We are in Uganda!
Jinja
Our first stop was in Jinja, a place on Lake Victoria at the source of the Nile. We caught an overnight bus from Arusha which passed through Kenya on the way. The sensible Bennetts had splashed out on a 'luxury' coach that marketed itself as being safe and obeying all speed limits. This it did, however one of the reasons it couldn't go too fast was because it was completely lacking in suspension, as Phil described it, like 50 tonne of metal on a pogo stick. This made us feel a bit sad given that we were going to be sat on this bus for the next 15 hours.
Turned out not to be too bad though. We were able to get a double seat each so we could lay down and actually got quite a lot of sleep which helped pass time. The bumpiness didn't improve any though and at one point whilst in a deep sleep wrapped up like a caterpillar in my sleeping bag I was unceremoniously thrown off the seat and landed with a pathetic yelp on the floor. Bent my glasses in the process. Ouch.
After 14 hours on the bus we arrived at a Backpackers in Jinje (we caught a cab that had to be rolled down the hill to the petrol station to get petrol with our fare!). Very nice chilled place it was too. We stayed there a night before heading up to Nile River Explores campsite on Bugali Falls.
The NRE campsite is in a really beautiful location high above the Nile River. Views are beautiful - the countryside in Uganda is green and lush. Very different to some of the dry landscapes we'd been in further south.
NRE is an incredibly chilled place - very easy to spend lots of time there. It turns a bit mad at night as the beer flows and music gets pumped up.
Our first night there we saw the rafting video which made us very nervous as the aim of the trip seemed to be to get the rafts to flip at the top of every big rapid and it is BIG water although reputedly 'safe' as everything washes out. We were rafting the next day.
Our raft had the perfect crew - everyone had either rafted or kayaked before so the skills teaching lasted seconds and our guide had a lot of confidence in us. We hit rapid after rapid, some grade 5 and by the last rapid had a 100% success rate for staying upright - even when our guide purposefully fully put us into a wave side ways with the hope of flipping us. For the previous two rapids, he'd been trying to flip us, we got through a hole called 'bad place' which flipped every other raft, so he turned us side on for the last big breaking wave of the day and shouted 'come on, please, please' ....we washed out upright with everyone still in the raft. People from other rafts were swimming all around us so (yet again on this trip) we felt very smug.
However, unhappy with our success, we went back hoping for failure
we carried the 10ft raftback up 200m to do the final rapid again. This time we surfed the wave for a few seconds before being sent arse over head (tit, the saying is deffo tit, PB) into the water. Brilliant fun. (no, I've spent enough time swimming white water in this life time, I swam to the bank no problems, but the hole plunged me about 5m down judging by the total lack of light and the time to get back up, not fun in my view, PB)
Phil's birthday!!
Phil spent his birthday kayaking the Nile. (PB, Had a top time, lots of rapids with no problems, some graded 3 some graded 5 al of them actually grade 4's in my view. Despite running every rapid without problems, I swam twice, both times in eddies at grade 2 level, I blame my boat and hang my head in deserved shame, PB)
In the evening we had a posh meal (rare steak which was delicious) and a big birthday cake with candles, his name in icing, the works. Then lots of beer and drink in the bar.
As it was halloween and there had been a lot of people rafting/kayaking the Nile people were up for a big night. In the process we tried locally brewed banana wine which was responsible for people (not us!) later on falling 4 metres off a balcony, walking into poles, people copping off left right and centre and some nudity in front of the large projector screen! We had a good night just people watching!
