Blagging it into Burundi

20^th April – Day 203 – Kigoma, Tanzania to Mabanda, Burundi

After having a day of African bus travel such as the one we had had on the way down to Kigoma and knowing that you are most likely facing another very similar day, I found myself surprised at how perky I felt in the morning. The sun was shining brightly, I could hear people talking in amicable tone while strolling along on the small alleyway right outside our window (one of them in clear native British accent) and the hotel staff was in a very friendly and helpful mood – it was just one of those mornings when you wake up feeling like anything is possible on that day. And this kind of optimism or good karma (whichever you want to call it) was very welcome today as we would be trying to get to Bujumbura by nightfall. I started the morning off by getting out of bed to look for some breakfast in order to take my anti-malarials that I hadn't wanted to take the night before into an empty stomach (as no opportunity for buying food really emerged during the long bus journey down to Kigoma and most certainly not after our arrival at 1am either). I found my way to sharing the table with the locals at one of the lodges close by and had the classic swahili brekkie of two mandazis, a chapatti filled with an omelet and a cup of tea. To top it off I bought a mango juice on the way back to the hotel where T was still dozing in deep sleep. We got our bags together, left one of them and all the camping gear we were not presuming to need in Burundi behind at the hotel and made our way to the unofficial minibus hangabout.

The hunt for the minibus to the border town of Manyovu started well as we found touts for the destination immediately after walking to the scene, i.e. a congregation of dalla-dallas and various market stalls behind a petrol station off the main road. We sat down into the bus where a few souls were already fading away, crammed our bag in and waited. The touts at this particular stop were not the most enthusiastic I've seen on this trip and it took over two hours to fill up the Hiace, making a new record of 23 people inside the vehicle at a time on this trip. It was already noon Tanzanian time (11am Burundian time) by the time we headed off.

We didn't get far before we were all told to get out and walk up a hill which the minibus couldn't make due to being old and overcrowded. Less than half an hour later we were courageously taking on another gravel uphill, albeit a much gentler slope, when the Hiace gave up the ghost. Us passengers clambered upwards the hill for a bit in hope of the driver and his tout friends fixing the problem and catching up to pick us up again, but even after an hour the Hiace hadn't made a sound. So we clambered down the hill back to the Hiace to interrogate on the situation and we were told someone was coming to have a look at the vehicle. A fellow passenger who we, in our usual fashion, had nicknamed stripy-shirt man started a chat with us about the perils of travel in Tanzania and it turned out he was a Burundian guy on his way to Bujumbura as well. He currently lives in South Africa and drives a truck there, and has also lived in Tanzania and driven around Southern Africa quite a bit so he had many interesting stories to tell. This was also his first trip back to Burundi to see some family that remained there since he fled from the war 15 years ago at the age of 15. We passed the time in good spirit with him, having him translate to us what was going on too. The place where we had got stuck was a track that lined an upper bend of a newly dug but rudimentary road (or trench, that's how deep the passage was) built by the Chinese. Some vehicles passed by lower on the newer tracks and our friend and some other passengers yelled down to ask if any of them could take some of us on. We had no such luck but were instead plied with bananas from one of the trucks transporting them to Kigoma. Not long after this fruit lunch, and a little more than two hours after we first broke down, a mechanic arrived on another vehicle and got the Hiace running again in less than 10 minutes. How it looked to us, it had just run out of oil and hence the engine had cut out but I won't start speculating on the technical skills of the driver and his touts without better knowledge.

"We could have broken down at a worse spot" we both concluded.

M draws figures in the sand while Hasani inquires over progress with the Hiace. Busy times.

The Hiace sounded much healthier in any case and we bounced happily all the way to Manyovu, from where we took boda-bodas to the border after a slight debate between me and the drivers over whether two people and a big backpack can be fitted on one single boda-boda or not. We have done it before on this trip and I insisted we follow the same pattern this time around as well, but the drivers insisted back that it was against the law and that they were the type to follow the law in this town. That would certainly make this town the first and only of its kind in this sense, but as there weren't really any actual taxis around I guess the boda-boda guys could afford to follow the law here. We got on two boda-bodas in the end as the market forces were clearly against us and the other choice would have been to stay and argue the toss until the border closed. Our Burundian friend had smiled at my desperate bargaining attempt and hopped on a boda-boda of his own already 10 minutes ago, so we also had an interest in catching up with him to share transport on the Burundian side of the border.

The Tanzanian border we swept through no problem, as with the pretty little forest in between the border posts in the afternoon's setting sun. At the Burundian border our passports went through a very thorough search by the official who announced there was a problem with the visas.

Let's explain the background a bit first shall we. When we had got our passports back from the embassy in Kampala, there were these tiny little streaks of ballpoint pen over on the word 'avant' (=before) on both of our visas in the part of the visa where it says “Premier entrée avant le date ….” (or “First entry before the date...”), in our case this date was April 15th. We had been asked on the visa application form about the intended date of entry into Burundi and we had put April 15th on there, so we had taken this to mean that the officials in the Burundi embassy had stroke off the 'before' as a result, meaning we could enter anytime after the 15th. However, just to be sure that this is how the border guards would understand it as well, we decided after some hesitation that we should maybe reinforce the streaks a bit. So T had painted over the streaks with some more ballpoint pen already in Kampala, only unfortunately the shade of blue on our pen was slightly lighter than the one used by the Burundian embassy in Kampala on other parts of the visa.

Our little work of art.

