"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.