(PB, NRE bar is astounding. It's run by kayakers. They bought me a shot of something black and annissed like when I arrived, it came in a whiskey tumbler filled to the brim. Then three blokes who fished me out of the river that morning collected a funnel and two feet of inch diameter hose from behind the bar and force fed me a litre of beer in about 4 seconds. They were having difficulty playing the rafting video so a bloke got on stage, stripped off and danced around a bit. Someone shouted 'seen it before, giving yourself a semi on hasn't helped!' Didn't distrub him a bit, he just wiggled around a bit more and then ran off. In the morning there was about 200g of weed siting on the floor where someone had been too drunk to bother picking it up. The cleaners just swept it off the balcony. A man called lee threw up in the corner, but as he'd drunk a bit and its a gravel floor, it just vanished and they raked over it in the morning, you could smell it for a day and then it was gone. I drank heavily and failed to get close to the drunkeness levels of the bar in gereral. A man was locked in a room to let him sober up, he escaped through a bolted door and promtly fell 4m off the balcony of the bar. He was returned to the bar and had a drink. Ben walked into a window frame and returned to the bar with blood running down the side of his face from a cut to his temple about 5mm deep. It stopped bleeding, he started drinking. None of this was objected to by the bar owners. In Zambia I met a man called Rob who claimed to have passed out in the bar and woken up naked with one big toe tied to his testicles. He had to hop to his room to get a pen knife because the knots were too small to untie. I didn't believe him in Zambia, I now have no doubt it's true. The bar reached similar levels of depravity almost every night we were there. PB)
Day after we of course felt rough. Day after that we were both felt even worse. Eating rare steak was probably a very bad idea in retrospect!
Kampala
Jinja
Our first stop was in Jinja, a place on Lake Victoria at the source of the Nile. We caught an overnight bus from Arusha which passed through Kenya on the way. The sensible Bennetts had splashed out on a 'luxury' coach that marketed itself as being safe and obeying all speed limits. This it did, however one of the reasons it couldn't go too fast was because it was completely lacking in suspension, as Phil described it, like 50 tonne of metal on a pogo stick. This made us feel a bit sad given that we were going to be sat on this bus for the next 15 hours.
Turned out not to be too bad though. We were able to get a double seat each so we could lay down and actually got quite a lot of sleep which helped pass time. The bumpiness didn't improve any though and at one point whilst in a deep sleep wrapped up like a caterpillar in my sleeping bag I was unceremoniously thrown off the seat and landed with a pathetic yelp on the floor. Bent my glasses in the process. Ouch.
After 14 hours on the bus we arrived at a Backpackers in Jinje (we caught a cab that had to be rolled down the hill to the petrol station to get petrol with our fare!). Very nice chilled place it was too. We stayed there a night before heading up to Nile River Explores campsite on Bugali Falls.
The NRE campsite is in a really beautiful location high above the Nile River. Views are beautiful - the countryside in Uganda is green and lush. Very different to some of the dry landscapes we'd been in further south.
NRE is an incredibly chilled place - very easy to spend lots of time there. It turns a bit mad at night as the beer flows and music gets pumped up.
Our first night there we saw the rafting video which made us very nervous as the aim of the trip seemed to be to get the rafts to flip at the top of every big rapid and it is BIG water although reputedly 'safe' as everything washes out. We were rafting the next day.
Our raft had the perfect crew - everyone had either rafted or kayaked before so the skills teaching lasted seconds and our guide had a lot of confidence in us. We hit rapid after rapid, some grade 5 and by the last rapid had a 100% success rate for staying upright - even when our guide purposefully fully put us into a wave side ways with the hope of flipping us. For the previous two rapids, he'd been trying to flip us, we got through a hole called 'bad place' which flipped every other raft, so he turned us side on for the last big breaking wave of the day and shouted 'come on, please, please' ....we washed out upright with everyone still in the raft. People from other rafts were swimming all around us so (yet again on this trip) we felt very smug.
However, unhappy with our success, we went back hoping for failure
we carried the 10ft raftback up 200m to do the final rapid again. This time we surfed the wave for a few seconds before being sent arse over head (tit, the saying is deffo tit, PB) into the water. Brilliant fun. (no, I've spent enough time swimming white water in this life time, I swam to the bank no problems, but the hole plunged me about 5m down judging by the total lack of light and the time to get back up, not fun in my view, PB)
Phil's birthday!!