So, today at the border was April 20th , and the border guard was looking at our “entry before” part very suspiciously. He interrogated us on why the word 'before' had been crossed out and stated, very rightly so, that the colour of the pen was different from the other writing on the visa. We answered that this was how we had received the visas from the embassy in Kampala (which was true in part) and that we had wondered about it ourselves as well and explained that we had been asked about the intended entry and hence with all logic it should make sense that they strike out the word 'before' exactly because we were not intending to get to Burundi until on the 15th or later. The border guard wasn't too impressed with our explanation and started pointing out instead that the visas had been issued on April 1st and therefore it would make sense that you should enter quickly, i.e. before the 15th. We dug out the phone number of the Burundian embassy (which had been given to us when we applied for the visas so we could call them up to ask about how the application process was going) and gave that to the border guard to call for himself to check with the embassy. This was obviously a slight risk because of course we couldn't be sure that the person who had issued our visas would confirm that there had been any crossing of the word 'before' in our visas in particular, either because they had exactly wanted to leave it unambiguous on purpose or simply because they would not even remember that they had crossed it out in the first place. We thought, however, that if the worst comes to the worst then at least they really have our application forms at the embassy with clear evidence on that we had intended to enter on the 15th or later. Either way, the risk was in the different shades of blue. The border guard wrote down the phone number but didn't call the embassy on the spot. He stamped our passports in for the entry, said that he would be contacting the embassy later and told us that we would have to go and extend our visas in Bujumbura in any case after three days, with additional payment of course. We insisted back yet again, pointing out that the visas had been granted for one month's stay. He didn't insist back on this issue but instead asked where we would be exiting the country and informed us that the emigration post for the same border crossing was in the town of Makamba instead of here at the border. We thanked him for the info, grabbed our passports, quickly changed some money outside, got into the taxi where our Burundian friend was waiting with some other people and drove off. We knew there was very little chance that the border guard would actually call up the embassy in Kampala, but if he did we might be in for some decent trouble on the way out. We started considering our options of exiting through some other border, hoping that the information would not travel too far.

The drive to Mabanda, the first town north of the border left all of us “foreigners” speechless, T and I because it was so beautiful and our Burundian friend Hasani (we finally got introduced formally in the car) probably because it was a very emotional moment for him to be back after all this time. Driving off from the border we saw mountains with their tops covered in the mist, sunlight beaming through somehow from the outlines. The hills and valleys in between were deep green and the road even more rusty red than those of Northern Kenya, the reddest we had seen so far on this trip. The mist made it rather eerie, as we couldn't see further than 10 metres at times once we had climbed up high enough, but it made it all even more exciting. Burundian people on the sidelines of the roads and in some small villages we drove past stared at us flat out and gave some blunt-sounding comments that we couldn't understand. A woman and man who were sharing the ride with us were talking during the most of the ride and the speech was loud, sounded very aggressive and altered in tone spontaneously. Our driver also had some character which he spilled out from the window at just about anyone who offended his driving space. Trying to interpret what was going on behind all these words I could not understand, I still sensed there was goodwill in it all, a rough and ready approach to things with some rowdy humour. I take it that is something you cannot survive without in a country recovering from decades of civil war and sporadic conflict.

We got some more examples of this in the town of Mabanda where we arrived in the early evening. We would have to spend the night here as it was too late to get transport onwards to Bujumbura. We arranged a minibus for the morning and signed in at the Hollywood motel before heading out for a dinner of nyama choma and chips at a local eatery/bar. There a drunken man sat down to our table, “Mzungu!”ed us for a while and proceeded to help himself freely to chips and meat from both mine and Hasani's plates after we refused to buy him a beer. It was done in the kind of humoristic bully attitude, clearly not wanting to offend us too much but also setting us right in our place. This got him some chuckles from the other customers at the bar as he showed off his munching to the crowd. Hasani took this very calmly whereas I loudly announced the man to be a thief and pulled my plate out of his reach in equally humoristic yet strongly “I'm not taking just any crap from you either” attitude. More chuckles followed. Sometimes it's good to be a woman in this respect, as you know you won't get into a fistfight even if you step on someone's toes without really knowing how they will react. After all, he had himself claimed I was pretty earlier so it would be a shame for him to smash my face in over a few chips, now wouldn't it?

Back at the motel, we both had ice cold showers to rinse off the rusty red crust from our skins and hair. Hasani went to see Inter beat Barca at some bar but we were too tired and just had a quick beer at the motel bar with more drunken chat from the locals. T said it reminded him of Finland and I laughed thinking that's probably why I feel at home here with the strong-minded but kind-hearted drunkards.

The bar at Hollywood Motel, Mabanda. It's too early for beer at 6am, boys!

Fun and Games in the Mud

18^th April – Day 201 – Bukoba to Kigoma, Tanzania

Forget what the Lion King told you - THIS is an African sunrise!

We'd spent far too long riding buses along tarmac roads (albeit on cramped buses) so it seemed that the cosmos had decided to condemn us to a bumpy day! Unfortunately it was also an early day as the bus departed from Bukoba at 6am. Ignoring our bus ticket's instructions that reporting time was 5am, we wandered down to the bus station at 5.40 – M feeling the cold, and me feeling the effects of my stupid decision to have four beers and a curry the night before. With me taking the window seat just in case, we trundled off down the road towards Bukoba. After 20 minutes we dropped off the tarmac and from then on, “road” was a slightly euphemistic term for what we were driving on. Dirt road, potholes, puddles, psychotic driver – we had everything we needed for a true African bus experience! It all seemed to be going so well as well – the sun rose, we were covered in its warm glow, my hangover slowly disappeared, and the 100km-on-a-dirt-road-through-huge-potholes approach only sent us flying small amounts of metres into the air, probably given that the bus was jammed to way beyond capacity as always and we had no capacity for movement. It was fun.

