Southern Uganda; traveling with a lack of money and seating….

A few hours later, I caught a taxi from the border post to the next town, approximately 100km away. It cost $5. Bargain? You say. Well, I shared it with a few others. Eight others actually. Nope, not a minivan, a normal sized car. Four men crammed in the back, myself and another man shared the front passenger seat, whilst the eighth passenger managed to share a seat with the driver. “Hey Mzungu” asked the quiet man next to me. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking you are all crazy” I said. I got eight little “He he he” as a reply.

When we reached police roadblocks, it became a group effort to conceal the number of passengers traveling in the vehicle. Of course, given the lack of space, our efforts were poor and fooled no one. Each police officer we crossed gave us all a firm screaming to, before waving our car on. No one threatened a fine, or forbid us to proceed.

In Masaka, after asking directions to my hotel, a passenger from the bus offered to walk with me. Geradaline was around my age, and spoke perfect unaccented English, as did her educated parents, whom I met when we stopped at her family’s shop. She was a final year law student at the University of Kampala. She thought my trip sounded very brave. It was funny to hear that even Africans have the impression that their continent was very dangerous for travelers.

The hotel recommended in the Lonely Planet had taken advantage of it popularity and good write up and increased its prices from $10 to $30 a night. This wasn’t unusual, I told then I could find something else. “The thing about cheaper hotels is that your possessions….” I cut her off and shook my head.
“Nobody would want my dirty clothes” I said. I found a hotel and had dinner in a restaurant on the main road.

The true reason I turned down the hotel, was frankly, I didn’t have the cash. I had changed a pile of my travellers cheques in Tanzania to Tanzanian Shillings, on the advice of the bank teller, who possessing no Ugandan currency, promised I could change it at the forex at the border. Unfortunately, the only method available is known as “The Mobile Forex”, young men with piles of cash, who operate out of car booths. Whilst their rates are reasonable, too many Mzungu’s have fallen victim to their traps; phony calculators, folded notes, or simply confusion over the hundreds of thousands of shillings being exchanged. I’d changed only enough currency to get me to the next town, but having arrived late on a Friday night, I hadn’t had the opportunity to visit the bank. The weekend was now upon me, and I panicked at the thought of being stuck in a remote village, with extremely meager finds. When Saturday morning arrived, my night in a hotel left me with the equivalent of a few dollars.

After popping in on Geraldine again to suss out the situation, I learned Mbarara, a slightly larger town, 100km west, may have a bank opened till midday on a Saturday morning. Arriving at the taxi rank, I offered the first driver I saw all my money and explained the situation. Hesitantly, he accepted my discounted fare, but still awarded me the front seat in the bus.

In Mbarara I ran though town, searching furiously for the open bank branch, dodging offers of rides from taxi drivers, and ever eager Africans with their confusing directions. I was the last customer in the bank line when they closed their doors. An hour later, I finally reached the front counter. The forex was only for a limited number of currencies, none of them Tanzanian, so I handed over what I had previously considered to be an expensive waste of time, some travellers cheques.
“I am sorry madam, but our computer is down and we can not exchange these for you today”. 100% penniless and scared, I cried.

The bank teller, a young sympathetic girl, devised a plan. Hesitantly, I handed over my passport and all my documentation to a younger clerk to take to the nearby market to be photo copied (the bank didn’t have a photo copy machine). Following many forms and phone calls to Kampala, she finally produced some cash. Despite losing 50% of the cheques value on transaction fees, I was thrilled! I finally left the bank, two hours after they had closed.

Cashed up, I was ready to move on. The bus was full, but we waited about two hours before it left. I sat in the front seat, next to the window, and crowds of hawkers passed by selling a collection of goods. An old man with crossed eyes spent some time quizzing me about my country.
“In your country, is the Prime Minister elected by the cabinet, or by the people?”
“What type of cows does your country bred? Are they long horned like ours?”
“In your country, how long does it take the average person to save up to buy land?”

The bus conductor lay against my window using the rear vision mirror to try on the sunglasses I wasn’t buying. “Try the red ones” I offered.
“I am a black man, so I wear black sunglasses” he said. “Here, you should try the orange ones”. Well, the look I was going for was ‘tanned”, but anyway.

