November 2014

Back to the ‘Real Africa’!

Diligent Cuthbert followers may recall our amazement at how much cleaner and well-maintained Rwanda is compared to other parts of Africa. Well, it took no more than a few kilometres of driving into Uganda to remind us that we were now well and truly back into the ‘Real Africa’!  From the Gatuna border a deeply potholed road leads 20 km to Kabale: a typically African small town with littered streets, unfinished pavements, un-painted and poorly maintained buildings.  But it’s not fair to be too negative here… Kabale has everything you need as an over-lander in rural Africa: fuel stations, food shops and a bank with a (functional) ATM.  The people are friendly and the colourful street-life is what African communities are all about. The rural landscape is equally as beautiful as Rwanda and a ‘Brucie Bonus’ …. the diesel is cheaper!  We’re looking forward to seeing a bit more of Uganda!

Our first stop for a couple of days is Lake Bunyonyi in the south-west corner of Uganda. The scenery in this area is spectacular and we headed out for a walk into the hills for views over the small lake.  We enjoy the ‘street life’ of real Africa that we see face-to-face when out walking through the villages and fields, it is far more interactive than when we pass by in Cuthbert.  The people are smiling and friendly, usually waving and calling out “Hello how are you?” to which the only answer is precisely: “I’m fine”.  Answers of any other words conveying a similar meaning seem to stump them 🙂 but it is admirable that they are so welcoming and want to practice the English that they learned at school.

On this particular walk we came across a musical procession of small children in graduation outfits walking (approximately) in-file down the lane.  They were led by a school band playing drums and trumpets and followed behind by proud parents dressed-up in their ‘Sunday-best’. It was a joyful scene; given how many children in Africa never make it to school at all, it is a day to celebrate those ‘graduating’ from infant to primary school.

December 2014

Equator

After a few days at Lake Bunyonyi, we said our goodbyes to the fellow overlanders that we had met there (a Swiss couple who had only been travelling for 4 weeks after shipping to Mombassa, and an Aussie couple who had been travelling for 4 years since arriving in South Africa for the World Cup in 2010!) and moved on north further into Uganda. The next stop was a brief overnight stay in Mbarara. The less said about this place the better, me thinks! Let’s just say it was not one of our most peaceful night-stops! But it was a convenient mid-way point en-route to our next ‘destination’ and it was also Cuthbert’s 1^st Birthday – exactly one year since he was handed over with trade-plates at the Bocklet factory in Germany.  A small celebratory drink was required to mark the occasion 🙂

Moving on to the very northern extreme of the Southern Hemisphere, Lake Nabugabo is apparently a popular weekend-away for the city-dwellers of Kampala so we thought we would check it out… a pleasant spot, but not a patch on the scenery of the Kibale area that we had left a couple of days before.  Nevertheless, we spent a peaceful couple of days there catching up on jobs around Cuthbert. We were also running low on Cuthbert’s fresh-water tank, but the tap in the campsite had dried-up! No problem… we used our submersible pump to bring water from the lake (through a filter) directly into Cuthbert’s fresh water tank. The water supply out of the tap in these parts is pumped directly from the lake anyway, so this is simply ‘cutting out the middle-man’.  Once the water is in Cuthbert’s tanks, it goes through two further filters before coming out of our taps, by which stage it is safe drinking water for our onward route over the Equator!

Our first stop in the northern hemisphere was the Mpanga Forest Reserve – a great place to waste a bit of time with the entertaining red-tailed monkeys playing high above Cuthbert in the jungle canopy. Every time the tiny apes make a giant leap, you hold your breath as they appear to plummet mid-air between the boughs… but miraculously they catch the slightest of branches as they are passing on the fall, then they continue their journey around the tree-tops.

From Mpanga it’s a short drive to the lake-shore at Entebbe where we visited the Wildlife Education Centre and explored around Murchison Bay. Our ‘exploration’ of Murchison Bay was actually slightly more extensive than planned, as we unsuccessfully tried to find a beach-front camp-site that was described in our guide book as ‘secluded’.  Well… ‘secluded’ is one thing… but being so concealed that no passing visitor can find the location is probably not a ‘business model of choice’ for a campsite. If you are reading this Nabinooya Beach Camp…… maybe a sign or two to give away your location to potential customers might help???  We ended up having a ‘fish and chips’ lunch in a quiet lake-side café before returning back to Entebbe to our campsite of the previous night. Fish and chips are available almost everywhere in Uganda – it is almost as popular dish here as it is in UK, but next time remind me to check that ‘fish’ means fillet and not a whole deep-fried Tilapia with head and stuff to be eaten around 🙁  ).

Kampala-palava

After Entebbe, came a long drive north up to Hoima en-route to Murchison Falls.  The distance was only 230 km and we wondered why Wallace the sat-nav was predicting a 6.5 hr journey time. We reckoned Wallace must have had some sort of soft-ware glitch… it is a tarred road all the way… surely it wouldn’t take that long? Based on our experience of Cuthbert’s speeds on the tarred roads in Uganda so far, we reckoned it would take no more than 4 hrs.