Bags and heads in the aisle of Western Tanzania's wild and wacky buses

Eventually the inevitable happened and we got stuck in the mud. We piled off the bus one after the other without incident until M managed to put her foot in it (so to speak) and step into the deepest, stickiest mud she could find and emerge without her sandal. It took quite a bit of fishing to get it back, and quite a bit of cleaning for her to manage to see her foot again after scraping off several tons of mud with blades of grass and leaves from the roadside. Meanwhile, I flexed my muscles to go with the the men of the bus to try to push it out of the mud, got quite dirty, and eventually we were clear. Cue more psychotic driving and more mud.

Getting stuck spot #1. The truck, seemingly, had been bogged down for quite a while

Our original plan had been to go Lusahunga and try to find a bus from there, pretty much based on how it looked on the map. Just before we arrived there however, M had a brainwave and declared that maybe it would be better to go all the way to Kigoma where we could probably get better connections to Burundi. I wasn't quite convinced by her argument but we went for it anyway. And thanks to that decision, we got to have some more fun in the mud.

I'd just fallen asleep when M shook me. “We've got to get out, it looks like there's another problem”. We got out and looked at the situation – a truck had got stuck in a large mud puddle and there was a small and unlikely looking corridor next to it for our bus to go through. We'd been booted out to remove the weight for the bus to be able to get through. It didn't work. A circus ensued which I would love to describe, but it's said that a picture speaks a thousand words and I believe a video speaks a thousand pictures, so I'll just leave our little montage to explain it all instead.

By 1am, 19 hours after leaving Bukoba, we pulled into Kigoma knowing that tomorrow we'd be doing it all over again, this time north into Burundi. The joys of travel!

In the Footsteps of Mr. Livingstone

18^th April – Day 201 – Bukoba, Tanzania

Despite being a junction town, it seems that Masaka isn't particularly easy to get out of. People told us that there were no bus company offices in town but that we could get a bus from the junction of the Mbarara and Bukoba roads just out of town. We set off earlyish to try and meet a direct bus to Bukoba while Uganda decided to say goodbye to us in its own way – the heavens opened as soon as we stepped out of the door of the hotel and we were soon drenched. And lost, again. The people of Masaka were treated to the same show as so many of their African brethren in the last 6 or 7 months – two muzungus standing at an intersection wondering which way to go. Common sense eventually prevailed and we hopped into a shared taxi which was going our way. The problem so far had been that we had not found two people who had given us the same answer on where exactly we should go to get the bus to Bukoba, and so we ended up standing under a tree by a petrol station with a couple of women who were waiting with their kids. A bus to the border town of Mutukula passed, I went to flag it down, and the bus sailed past. The women told us that this was the only one going in that direction. A classic African headscratching period ensued and we ended up sharing a shared taxi with the women and many others to the border. All in all, we packed 9 adults and 3 kids into a normal car. Impressive even by African standards.

A small selection of the passengers

The crossing was uneventful and after swapping shared taxis a few times we rolled into Bukoba on the shores of Lake Victoria. It's a fairly quiet and unassuming town which we walked around (in circles as always) looking for a place to stay, which we eventually found. This done, we headed off to the lake to see what there was to see. It was the first time we'd set eyes on the lake and, even if the proliferation of bars and hotels prevented us from feeling exactly the same sensation of discovery felt by David Livingstone, we consoled ourselves with the thought that Dr. Livingstone could not have taken a few photos and gone to sit at a beach bar for a cold Serengeti beer so we did exactly that. M, still on anti-Giardia drugs, had to settle for a Coca-Cola although it's doubtful that Livingstone had one of those out of the fridge when he arrived here for the first time. But anyway, I digress.

The above-mentioned lake

The above-mentioned beach bar

Aside from being home to a number of beach bars, Bukoba is also home to a Catholic cathedral which I would imagine is probably the only one on the planet which could be used as a set in some kind of futuristic sci-fi movie. It was ugly and totally incongruous with the rest of the town (and indeed with the rest of Uganda) and so like good tourists we stood and stared at it for a while and took a picture before moving on.

Delightful, isn't it?

We spent the evening swatting mosquitos and reading our Lonely Planet to Southern Africa, given that M's parents are arriving in Zimbabwe in less than 4 weeks. Slightly amateur-tourist perhaps, but Livingstone probably couldn't have done that either.

Bukoba - where you can share your bathroom with a mushroom!

"Chap Chap"

17^th April – Day 200 – Masaka, Uganda

We never really planned on staying in Masaka. It just kind of happened.

As often in Africa, our plans were wildly overoptimistic and our dreams of spending the night in Tanzania evaporated further as the hours went on. After going to bed later than planned due to a late-night viewing of Tarantino's “Inglourious Basterds”, we lugged ourselves out of bed at 7.30 and as M got ready and got our stuff together I found a bus which was heading to Masaka, the junction town for transport to Tanzania, about 380km away. We didn't think it would take long, what with East African bus drivers so far seeming to like driving like lunatics, but it would turn out to be...

The omen on the side of our bus was good. It turned out that the spelling of "Chop Chop" was about a good as its execution

A Typical African Bus Day! (starring T, M, man-with-glasses, man-with-cap, old-lady-with-big-hat, and ticket man)

“You must be here at 9am”, the guy said as he handed me the tickets at 8am. “We will not wait”. M had pointed out yesterday that in Uganda things have run strangely close to schedule, and she right enough for me to put aside my scepticism and we turned up at 8.50, got in the bus, and sat and waited.

A Ugandan bus has 5 seats on each row plus some extras dotted here and there, which makes a total of about 75 seats. On the more established companies' buses, they will generally leave on time-ish, regardless of how full the bus is. With the smaller companies such as Kibungo, our carrier for today, schedule enforcement is a bit more haphazard and so we waited until 11am before the bus finally got moving. 'Waiting' in the case of the African bus can mean several things. In Ethiopia, it meant driving around town looking for passengers before coming back to the bus stop to wait for a bit, before circling around town again, filling up with petrol etc. At least in Ethiopia they didn't actually really announce departure times and the bus just left when it left, and that was how it went.

