WELCOME TO UGANDA

WEATHER: Bloody freezing in the morning 9C to a tops of 27C and beautiful

HIGHTLIGHT OF THE DAY: Beating Lisa at our lollipop sucking competition

BUMMER OF THE DAY: Not really beating Lisa at the lollipop sucking competition – I cheated

BUYS OF THE DAY: A roll of toilet paper for .25c

WORD OF THE DAY: Mumbo – hello

ANIMALS SEEN TODAY: Travel day – so no animals today

CAMP SITE RANKING:  Flushing toilets, hot water and a BAR = 4 STAR out of 5

SOME-ONE TURN THE FREEZER OFF……..

OMG how flipping cold was it this morning.  I know we are high at 2165m and it is the altitude, but F#@K I woke up during the middle of the night and put on another shirt over my pj’s, put on my jumper backwards so my hood was at the front, so I could pull it up over my face, add my towel on to that and then I moved my sleeping bag around so the hood of that also covered my face, and then, and only then did I feel warm enough to try and get some sleep.  My feet weren’t cold for some reason, but I managed to cocoon myself enough to get some warmth. It was C-c-c-c-cold……

So a 5.30am wake-up call, this safari camping gig is a tough love first thing in the morning with all these early starts, but today is a MASSIVE travel day.  We have 350km to travel.  This may not sound much, but based on the conditions of the roads and traffic, it is expected to take 8-9 hours - yes to travel 350km.  Every time Jools updates us of how long we have till the next stop or how far left to go it is always given to us in kilometers, it is never in time, as the roads are that unreliable.  20km till our next stop, 120km till lunch etc.  We also have a border crossing today as we say good-bye to Kenya and hello to Uganda.  Jools rekons it can take from 1-4 hours to cross depending on who is working, whether they like us, how much they check the truck etc……

It is the second day of tents, and this morning we have to take it down in the dark, as we are leaving at 7am, so everything on the truck by 6.30am for breakfast.  This tent fitting in the bag thing is driving Afke and I nuts on day 2.  There is just no way that tent will fit back in its bag, we re-rolled the bloody thing twice and we just couldn’t get it to work, so we left it as it was, which looked like a car accident, everything poking out, we couldn’t even pretend to close it up, it was a disaster.  We were one of the first to put our tent in the truck, so we just hoped that no-one would notice this tent bag, now twice the size of everyone else’s conspicuously in the tent hold.  There is definitely room to improve on our tent packing skills.  Afke and I have decided that tomorrow is the day we will get this bloody nemesis into its home.  Maybe after 60 days I may just master it – maybe.

On the road again, and as predicted the roads are shocking.  Not just bad – SHOCKING. No wonder it takes so long, at one point we passed some road works and to be honest I don’t know why they bothered, but I guess you have to start somewhere.  I’m having problems with my ears, I keep having to try and pop them, I guess that is to do with my cold and also the altitude as well?  I am sounding worse, it’s all in the nose, but I’m feeling okay, so I just need to get rid of the symptoms.  I am taking my cold and flu, ate a whole orange, drinking vitamin C and Louise gave me a vitamin horse pill so hopefully I have taken enough to get me in the clear.  People are jokingly keeping away, but I can see fear in their eyes that they don’t want any of my germs the closer we get to the gorillas.  I throw a fake sneeze in just to rile them up! Ha ha.

Well we could tell when we were getting close to the boarder as there is a massive queue of trucks.  I am talking like 30km long.  These trucks can wait from 3-7 days in this queue just to get into Uganda.  Uganda is a land locked country, so all its imports are bought in by road.  There are 2 other crossings in Kenya and one from Tanzania, but this boarder is by far the busiest and the longest.  By rights, we really should be joining this queue, but then that would be an Intrepid tour in itself.  Itinerary would read day 1-7 border crossing before continuing on with the trip.  Yeah not good for Intrepid and probably not a big selling point for clients either I would imagine.  So we did what everybody hates people doing and we jumped the line.  To facilitate this we had to drive for 30km on the wrong side of the road, so you can imagine, there were times we had to squeeze past oncoming trucks with the stationary one (who had possibly been sitting there for days) and as we are also in a truck, we could see straight into their cabs and felt a little guilty as we pulled away, continuing with our queue jumping.  It was a sight to see the endless line of trucks.  What a way to make a living.  But as the saying goes there is always a silver lining (not for the truck drivers) but there are people selling commodities to all the truckers, so they get to make a living off this endless queue.  A smart business opportunity.

We got to the boarder at 11am, and we all had to get off the truck and get our passports stamped that we were leaving Kenya and then back on the truck, crossing no man’s land to get us to the Uganda boarder control.  Here we all off loaded again and had to supply finger prints of both hands and pay our 50USD.  I have to say the crumby stamp they gave us for 50USD was a little disappointing.  In total the whole process only took a 1.2hours and then we were on our way again in UGANDA.  Afke and I just looked at each other and said, man we are in Uganda!!!!! Pinch time.  Sometimes we just need to sit back and take in where we are and what a great opportunity we are getting to experience.  No matter how or why people got here, we are all travelling for basically the same reasons.