Unfortunately, Wallace’s time-estimate turned out to be much closer to the mark than our own!  Unlike Wallace, we hadn’t reckoned on the central Kampala traffic!  We are now however, in a position to advise anyone unfamiliar with the city, that traffic jams don’t come any more ‘jammed’ than the Kampala inner ring-road on a Friday morning!  We thought that we had seen utter road-chaos driving in Doha and other major cities of the Middle East, but at least the congestion in Arabian cities consists only of 4-wheeled vehicles whose drivers each having an equal chance of making it alive to the other side of town. Kampala on the other hand, takes traffic-mayhem to a whole new level!  The streets are literally packed solid with cars and mini-buses jamming up every junction; any gap between them is filled by mopeds or cycles and any gaps between the mopeds is filled by pedestrians squeezing into any tiny cracks in the traffic stream.  African pandemonium at its best!

African Queen River

We finally made it to Hoima and after an unremarkable night-stop there, we chose the longer (and according to our guide book, more scenic) of the two route options to Murchison Falls Park.  This rough track took us to the top of the escarpment with splendid views over Lake Albert and then down a steep track to the lake-shore with the most amazing bird-life. If you are heading to Murchison Falls, we would highly recommend this route rather than the far more boring (albeit more direct) main road.  Even for the bird-life alone, it is worth the extra miles. To be honest, we don’t really know our Kingfishers from our Fish Eagles, but they all looked pretty impressive to our un-trained eyes!

Once down at the lake shore, we headed first north up towards the delta where the White Nile enters Lake Albert from the east. Very close to this point, the White Nile leaves the Lake again and heads north on its way to join the Blue Nile up in Sudan, but rather than follow this northerly down-stream route, Cuthbert took us eastwards, up-stream of the river into Murchison Falls Park.  This section of the White Nile is famous for two reasons: first, it is where Bogart and Hepburn filmed the great Hollywood movie: African Queen. Secondly, it is where Ernest Hemingway was unfortunate enough to suffer not one, but two serious aircraft accidents on consecutive days!  It’s a ‘stranger-than-fiction’ story – if you are interested, Google it and check it out.

Anyway – back with Cuthbert by the White Nile –we decided to take a boat trip from the village of Paraa up-stream to see the Falls from the base. When we turned up to join the boat, we were pleased to bump into Reeka and Ashley who we had previously met a few weeks ago back in Kibuye, Rwanda (see Another Big Lake)!

Murchison Falls is far from the tallest or widest waterfall in the world or even in Africa, however it does have one of the most powerful water-flows, as the volume of the White Nile is forced through a 6m wide chasm of rocks. The river cruise was very worthwhile with fabulous animal and bird sightings along the banks. We saw ellies, hippos, crocs, buffalos, water-bucks, hartebeests, wart-hogs and more bird-types than we could mention here (even if we could remember all the names that the guide told us)!  But although we saw the base of the Falls, we didn’t get sufficiently close to have that ‘in-your-face-spray’ experience that we were expecting. So the next day we headed on land to the top of the Falls to get the view from the other end.

Murchison Falls – time to turn back!

As we parked-up in the clearing near the top of the Falls, we noticed a plague of tsetse flies and other horrible air-borne monsters, swarming around Cuthbert.  Regular Cuthbert followers may recall our previous tsetse experience back at Vwaza, Malawi and the story of how we unwittingly ended up with Cuthbert painted the colour voted ‘most likely to attract tsetse flies’ 🙁 (see Tsetse Land).  Well today, we hope that you are impressed to learn that as your intrepid reporters from the Dark Continent, we covered-up and selflessly braved the swarm to investigate on your behalf, the view from the top of the Falls.  We are pleased to report that this vantage-point provided a much better impression of the volume of water crashing down the cataract than we had seen from the bottom! We escaped the event suffering a few random, itchy nips from some unidentified flying critters, but thankfully no tsetse bites!  Just one of the hardships that we have to suffer in the course of duty! 🙂

For us, one of the most notable aspects of the visit to Murchison Falls, is that it marks the most northerly point of our African trip.  For various reasons (including the current reluctance of Ethiopia to issue visas to travellers with overland vehicles, and also the security situation in South Sudan/northern Kenya) we have decided to ‘turn around’ at Murchison Falls. From here, we are on the return journey heading back south! First into southern Kenya, then back down through Tanzania, this time the eastern side – pursuing an equally slow and fluid pace as we enjoyed on our way north up the western side.

We have recently learned that our good friends from England, Mark, Anna and Freya will in Tanzania on New Year’s Eve. So for the short term we have (unusually for us!) a timescale for our travels and we are excited about meeting up with them to celebrate the start of 2015!