A beautiful day for a bus ride

In Uganda, 'waiting' will consist of sitting in the same place for a while with the driver continuously revving the engine and sounding the horn. With a mighty roar, the bus will then chug into action before coming to a halt 20 metres down the road, and the whole circus starts again. In such a way, we advanced about 200 metres in 2 hours down Kabale's main road as the bus slowly filled with passengers and litres of fuel were pointlessly used up. There are normally several buses going at the same time in such a way and that means that entertainment takes the form of looking out the window as the bus touts argue with each other and occasionally fight for business. On this occasion, our guy way a lot smaller than his competitor but seemed to have a sharper tongue or a better sales pitch than his main rival and so the Kibungo bus filled up quicker than the other. This in turn allowed us to triumphantly chug 100m down the road and park again, allowing the passengers to get off and discuss very important things outside the bus. When this happens, the touts will enthusiastically wave everyone back onto the bus, announcing the imminent departure of the bus, although this is quite a rare event and you can generally be sure that there will be more sitting around to be done. When you've done enough short chugs to get past the last line of houses and into the banana plantations, you know that you've finally made it out of Kabale and that you can be solidly on the move for at least five minutes before you arrive at the next village and the tooting and revving can start again.

Onions, sir?

The next 130km went surprisingly smoothly and without too much delay we pulled up at Mbarara bus station. As half of the bus filed out and went to their homes, the rest of the passengers quickly realised that it was going to be a while before we set off again as the touts went off hunting for new meat to fill the seats. An hour later, we pulled out of the bus station, drove around the corner to a petrol station and sat there for a while although given that we were not filling up, it wasn't immediately clear what was going on (aside from the obvious, which was 'not much'). By this point, a couple of guys over from us (named man-with-glasses and man-in-cap were getting slightly animated and under pressure, we pulled off from the petrol station only to come to a halt about 50m down the road, where the touts got off again and the driver disappeared somewhere. Man-with-glasses got increasingly vocal and eventually got off to mouth at the ticket man. As it was all in Luganda it wasn't clear what, precisely, was being said although there was a lot of angry gesticulating and man-with-glasses was repeatedly pointing at the clock on his phone. This achieved little of substance and man-with-glasses returned to the bus to complain loudly in tandem with man-in-cap. The woman sat next to them, old-lady-with-big-hat, joined in and soon ended up in animated conversation with the ticket man herself. One more 100m chug later man-with-glasses finally claimed victory and we set off towards Masaka. The arguing between passengers and beautiful landscapes whooshing/crawling past are generally enough to distract you from the fact that there's no padding on your arm-rest and so it's digging into your leg (to which blood regularly refuses to flow given your folded up sitting position), given that you have a seat about 20cm wide to share between two people.

Meat on a stick. M's comment: "Just looks like fat". T's opinion: a bargain at 500 shillings

We've had a quite a few such bus rides – none of them outside of Ethiopia have ever actually ended up in fist-fights although a loud-mouthed ticket guy in Soroti threatened to slap one of the passengers, earning a rebuke from a very large passenger who leant out of a window and declared that if he did that, “we will all beat you very hard”. The arguing soon stopped. We've had no bus rides so far to rival the Dire Dawa-Djibouti bus ride filled with gangs of brawling Somali women for the whole night, although suffice to say that getting around in Africa, while sometimes slightly testing on the patience levels, is generally a colourful and interesting experience.

Masaka is a junction town and is neither particularly attractive nor interesting but we're only here for a night, and passed the evening with the usual satisfying food-and-football combination. M, after days of trying, finally managed to finish a meal (hurrah!), John Terry got sent off and I found 13000 shillings in the laptop bag. A satisfying evening all in all.

U-Turn

16^th April – Day 199 – Kabale, Uganda

We never really planned on being in Kabale. It just kind of happened.

The day started with a panic, as it so often does. Firstly, M realised that she didn't have the printout of her acceptance letter from Rwanda. Secondly, we also realised that we didn't have enough money to last for 2 weeks in Rwanda and Burundi, where we didn't believe that there were any ATMs. Thirdly, it was 8.10am, 50 minutes before the bus was supposed to leave, and it was rush hour. In Kampala, that means that you don't go anywhere very quickly. Consequently we hatched a plan where M would take a taxi to the “Jaguar Executive Coach” bus park with our mountains of luggage, and I would run around trying to get whatever else we needed and hop onto a boda-boda to the bus station and everything would be fine. As I waved M off at 8.15, I ran off through the pouring rain to find an internet cafe where I hoped to print off M's letter, and transfer some money over to her account so that I could draw it out (my card is broken, and I'm going to pick up a new one in Burundi). The fourth place I found was just opening although I had to sit and wait while the system warmed up before I could finally use the prehistoric computer to actually do anything. By 8.35, the letter was printed and the money transferred.

By 8.36, I realised that I'd been running around in this busy district of Kampala enough to have got completely lost and so couldn't work out where our regular ATM was and went to a KBC bank instead. It didn't work. The security guys pointed me in the direction of another bank which delightfully also refused to work. I resisted the urge to swear at it and ran back out into the rain to find another. Suddenly I came upon our regular, blew kisses at the sky and ran in. Of all mornings of course, this had to be the morning where one of the machines didn't work and the second would only dish out a pathetically small amount of money. I took it anyway, changed the lot and hopped on a boda-boda to meet up with M at the bus station. It turns out that the boda-boda guy not only asked a fair price for the ride (which is rare enough for a muzungu to experience) but was also a cross-breed of a superhuman and a cat, weaving his way through the traffic with a millimetre-perfect accuracy that I hadn't seen before. Once again, I staggered off the bike half surprised at the fact that I still had four limbs and tried my hardest to put on a cool swagger as I walked towards the bus. “Told ya I'd be on time didn't I!” I told M. It was 8.59am.