Phil spent his birthday kayaking the Nile. (PB, Had a top time, lots of rapids with no problems, some graded 3 some graded 5 al of them actually grade 4's in my view. Despite running every rapid without problems, I swam twice, both times in eddies at grade 2 level, I blame my boat and hang my head in deserved shame, PB)
In the evening we had a posh meal (rare steak which was delicious) and a big birthday cake with candles, his name in icing, the works. Then lots of beer and drink in the bar.
As it was halloween and there had been a lot of people rafting/kayaking the Nile people were up for a big night. In the process we tried locally brewed banana wine which was responsible for people (not us!) later on falling 4 metres off a balcony, walking into poles, people copping off left right and centre and some nudity in front of the large projector screen! We had a good night just people watching!
(PB, NRE bar is astounding. It's run by kayakers. They bought me a shot of something black and annissed like when I arrived, it came in a whiskey tumbler filled to the brim. Then three blokes who fished me out of the river that morning collected a funnel and two feet of inch diameter hose from behind the bar and force fed me a litre of beer in about 4 seconds. They were having difficulty playing the rafting video so a bloke got on stage, stripped off and danced around a bit. Someone shouted 'seen it before, giving yourself a semi on hasn't helped!' Didn't distrub him a bit, he just wiggled around a bit more and then ran off. In the morning there was about 200g of weed siting on the floor where someone had been too drunk to bother picking it up. The cleaners just swept it off the balcony. A man called lee threw up in the corner, but as he'd drunk a bit and its a gravel floor, it just vanished and they raked over it in the morning, you could smell it for a day and then it was gone. I drank heavily and failed to get close to the drunkeness levels of the bar in gereral. A man was locked in a room to let him sober up, he escaped through a bolted door and promtly fell 4m off the balcony of the bar. He was returned to the bar and had a drink. Ben walked into a window frame and returned to the bar with blood running down the side of his face from a cut to his temple about 5mm deep. It stopped bleeding, he started drinking. None of this was objected to by the bar owners. In Zambia I met a man called Rob who claimed to have passed out in the bar and woken up naked with one big toe tied to his testicles. He had to hop to his room to get a pen knife because the knots were too small to untie. I didn't believe him in Zambia, I now have no doubt it's true. The bar reached similar levels of depravity almost every night we were there. PB)
Day after we of course felt rough. Day after that we were both felt even worse. Eating rare steak was probably a very bad idea in retrospect!
Kampala
We left Jinja on 3rd November and headed for the capital. At the end of November the Heads of the Commonwealth including our very own Queen are coming to Uganda for a chat. So, lots of road improvements are underway to make sure Queenie has a nice smooth journey. Absolutely no way the improvements will be completed by then! Roads are just mud and it's raining. (PB, still the rumour goes the hydroelectric dam is going to be turned up to 11 in order to ensure the daily power cuts don't happen during the conference, we've booked into the hairy lemon island to paddle the nile speial play wave on the 28th and 29th Nov when the levels are MASSIVE, joy, hopefully all the eddies will be washed out, PB)
Kampala is a booming city. It has a very cosmopolitan feel to it and by far the most 'western' city we have been in so far. Whilst it no way near as attractive as Maputo it has loads of different restaurants, bars, shopping places, casinos and a multi screen cinema. So I like it loads!
Kampala is a booming city. It has a very cosmopolitan feel to it and by far the most 'western' city we have been in so far. Whilst it no way near as attractive as Maputo it has loads of different restaurants, bars, shopping places, casinos and a multi screen cinema. So I like it loads!
We took a boda boda to the cinema. Thats a 125cc motorbike with three of us sat on it doing a cheap impression of a taxi. Wanna know if someone is good on a bike, ask them to do a u turn in 6 feet with 3 on a 125cc bike. Despite his driving abilities it still felt like a very risky game of traffic pinball and we swore to pay the extra for a car in future.
Having not eaten for 2 days following the post rare steak trotts we had a massive curry complete with popadoms, starters, nann, rice and huge main meal last night and suprisingly feel much better thanks.
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