We finally departed. Twenty minutes later I was sitting on the side of the road next to a broken bus. Another hour later, what was meant to be an empty bus arrived, half full. Four of us squashed in the front, again, two in the driver’s seat, and the back looked unimaginably tight. It took fifteen minutes to place the ‘Tetris’ of bodies together. A young boy stood up against the back of our seat, his body bent in half at the hips, hanging in the gap between our heads.
“He could sit on my lap” I offered the driver.
“No, it’s against the law to have children in the front” he said.

By the time we got into Kabale it was late and I fell into the nearest hotel, and offended the chef by eating only a few spoonfuls of my meal. In the morning there were a number of taxi drivers waiting outside the door of my hotel. A guy called Harbib introduced himself and explained. “The guy from the hotel told us that there was a Mzungu who came last night, and in the morning would go to the Lake. I have been waiting here all morning”. I hadn’t told the hotel staff I was going to the Lake, but I had written it in the guest details sheet. I had breakfast and went with Habib.

The road to Lake Bunyonyi was spectacular. Uganda was proving to be the ‘Pearl’ Winston Churchill had described after his visit to the country in 1907. Habib stopped to let me take photos. Kabale is Uganda’s highest town, but the road to the lake kept climbing, the hills covered with perfectly sculptured rows of banana tress, vegetables and forests. The day was hazy, but everywhere I looked was the quintessential jungle green I had imagined in Central Africa. The bright red road was decorated with the contrasting colorful skirts of the women walking alongside it. The Lake was captivating, islands and bays sprinkled along its idyllic surface. It was hard to believe it was all real.

Later that afternoon I went for a walk. The road we had driven down continued past the camp where I was staying, and I followed it. It grew higher and offered beautiful views of the Lake and its islands. I was quickly joined by a mass of children who wanted to walk with me, and I remembered why I’d struggled through the walks I’d taken in Africa. I begged them to let me walk by myself, but as soon as I chased some off, more appeared. “You’re going the wrong way!!!” they yelled.
“It doesn’t matter, I’m just walking” I pleaded.

The ‘wrong’ road I took curled around a hill, before it reached a small church at the top. The Church had a roof, but the walls were open arches, looking over the amazing view in every direction. It was Sunday morning, and the parish sung beautiful African hymns.

Along the road people went mad to see a Mzungu. Sometimes I could hear children screaming out “Hey Mzungu, how are you!?!”, and I had to scan the hills, finding a house at the very top, and next to it miniscule figures jumping out and down.

I turned back when I encounter a very persistent child called Hillary. He had raced across the lake shore when he saw me, but didn’t catch me for about ten minutes. I had seen he had a canoe and I knew he wanted to take me to the Island, for a fee. He was quite young, but I knew I was in for a whole conversation, where he told me about his life, then pestered me to join him in the canoe, and I was desperate for some peace and to simply enjoy the scenery. After I told him this, he would not relent; I got annoyed, and turned back.

The next day at breakfast the guys at the restaurant wanted to know what I was up to. The camp ran a lot of activities, canoeing, bird watching, nature walks, bike ridding, and they were keen to sign me up for something. I was interested in canoeing the lake, until I pictured myself stuck in the middle, alone, calling to Hillary to come and rescue me because my unfit body was too weak to paddle anymore. I decided to go for another walk instead. I trekked up one of the steeper, higher hills, less populated with children.

At the top, an hour later, huffing and puffing, I sat down and had a drink. The top of the hill was a popular transport junction. The guys on a truck asked me where I was going. “Back down the hill where I came from” I said. He explained to everyone else and they roared with laughter. The music emulating from a nearby shop was Men at Work, “Down Under”. I laughed and though that perhaps I could just explain that the same place this crazy song is from, is the same place the crazy Mzungu is from too. Would I make more sense then?

The next day I decided to pack up and head to Kampala, whilst I still had the funds to get there. I rang Harbib and asked him if he would come and pick me up. He explained that in the last two days, the petrol price had increased dramatically, and the fee to pick me up from a remote destination, where I didn’t have many other options, would now be double. Fair enough, I guess. He took me back to Kabale.