"It reminds me of the Care Bears", said M

The ride towards Rwanda is a beautiful one – as green as anywhere in Uganda but covered in hills, banana tree plantations and small villages. The hours flew by like minutes for both of us – for me because I was gazing out of the window and for M because she was sleeping off her Giardia bugs. She eventually woke up having shaken off the nausea that she's been living with for quite a few days now, and we rolled for the last few hours to Katuna, on the Rwandan border. Getting out of Uganda was slow but easy. Getting into Rwanda however, would have been a quick process had it worked, but it turned out that this wasn't our day. “If you don't have this letter of acceptance” the guy told me, “you can't enter Rwanda”. Aha. “But your embassy in Addis Ababa told me that I can get a visa on the border?!” I told him. The last time I'd tried this line was in Gambia 4 years ago and it had worked like a charm. I was hopeful. “No. That is not true”. He seemed firm, and I was a beaten man. We grabbed our bags from the bus, trudged back over the bridge to Uganda and got our exit stamps cancelled. It was disappointing, but to be honest it wasn't completely unexpected and I would have been quite surprised to be writing this in Kigali, where we had hoped to be tonight. Next on the agenda was getting somewhere from the border, and we spotted our chance with 2 muzungus getting into a car just over the road from us. M ran over and had a word with them, and then called me over. We squeezed in. It turns out that they were only going to Kabale, the closest town to the border, but it was fine for us. The guy was British, the girl was Australian, the guy driving them was their pastor, and they had a “Jesus Has All The Answers” sticker (or something similar) in the front windscreen. We were hitching a lift in a bible-wagon.

“So what brought you to Uganda?” I asked, making conversation with the guy who, strangely, spoke to the Ugandan pastor/driver with an African accent yet spoke to his girlfriend (or wife, I suppose) in a broad cockney accent. He was pensive for a second. “God...” he finally declared. “Ah. And why did he bring you to Uganda, and not to any other country?”. “Well... I suppose because he thought that this is where I should be, where I would mature the most”. I considered asking if God had put him on His own private plane or a on a commercial airliner but thought that maybe this was where I should draw the line. Meanwhile, M was being interrogated on her Christian beliefs by the pastor in the front seat. “Well... I am Christian yes, in that I belong to the church. Although... well... I can't remember what that church is called in English”. It seemed like a good thing that we weren't going any more than 30km, as grateful as we were for the ride.

Kabale the beautiful

Kabale slowly crept into view, and our cortège dropped us off at the Skyline Hotel (which I suppose is an ironic name given that the place is only on one level) and our new friend the pastor gave us his Burundian number and instructed us to call him next weekend as he would be in Bujumbura. We told him we'd get him a beer there and his beaming expression suggested to us that here was a Christian who was not afraid of a tipple or two. We said goodbye with smiles and thanks and settled in to our new and, typically for Uganda, friendly home. We're aiming to get over the border to Tanzania tomorrow so it seems like an early morning rise to try and get a bus to Masaka (about halfway back to Kampala), from where we'll try and get a bus to Bukoba in Tanzania, then to Nyakanazi, and finally over to Burundi, hopefully in two days. At least we have all the visas we need this time...

Action shot

Return to Base Kamp

6^th – 15^th April – Days 189 – 198 – Kampala, Uganda

It was nice in the north but I wasn't disappointed to be back in Kampala either – I'd liked the look and feel of this place the first time we were here and wasn't at all averse to spending a bit more time here. We checked in again to the Aponye Hotel, the greatest deal to be had anywhere on the planet, which is located on what is probably the hardest street to walk down on the planet – it's full of warehouses and small businesses and shopping arcades and, the whole day long, the road is jammed with parked trucks and the pavements are full of people walking around at high speed unloading these trucks. A walk down William Street is a full-time adrenaline rush as you weave through an obstacle course of high-speed sacks of cereal, metal bars, boxes of everything and anything, plastic tubes and many other things, all travelling as fast as the people carrying them can go. Much like the hippos we saw in Murchison Falls (although smaller, obviously) these guys stop for nothing and I suspect that if you purposefully put yourself on a collision course with one of them you'd end up as little more than small particles of dust. At least it's atmospheric!

The coffee was lovely, but the computer crashing after 6 hours losing all work done in the meantime was less so.

The life of a junkie!

This stay in Kampala has been more business than pleasure though – M has been knee-deep in university papers again, we've had a lot of football to watch, and then there's been the case of the Rwanda visas. Given the history between France and Rwanda I wasn't expecting a perfectly smooth ride with these visas and so I was expecting the worst when we walked into the Rwandan embassy the day after we got back.

Us: “Hi, we've come to get visas, we're tourists”
Woman at desk: “OK, which nationality are you?”
M: Finland
Woman: Finland, OK (smiles at M) and you?
T: France
Woman: France? (glares at T) OK, take a seat.

Great. Another moment when I wished I'd got a passport from some small, globally irrelevant country which had never caused any harm to anyone. Like Andorra, for example. We sat for a while before another woman came out and explained that people on French passports couldn't apply for visas in embassies for the time being, and that I had to do it on their immigration department's website. Yup, you can apply for a visa online these days! By filling in all the info you would on a normal paper form, you get a response – print off the response and take it to the border, pay for your visas there and you have a streamlined operation including no waiting around at embassies! It's nice, it's advanced and it's futuristic and all that but half of the fun in getting the visas is going to the consulates and dealing with the people in a bad mood there. Besides, if the element of human contact was removed I wouldn't have been able to plead nicely with Mr. Asshole in the Sudanese Consulate in Cairo and that means I'd have been forced to spend the last 6 months in Egypt. Hmmhmm.

