to ruin all the fun places we had been in the morning and even though we loved Uganda very much we had to admit a shocking reality. In Uganda, as in most of the rest of the East Africa we had been, the motto seemed to be to kill everything that moves, cut down everything that doesn’t move and destroy as much of the natural world for financial gain as possible. The tiny bit of the continent that was left, we call National Parks where the finances of the Mzungu tourists got taken advantage of in currencies not printed by the countries they were in. But hey, in Africa, that is called “Progress”. In this specific case Uganda apparently had to promise the Egyptians that they would allow the same volume of water to reach the Mediterranean to avoid Egypt sending a war plane to bomb the crap out of the structure.
The afternoon session gave us a few more grades 3’s and grade 4’s and saw us flip once or twice more. It was after our fourth flip for the day that a tourist in another raft told us how Doug, with a huge smile on his face, forced the flips while we were all hanging on in terror. He obviously did this in safe places and to be honest, it did ad to the fun of the ride, but I never expected that from him. Towards the end of the day Rachel started talking non stop and asking questions, receiving contradictory answers from Anton and Doug and we figured out that the grade 6 in question was fast approaching.
We were told that we had to get out of our rafts and walk a small section, avoiding this rapid. We did as we were told… From the banks we saw the white foaming aggression of the rapids and all of us became silent, secretly praying for the soul of poor, tiny little Rachel in the front of the tandem Kayak. I could see no possibility of surviving that run and kept thinking of the story of Anton’s smashed up kayak and lost GoPro camera. That didn’t stop me from strapping our GoPro to the front of their boat, facing Rachel earlier though.
The safety boat was in place and the signal given and this was obviously an event of enough importance that the locals came out in force to watch. Our group of naïve and inexperienced rafters watched in awe as Anton expertly guided them through the huge waves and massive sprays. They flipped after one section, but rolled back up in an instant and with Rachel screaming as loud as I had been wanting to the whole day, they passed us. Anton, laughing so much and almost dropping his paddle brought them to a stop at the take out point and waited for the rest of us to run the last half, a modest grade 5.
Our boat was the last down and we managed the really dangerous place without issue after which Doug shouted “HARD FORWARD SUCKERS” and I knew what was coming. I could see the huge wave as we approached and I could see Doug turn the boat sideways. Out the corner of my eye I even saw him stand up and jump in the air as we flipped. The cheeky sod tried to land on his feet on the upturned raft to please the mass of spectators who had gathered to see us die! By this time we were experts though and we all hung onto the rope, helped right the raft and climbed on down stream of the take out point. He had us paddle hard forward upstream and we all crawled from the raft onto dry land, exhausted, but ecstatic!
We reached the top of the hill and found the waiting truck with ice cold drinking water on it. Before long the rafts were loaded, the tourists boarded and we set of back towards the camp site. Anton told us that we had travelled about 30km on the river that day, which was almost hard to believe. Back at the camp site we were treated to a buffet dinner of salads, potatoes and skewers of beef fillet. I ate to bursting point and finished my two free beers without them touching the sides of my thought. Despite her objections, we loaded Rachel’s finest moments onto the laptop and played it for everyone to see. It was fantastically terrifying from that point of view and she immediately received “super hero” status from the rest of us “first timers”.
The evening grinded to a halt with tired muscles and minds and smiling faces, courtesy of an absolutely fantastically spectacular day on the mighty Nile River!
Day 175:
OUCH! It was hard to lift my head and I was not looking forward to trying to get up. There was no hang over this time, but the muscles I had been neglecting for the preceding five and a half months were taking their cruel revenge! Catt was feeling fairly much the same.
After a slow start to a perfectly warm and sunny day in Africa I managed to get the coffee made and the chairs put out. We sat for a while, reminiscing about the fun of the day before and complaining about the stiffness of our muscles. Brandon and Tam next door giggled at us knowingly as they had experienced the same thing a day before we got there. It was fairly obvious that we were not going to move on that day!
Catt had met a Speech Therapist from Wellington, New Zealand, who was volunteering in the nearby village and was keen to investigate the local clinic. I had to try and find an electrical fault causing the indicator fuse to blow every day and rest as much as possible. With Catt on her mission I started my own venture and surprisingly managed to find a loose wire and re-attach it to solve the indicator issue. Brandon and I chatted about cars and boy stuff until they left around mid morning and after showering and a long overdue shave the second part of plan commenced.
Catt came back around lunch time and with our usual grub of fine tomatoes, spectacularly large chunks of cheese and some wheaty biscuits. While chomping away she told me that her new friend was paying £75 per week to work in an African village for free for six months as a volunteer. This did not include her living costs or travel expenses. After sitting down again, having fallen of my chair at this news, I struggled to understand the concept. Conservatively a speech therapist would have spent £20 000 getting qualified and should charge around £80 a day if they charge only double the minimum UK hourly wage. This meant that she was not only paying £75 a week to the charity in the UK, but also donating £400 a week of her skill and knowledge and probably another £20 a week on living expenses. So adding it all up, her actual contribution to charity was in the region of £12 500 in her 6 months. I could not help but wander what car the owner of this charity drove and what the size of his house was. He was definitely not living in a mud hut in an African village volunteering his time to “The Cause” and paying o9ver £2 000 a month for the pleasure.
Our afternoon was spent on philosophizing about the greediness of man kind and deciding whether we wanted to spend a day or two on an island at a place called “The Hairy Lemon” We watched the sun set over the mighty grade 5 we had ridden the day before while drinking a Nile Special beer before using the Cobb to cook the best roast chicken known to man.
If I had to do it all again:
On an adventure like ours we found it really important to stop every once in a while. The Red Chilli in Kampala was a great place to do just that, but honestly, knowing what I know now, I would have preferred to spend that resting time at Nile Explorers in Jinja. This is such a nice place with such a fantastic atmosphere of excitement and friendliness with a market for fruit and vegetables right outside the gate. The only trouble with that would be that I would be sorely tempted to “run the Nile’s rapids” again costing me another $125 per person for the day.
The week was deemed a great success and we feel strangely refreshed and tired at the same time and looking forward to the next week’s adventure!
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