Another ‘Source’ of the Nile!

The first leg of our south-bound journey took us from the Murchison Falls Park towards the town of Jinja where the White Nile starts out of Lake Victoria. On the way to Jinja we made a couple of stop-overs: first, a night at Ziwa Rhino sanctuary near Masindi, then a couple of nights near the misleadingly named Kalagada Falls…. not actually ‘Falls’, more a series of boulder rapids. Nevertheless, a pretty spot to give Cuthbert a day off from the road (yes… its laundry day again!!).

Eventually we reached Jinja, the point where in 1862, the British explorer John Speke claimed to have found the ‘official’ Source of the Nile. Interestingly, Speke made this claim based on a certain amount of exploration, but also based on a significant amount of speculation on his part. His claim to fame, challenged by rival explorer Richard Burton, was not confirmed until much later in 1874 when Stanley (he of the “Dr Livingstone, I presume” fame) carried out further extensive explorations.  Stanley was sufficiently generous to publicly credit Speke with having ‘discovered’ what is today still widely recognised (at least in Uganda!) as the main source of the Nile.  The fact is however, that the River Nile which eventually flows through Egypt into the Mediterranean has many tributaries and ‘sources’ flowing into it. Several places in central/eastern Africa claim to be ‘The Source’ – indeed regular Cuthbert followers may recall that we visited in Rwanda a few weeks ago, the point found as recently as 2006 to be the Furthest Source of the Nile (i.e. the source most distant from the Nile’s Mediterranean delta).  Anyway, for the sake of another ‘tick in the box’ of our African journey, we felt the need for a souvenir snap of ourselves at Speke’s ‘main’ Nile Source at Jinja.

The ‘Cuthbert Welcome Factor’

One measure that we have started to use in Africa to judge the level of ‘official’ welcome to tourists in a country, is the frequency of police stops and the attitude of the police when we are stopped. We are pretentiously calling this the ‘Cuthbert Welcome Factor’ 🙂 !

Retrospectively considering in overview, the ‘Cuthbert Welcome Factor’ for the various countries we have travelled in Africa so far, we have had a fluctuating level of reception. But no country (yet!) has scored particularly poorly. In Zimbabwe we experienced our one and only attempt at police corruption, but even that was carried out in a fairly friendly and un-threatening manner (and didn’t succeed! – see ‘The ‘helpful’ policeman‘).  In Malawi the police stops were frequent, but never impolite or aggressive. In Tanzania we experienced very few police-stops up the western side of the country, but by over-lander reputation the eastern side of the country is far worse in this respect. We therefore have that little joy to look forward to in the New Year as we head back south!

Most recently, over our 18 days of driving around Uganda we did not have a single police-stop at the side of the road. As in many African countries, there are random police-stops dotted around the country, but in Uganda they simply smiled and waved us past every single check-post! Tip-top chaps and a high score for Uganda on the ‘Cuthbert Welcome Factor’ scale!

A reason to party?

We spent our last few days in Uganda relaxing at a couple of camps in the Jinja area, including going for walks and some kayaking on the White Nile. On our final evening at the Nile River Explorers Camp, we heard a commotion coming down the road approaching the camp gate:  loud music, cheering and that celebratory ‘yodelling-type’ (for want of a better word!) noise that seems to mark joyous occasions in much of Africa.  We couldn’t see what was going on, but the local staff in the camp all ran towards the gate to join the street party. What could the occasion be, we wondered… a birthday? a hen or stag-night? or a wedding even???  It was certainly quite a party and the local staff were beckoning the various campers to join them at the gate to see the spectacle.

As our interest was raised, we asked the staff about the occasion for the celebration and were slightly taken aback by the answer….. a circumcision ceremony!  Apparently, the appropriate time had come for several young men of the village; the procession was leading to the centre of the village for the operations to be performed in public. And there was no shortage of spectators.  Errr…. not our cup of tea thanks! As the procession moved-on past the camp gate and further into the village, we declined the kind invitation to join the party – we’ll leave that particular celebration to the locals!

The next morning we packed up Cuthbert and headed on the dull 3 hour drive eastwards towards the Kenyan border near Tororo. Looking back, we’ve had a thoroughly enjoyable 2 ½ weeks in Uganda. It’s problematic recent history unfortunately still influences its international reputation, so we weren’t sure what to expect in Uganda; but it really is most picturesque and a pleasure to travel. The quality of driving on the roads (that is, when they decide to drive on, rather than in the general vicinity of, the road) may leave something to be desired 🙂 , but the people are genuinely very friendly, prices are reasonable and the campsites/lodges are mostly pretty good. Marvellous!

Here is a quick overview map of our route in Uganda.

Onwards now…. Country No. 10 awaits! Tune in to the predictably named Kenya page for Cuthbert’s plans to celebrate Christmas in Africa!