It's not much more poetic than Cairo, but it's still an improvement

After struggling to get onto the website and to get it fully functioning, we managed to apply for the visas on Tuesday afternoon. By one hour later on Tuesday afternoon, M had her letter of confirmation. It's Saturday afternoon, and I still don't have mine. If it's not in my inbox by Tuesday, we'll go to Burundi through Tanzania instead (or through DRC, if I can manage to persuade M that it's a great idea, which I doubt will happen).

Our days in Kampala were spent writing 1% Fund reports, going through M's academic business at length (including one lovely episode where we worked for 6 hours solid only to have the computer crash on us and see all of our saved work disappear), watching football on TV and zipping around from cafe to bar to cafe on Kampala's infamous boda-bodas (motorcycle taxis). When you're on a quiet road, boda-bodas are a great way to get the wind in your hair and move from one part of Kampala to another on the cheap. On a busy road at a busy time (i.e. most roads, most of the time) the boda-bodas would give any rollercoaster ride in a world a run for its money – the drivers have an exact knowledge of the width of their bikes and can spot a gap in the traffic to the millimetre and go through it, although for the uninitiated like us, it seems like every second will be your last. Kampala is chaotic when it comes to traffic – boda-bodas go everywhere, cars go anywhere, the streets are littered with potholes and at this time of year it's pretty wet too. When there are two of you riding on the back of the bike, your legs have to spread further so that everyone can squeeze in and, especially if you're sat at the back of the bike, you have perpetual visions of leaving your knee-caps on one of Kampala's ubiquitous minibuses (whose drivers are seemingly as fatalistic as the boda-boda guys). However, we emerged from every ride intact, and kept taking them for three reasons. Firstly, you don't get stuck in traffic. Secondly, they're a lot cheaper than taxis. Thirdly... well... they're fun!!

Feeling the rush of a nighttime boda-boda ride!

-------

Post-scriptum......
Having called the Rwandan foreign ministry I've found out why I don't have a visa – it's because I don't have an invitation. Telling them than M got her visa within the hour without an invitation didn't seem to make much of an impression so we've just decided to hop onto a bus to Kigali and see what happens. This departure was delayed by a few days thanks to M taking her turn at having a ride on the sickness train by contracting Giardia, but eventually we managed to get a ticket on an early morning bus to Kigali. The front pages of the Ugandan papers were covered with discussion on whether we would make it into Rwanda or not. Of course, exclusive coverage of what actually happens is only available right here. Stay tuned.

We came to "Bubbles O'Leary's" twice and the heavens opened both times. It's locally known as "The Irish Effect"

Fall(s)-out

4^th - 5^th April – Days 187-188 – Murchison Falls National Park, Uganda

Breakfast at the hotel, sadly no more Warrior Heart but instead mobilization out of Arua! We got tickets with (Lady) Gaagaa Bus and had time to wander around the block for an hour as well, during which we encountered a rather bizarre procession of East African Nubians (we didn't know such a group of Nubians existed) on one of the streets.

Ismael from Aru had told us Gaagaa was very reliable with its schedules and we can definitely second this. The bus was equipped with some super turbo jet engine and practically flew to Pakwach, a little town right outside the northern gate of Murchison Falls NP where we got off. In Pakwach we sat down at the Mango Tree Hotel for a beer and a chat with the locals about how best to get to the park where no public transport enters. We would have wanted to take a boda-boda but were unsure of if this would be allowed in a park with big animals and predators. As it happened, one of the guys who stopped at the hotel as well worked in the park and called up his park ranger friends to enquire whether we could be let in on a boda-boda. Nope it seemed, so we organized an expensive special-hire taxi instead.

M uses the time in Pakwach wisely to get up to date with scientific developments

Inside the park, we stayed at the Red Chilli campsite a stone's throw away from the park headquarters where there were a lot of other mzungus to chat and drink the evening away with. It felt refreshing to have full length pointless casual conversations with other travellers after a while of mostly being busy with the projects and the local people involved in those and conversing mostly about them as well. We also befriended one lovely and lively, not-so-mzungu family in particular: Angela and Derek with their three daughters had earlier lived in London but as Angela was half-Ugandan they had decided to move to Entebbe (by Lake Victoria) three years ago and would be setting up a hostel there in the near future. They were in the park with some of Derek's family who had come over for a visit.

Way too late and dark in the evening, we struggled to set up St. George after a long while, couldn't find a good spot for it and took time to clear thorns from the ground, bickered about the whole thing like an old married couple and tucked in semi-shaking in the cool night with our backs facing each other. We hadn't taken our sleeping bags thinking it would be warm enough to sleep without them, T couldn't find the sleeping bag liner from anywhere (which we had taken instead and packed in his bag) and we also didn't have enough clothing to cover up for the error in judgement in not packing the sleeping bags. T fell asleep within 30 minutes (not typical of him!) whereas I lay awake and rolled around and clattered my teeth until 5am cursing the whole camping experience to hell. I also thought about cancelling my intention to ever take part in the Amazing Race with T. In your mind it's so easy to blame other people for mistakes that are partly of your own, and ever so wonderful! Granted, not very fair.

Wake up was at 6.30am to go on a boat trip to see the Murchison Falls, the most powerful waterfall in the world. Needless to say, the morning continued in equally cool spirits as I was in a grumpy mood over the previous night for the first half of the boat trip. We had also received a text message from Tom in Nairobi overnight telling about his trip to Oman and hoping we hadn't killed each other yet, which I found to be greatly topical with its timing on this particular morning. Angela and Derek with the family were on the same boat with us and found my grumpiness understandable but rather amusing, which of course always helps me get rid of it quicker. On the way upstream to the falls we got to see plenty of hippos and crocs and some antelope and buffaloes as well, with a few birdies flying around from time to time too. The second half of the boat trip I slept, until we reached the falls.