The immediate thing I notice is that the roads are better in Uganda, which is a little surprising as the country is known for its corruption; you’d think they wouldn’t care so much about the road infrastructure.  We stopped about 20 minutes over the boarder for our roadside lunch.  It is pretty cool we can pull over anywhere and within 40 minutes there are seats out and food prepped and on the table. Another 40 minutes later and we are washed, packed and back on the road again.  This is safari people. 

So drive driving driving again.  We got to glimpse Lake Victoria, which is the second largest fresh water lake in the world after Lake Baikal, which I would like to point out I walked on frozen nearly 4 months ago.  Man that seems like a million years ago.  I am really going to have to make some time when I get home to go back through my blog and pictures to just pinch myself and remind myself what has been done.  That is probably one of the few ‘downsides’ of doing so much.  Normally after a holiday when you get home you have a chance to soak up the ‘after holiday’ experience, share it with your friends and start planning the next adventure.  I am currently moving from one awesome trip to the next, except for the contact I have with my new friends, it is go go go onto the next trip.  I know, I know – I can hear you all say ‘poor Bernie’ whatever………

Lake Victoria is the source of The Nile, which flows through 9 countries.  And to be a smarty they are

Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia, Egypt, Burundi……..  It is the longest river in the world.  Not many people know but the Nile has 2 tributaries called the White Nile (Lake Victoria in Uganda) and the Blue Nile (which starts at Lake Tanna in Ethiopia) and both these rivers meet in Khartoum in Sudan where they then flow to Egypt and then out into the Mediterranean Sea.  I wonder if I will see the Blue Nile when I am in Ethiopia.

So another 4 hours got us to our campsite for the night just outside of Kampala.  We did have a little hiccup where a police officer was involved.  In Chris’ defense he had to get a run up to pass a van and 2 long haul trucks, but as we pulled back into our lane, there was a police officer there waiting for us.  So we got pulled over, Chris had to get out and show his papers and then Jools got in on the act and told the officer we had a sick tourist on board and we were speeding to get to the hospital to get Chris out of the fine and to not have to palm over some ‘money’.  We didn’t think he was speeding for the record. 

The camp is busy and there is another Intrepid truck with 18x15 year olds on a school trip.  Needless to say Jools is happy that he has our group and not a truck load of teenagers!  There is a high five for this camp with flushing toilets, hot showers, an intermediate Wi-Fi and a bar.  I wonder if we are getting spoilt before we hit the rest of Africa – who cares lets live with the now with showers and toilets!

We went and had a beer before dinner at the bar and we now have to wrap our heads around a new currency.  We are now using the Ugandan schilling and the rate is approximately 1USD equals 2400 of the local currency!  Holy Moly – how good are you at your 24 times tables.  A beer was 2600, as we had just crossed over; we had no local currency, so they would accept our USD instead.  I am sure that is better for them anyway as I am sure the rate they use for us is lower than what they would get, so they make some more money off the sale and the exchange.  Oh well – we are thirsty so it is worth it.

Dinner was a fare of vegetable soup for dinner and pasta with meat sauce, veggies and cabbage.  Team A’s duties tonight is scrubbing – yes I was a scrubber for the day legitimately, and as the dish washers go first, Lisa and I thought we would have enough time to duck to the showers and get back in time to do our chores without anyone noticing that we were gone.  Well I probably shouldn’t have washed my hair and I may have had a better chance to have gotten back on time, but when I saw 2 people flapping pots I knew we were in for a bit of trouble.  Needless to say when we showed out faces we got quite a ribbing from the team as well as some hanger on-ers.  So we have now been given the task of pot scrubbing on our own when the rotation comes back to us again.  Fair enough, but in our defence we really weren’t gone that long, I didn’t think.  Sean has been more than happy to rub in my lack of duties, as I have been joshing around with him that he always turns up after the work is done (possibly a little unfair) but it is good to be able to have some fun at some-one else’s expense!  Needless to say you have to be able to take what you give out, so I just take it all on the chin and tough it out.

Time to utilize the bar.  It has a pretty good atmosphere and they had music playing and we could just reach the Wi-Fi  from where we were sitting outside.  I love this part of the trip, where we all just sit and chat for hours.  I have some more places to now add onto my travels, with Em and Justin in London, so it will be good to be able to see some friendly faces when I am back there in October.  5 beers later (that’s 3L) it was time to hit the hay – midnight isn’t too bad a knock considering how early we were up this morning.

I am not sure what is up, but I took 1 photo today!  ONE, UNA, UN, A HAN.  It was a drive day and we have been told to always ask if we are taking photos of people, but as we are driving through villages and towns I haven’t bought out the camera as Jools said African people aren’t too keen on getting their pictures taken and there have been instances where the bus has been vandalized because of this, so the camera doesn’t see much air time when we are travelling.  But for those of you who know I am a photoholic, this would have to be a first EVER, one photo in one whole day.  That is just about UNBELIEVABLE.

So I have 5 days till the gorilla’s and I have to say I am feeling and sounding 100% better, so I think the likelihood that I will wave goodbye to the gorilla trekkers without me is going to be minimal.