Uganda

I have been blogging a lot less since coming to rural Kenya, mainly because my internet modem doesn’t actually work well at my house, so I have to squeeze any online time more or less in when I’m at work. So, I feel it’s about time to talk about Uganda, which I visited 2 weekends ago. It was an adventure. It started Thursday at 6 am, when I boarded a Matatu from Nyeri to Nairobi. It should be a 2 hour trip, but this being Kenya, it took about 3 hours and 15 minutes. There is now a nice Highway that runs from Nyeri to Nairobi, thanks to the influx of funding into central province thanks to the shared ethnicity of this region and President Kibaki. However, there was a cop roadblock every few miles (aka a place for the police to collect a “kitu kidogo” from the matatu drivers)…so we ended up taking an hour long detour on some back road, that was really a glorified nature path. The next leg of my journey was an 8 hour bus ride to Kisumu, where I met up with my friends and we had a awesome dinner of delicious non-Kenyan food, interrupted by a brief torrential downpour. The next morning at 6 it was off again in a hired Matatu to Uganda, with a detour at the equator for needed pictures. At the boarder we ran into a problem because an oil tanker was leaking and they weren’t letting anyone across from where we were. But, we were eventually helped by our driver on the Ugandan side of the boarder, who came and got us, took us around behind some buildings, through a hole in a fence (yes a hole in a fence) and onto the Kenyan side of customs, which we went through followed by the Ugandan side, and then it was a 2 hour drive to our final destination of Jinja. Our hostel was so cool, with two sites, a main hotel with restaurant/bar close to town, and a more campsite oriented site, also with a large outdoor restaurant/bar on the nile. We stayed the first night in the latter and the 2nd in the formal. After checking in at the first site, we started meeting some of the staff, who were all a ton of fun. We ate lunch and decided to bungee jump in the afternoon. One of the staff convinced us to rent bikes and bike to the bungee jump place, and then down to the camp site. Bungee jumping over the Nile was a ton of fun. Even though I had bungee jumped in Switzerland, from a place that at about 20m, makes 44m look like cake, I was still nervous. Luckily, I went last, so I had plenty of assurance on the safety. That said, I had a moment of hesitation when I realized a towel and some heavy duty strapping where all that was connecting my ankles to the bungee cord and carabineers. However, I trusted the people knew what they were doing, and the whole experience was a ton of fun. After biking around for a bit, we had a fun night at our hotel, meeting lots of cool people, and had an early night. At 8 the next morning, we were bused back to the main hotel to leave for white water rafting on the nile. There were the 7 of us and the guide on our raft. Our guide was funny, but sort of an ass-hole, and we all were not supprised to find out he spent most of the time creating elaborate lies about himself for us. The first rapid we went down was essentially a waterfall. Rafting, or as I may choose to call it, getting thrown around in the Nile rapids like it was a waterslide, was so much fun. We probably flipped about 4 or 5 times, all of which I think was intentional on our guides part, because every time we were warned to keep our feet up, or be careful of something if we flipped, we didn’t flip. But, every time we were told it was deep and to just chill if we flipped, we flipped. It was an interesting experience flipping, because while you would think you would panic, you actually remained surprisingly calm. The first time we flipped I got trapped under the raft, and I just calmly held on under there until the water calmed down. The other times, you just get tumbled along in the waves, managing to catch a gasp of air every several seconds while not being entirely sure of what direction your going (up, down, forward, back). This lasts for about a minute, and then the water is calm and you get pulled back into the boat. It’s scary but fun. That night we had fun hanging out with the people we had met, and in the midst of a literal monsoon of rain, we all went to a local club and danced for a few hours, before taking motorbike taxis back to the hotel. At 9 the next morning, we were on a bus back to Kisumu, which about 12 hours later, landed me in Nairobi. I spent the night in Nairobi with my host family there; and, at 730 the next morning I was on a matatu back to Nyeri. I arrived in town around 10, and was back at work by 11! It was an exhausting but fun weekend!! Uganda was a lovely and beautiful country. It was lusher than Kenya, with a jungle like feel, and the people were very friendly. It was also CHEAP, and this is even compared to Kenya, which I also find incredibly cheap. Paying more than a dollar or two for a meal is going to be an adjustment when I come home. One thing that was interesting was that for whatever reason, Ugandan English was much easier to understand for us, and vice versa than Kenyan English, so it was a nice change of pace to not have to constantly be repeating oneself, or asking others to do the same.