A selection of the Albert Nile's friendly critters

The most powerful waterfall in the world...? Apparently so.

The boat cannot get all the way up to the actual cataract, so we stopped close to some rocks in the middle of the stream for some photos and then decided to go on a hike with Angela, Derek and the kids up to the top of the falls. The boat dropped us off on the shore and turned back as we walked up the path for a good half an hour, me and Angela watching out for snakes in all the trees and piles of rocks that we passed. We didn't see any snakes, only a few small lizards. Some of us, me included, had also not seen the sign at the bottom of the path saying that the hike costs U$10 per person so we were surprised to be charged at the top of the falls by the park rangers. Angela & Derek's driver had come up to meet us there to pick us up back to the campsite and he managed to talk the price down to half for us pair of mzungus as well.

After the successful climb, and before finding out about the $10

Back at the Chilli we had lunch and again had to weigh our options for transport, this time to get out of the park. We'd read from the Bible that there are usually some park vehicles going daily from/to the park on which you can hitch a lift for a fee so T trekked to ask the headquarters but everything had already gone for the day. We also asked at the Chilli reception if they knew of anyone of the guests leaving anymore on that day but no luck there either. Derek also asked his driver who comes to the park often and knows people who work there but he too said that everything had already left earlier.

Luckily an older mzungu (presumably British) gentleman overheard our discussion at the lunch table and approached us to offer his driver, who was free for the afternoon, to take us to Masindi, the first town south of the park, for an expensive (55€) but all in all fair price to be paid for a ride of roughly 100 kms on dirt roads, as the driver would of course also have to return to the park. It also seemed the only way out of the park for that day so we decided to take it, as overnighting for the second time would mean paying another park fee (U$30 per person per day), never mind freezing inside St. George again. Once in Masindi, we got very lucky and caught a bus to Kampala within 30 minutes from arriving there. Hotel Aponye welcomed us back with a smile and a cold beer later that evening.

3^rd April – Day 186 – Arua, Uganda

In a shining display of productivity....

...we achieved very little today after the exploits of yesterday and little sleep. We got up, had breakfast, and then became strangely hooked on a Nigerian miniseries called “Warrior Heart” - a sort of jungle village soap opera where a prince is hit by an arrow fired by his brother but then is nursed to health by the female chief of a neighbouring “kingdom” (which M pointed out seemed more of a small village than a kingdom) set up as a woman (the female chief's mother) is accused of being a witch and banished from the other village by an evil king. The prince then falls in love with the chief and ends up marrying her, despite the fact that the two kingdoms/villages are enemies. The acting was terrible and the sound technician should have been fired as we couldn't hear anything that was being said if the actors were more than a few metres away from the camera. Prince Obiorah had a strangely American influence to his Nigerian English and also was sporting a slight beer belly, which one probably wouldn't expect from a member of the royal family. Somehow, though, it was strangely compelling and we ended up watching the entire thing, even if one of us ended up asking the other “what did he just say?” every couple of minutes. Another mystery was why such a series was only to be watched by people aged 16 and over – we could only think that Obiorah at one point called his brother Obinna a “bastard” and declared that his marriage arranged by his father was not consummated as he was still in love with another woman. Unfortunately, this woman had been framed and castigated as a “promiscuous trump” [sic.] by the prince's father. The highlight of the series, however, was when the girl was accused of schmoozing with Obinna, and her father was summoned to the royal court. “You prostitute!!”, he exclaimed. We howled with laughter. It was nearly as good as the Mel Gibson movie about the Incas we'd seen on the bus to Arusha.

M, as she often does, wanders the streets of Arua with a camping mattress under her arm.

After 3 hours of “Warrior Heart”, we got up to head into town, whistling the music from the show (which consisted of about 4 bars repeated for several hours) – we'd only seen a little of Arua (and got given a tour by car yesterday evening by Ismael) although we had a few strikes against us. M had picked up a cold, we were both still wrecked, and we were staying a distance away from the centre. Consequently, we ended up having an accidental 4 hour nap. Evening consisted of eating and watching Manchester City demolishing Burnley in the beautiful northern English weather. Further laughs came as the cameras panned over Burnley's council housing and industrial chimney as the rain poured down and the commentators declared that “with the heavy rain and the setting sun, there's an almost tropical atmosphere here”. Sitting in our hotel bar with open windows in northern Uganda, we sniggered.

A procession of "Nubians". Apparently.

All in all, a very useful day once again.

"Hello, I heard that you sell lightweaponry...?"

The infamous "A cow at home" restaurant

The Heart of... Darkness?

2^nd April – Day 185 – Aru, Democratic Republic of Congo

We'd arranged a visit just over the border from Arua in Uganda to Aru in the Congo where a 1% Fund project was based. From email contact with Ismael, the project's boss, we'd found out that we could get over the border and back into Uganda without paying any visas which would have the advantage of saving us 180$ but would have the disadvantage of forcing us to get in and out of Congo the same day. I've wanted to see this country for as long as I can remember and a day was a bit short but at least it would give a small taster, and I've been looking forward to it for quite a while.

The day set itself up to be a bit of a challenge from the beginning – our bus ride from Kampala was pretty cramped and I slept only a little while M didn't really get any sleep at all – and we were left for several hours in Arua as Ismael firstly waited for the border to open, and then had to take some time for the formalities and to put the final touches on organising our little day out. He eventually turned up and helped us find a place to stay in Arua before picking up his mail from Arua post office, and we headed off towards the border, 15km away from Arua. We arrived at the border full of optimism, which soon faded.

“So, you are going to Congo are you?” the border guard asked us. She eyed our passports and looked up at us again. “And you will be back in Uganda today will you?”. We nodded and smiled. Ismael had done his job well, it seemed. “We have a big problem here. I will have to stamp you out, which means that you will have to pay a new visa when you come back”. Aha. “But let me see what I can do”. We sat outside as Ismael explained that he had been here just yesterday and it had seemed all was fine, although there was a new chief at this post and that he was not as cooperative as the previous one when it came to local cross-border affairs. He was called over to visit the police post as we were asked to stay put, and eventually he came back, explaining that he had tried to be persuasive and explain that our visit was on humanitarian grounds and that he personally guaranteed that we'd be back before the border closed in the evening. We sat and waited. Eventually our border guard came back, asked us to fill in a form and waved us off. It had worked! She looked over at Ismael. “You will bring them back well before we close tonight. Tomorrow is NOT the same. I hope you realise this.” Her face told us that she meant business, and that being late would not result in very pretty scenes.

Congo countryside

We promised to be back on time, and off we went, to a car on the other side of the border driven by an older man with a fantastic Hulk Hogan moustache and a casette player blaring out Congolese music. We were watched by a bunch of moto-taxi guys waiting for business and looked over at the road where a sign informed us that the Democratic Republic of Congo welcomed us. As soon as Ismael was done with the police, we'd be taking another step into the unknown. Maybe it's just my imagination playing tricks on me but it seemed different on the other side – as we bounced along the potholed earth road it seemed a lot wilder – plants had been left to grow wherever they wished, mud huts were planted wherever people wanted them, the trucks so familiar in the rest of East Africa were replaced by guys pushing or riding bicycles – they carried petrol, beer, soft drinks, sometimes with huge mounds piled into the back. Some were trying to pull their bikes back off the floor after they'd fallen. Women walked in long lines carrying their wares on their heads. It seemed like we were driving the only car in the area. It seemed closer to picture-book Africa than anything else I'd seen so far. Pepe Kalle and Koffi Olomide sang to us through Hulk Hogan's tapes as Congolese immigration formalities consisted of little more than a wave through the window as we drove past – it seemed Ismael was on firmer ground on this side of the border. After the short ride, we pulled into Aru where we were welcomed to Ismael's place, met his wife, and got given a breakfast of scrambled eggs and chips.

I wasn't sure what to expect of this little corner of Congo, but if I was expecting anything, Aru was it. Barracks style buildings splattered with red earth were dotted around at odd angles, the earth roads wormed their way around town through these long concrete buildings occasionally fanning out into enormous empty red earth patches. The mud huts seemed to add up to half of the town's buildings. There was a lot of construction going on here as well – bigger houses were sprouting up even if there didn't seem to be much actual working going on, and it looked like there were a lot less people around than we'd have seen in a similar sized place in Uganda. Those who were around went about their business slowly and, unlike my expectations, we weren't treated as much of a curiosity and wandered around the earth paths through the long grass and banana trees peacefully. I took a liking to the place straight away.

M takes a rest after a taxing night bus ride...

Ismael himself was a quiet yet driven guy who'd set up a school for deaf and blind children from all over this corner of the country – some of them came from 500km away, he told us. Meningitis is quite a peril around here and this has led to kids become deaf at a much quicker rate than in other parts of Congo, and from this fact Ismael had resolved to help them out, building on knowledge from his studies. It was a nice place to visit and, although we couldn't communicate with the kids any more than saying hello and thank you as we'd learnt the signs for, it looked like a place where they could get a life for themselves. Ismael told us that in Congo, belief in the dark arts is very widespread and that disabled children are often seen as being punished by God for bad deeds in a previous life. Others believed that it was a punishment to the child's mother for being unfaithful to her husband. Whichever the belief was, the kid would generally be seen as a shame on the family and would be ostracised. He told us that some of the kids were winning their way back into their parents hearts and that some parents are even learning sign language to communicate with their kids but that it's a long, uphill battle and that it will take a long time to change peoples' long-held views. We wish him good luck in his obviously difficult mission.

The entrance to the school, with suitably threatening sign warning against anyone not permitted to enter

The school's main building

It was already around 3pm by the time we got out of the school and Ismael wanted us to get going by 4 to get back to the border post well on time but I asked if we could take a wander around Aru to get to see the place a little. The driving tour that we got wasn't exactly what I'd have hoped for although it was still nice to see the town, which didn't have the feel of a town at all – more of a collection of buildings and huts scattered around which had haphazardly ended up in the same place. Ismael mentioned that they were always happy to have volunteers working at the school. My mind started working.

"The Champs Elysees of Aru!" feat. tree

Eventually I managed to get out of the car as I asked if we could pick up some Congolese beer to take back to Uganda for the evening, and we drove off to the main road (which, I felt quite representative of Aru, had a large tree growing out of it) and stopped at a “shop” which was in fact crates of beer stacked up in the back of a truck, which may or may not have been functional. We picked up 3 bottles of Primus beer and, as soon as we had arrived in Congo, it was time to leave again. As I looked left out of the window, I promised myself that I'd be back. As I looked right into the car, I saw M fast asleep. She'd struggled to sleep on the bus and also had to go about official business concerning the technicalities of schooling for the handicapped in French today so it had been quite a long day for her. We'd both been struggling to keep awake in our meeting with the school's teachers as well and decided to think twice before taking a night bus again...

M deals out detentions, again

We didn't really hang around at the border for long. Our friend from this morning was still there. We handed her the passports which she put straight onto her desk without looking at them. “I hope no one from Congo stamped your passports? You have no more business here. Go.” It seemed like a good idea.

Hulk Hogan's car with, in the background, the beer truck/shop

Ismael and his wife Beatrice had accompanied us back to Arua where we were driven around town and shown the sites (market, discotheque, an 18-hole golf course, and a restaurant called “A Cow at Home”) and chatted more about the project. We also tried out the Primus beers, which passed the taste test quite well.

Mmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmm!