The most wonderful time of the year

Well, the holiday was wonderful. Seeing everyone was the best part. Getting to check out some really beautiful places and having new adventures was a blast too. It was so much fun to live as a tourist for a couple weeks, and get share first experiences of Africa with Jason, Jen, Tom, and Grace.

Tom and Grace got here on Monday the 12th, but since the rest of my placement parted on Friday I spent the first weekend of our vacation doing a little exploring on my own. I spent a boring night in Jinja, then caught a taxi into Kampala. I’m not a big fan of Kampala; it’s busy and dirty and kind of unpleasant. Still, I had to relish the opportunity to go to a movie theater (I saw Made of Honor, which was standard romcom cheesiness), get Japanese take-out, and have a room to myself with a private bathroom and double bed. The next morning I rolled into Entebbe, which is lovely – palm trees and nice houses and views of Lake Victoria. I checked into a hostel and spent the afternoon at the Entebbe Botanical Gardens. The entrance fees for the gardens had been hiked because there was – get this – a rally car race going on. So I had a nice stroll of the park and got to see the occasional import car fly by.

The next morning I woke up early and had the “transport officer” from the hostel give me a ride to the airport to meet up with Tom and Grace! It was kind of overwhelming to see Tom and kind of felt like I’d seen him yesterday. We spent the morning napping and waiting out the rain on the couches at the hostel, then split for the 3-hour ferry to Buggala Island.

The Ssese Islands were beautiful, relaxing, and quiet. We stayed at a campsite called Hornbill Camp that was pretty bizarre. It’s a collection of brightly-painted wooden buildings reminiscent of a hippy summer camp run by an eccentric middle-aged German couple. Tom, Grace and I pitched our tents near the beach and had a couple days full of swimming, exploring, fish dinners, stray dogs, beer and campfires before Jason and Jen joined us on Wednesday. We camped another night at Hornbill as a fivesome, then spent our last night on the islands at Panorama Lodge, which wasn’t on the waterfront but had nice self-contained cottages and a very helpful waitperson named Arnold.

Then it was off to Mbale, near the Kenyan border. Everyone piled off the ferry and into their first matatu. We stopped in Kampala to change money and get snacks and be overwhelmed for a few minutes, then rode for another four hours or so. Our taxi stopped at the rest stop where vendors swarm the car and poke bouquets of meat on a stick and drinks and fried bananas through the windows, which came as quite a surprise to sleeping Jason and Grace. We spent that night at a basic hotel in town and had some tasty Indian food.

The next morning we stopped in at the Uganda Wildlife Authority office to plan our next few days, deciding on a couple nights at Sipi Falls with a night camping on Mt. Elgon in the middle instead of a three-night summit trip, which we didn’t really have the gear for. Sipi was gorgeous. We made the Crow’s Nest our home base, which is a rustic collection of cabins set opposite a valley from the waterfalls. We hiked down to the main waterfall on our first afternoon, and were aided down the last muddy slope by a bunch of little boys that appeared out of the bushes like oompa loompas. The biggest fall is long and skinny, and really pretty to look up at from the base.

Mt. Elgon is a long and flat mountain, so hiking around seems to be just as cool as reaching the actual highest peak. We hiked in about ten miles to Tutum Cave, passing through farmland, rocky mountainside, bamboo forest, and lush jungle on our way in. The cave was loaded with bats and it was pretty creepy to shine our lights onto the ceiling and see thousands of swinging orange eyes glowing back at us. We had two rangers with guns with us, and we all had a nice bonfire before a very cold and damp night. We saw a few monkeys, a chameleon, and lots of large biting ants during the hike (Grace even saw them in her pants). It rained for a while on our way out. We took shelter at an empty primary school for a bit but ended up braving the drizzle and extreme mud when we realized that the sky was pretty solidly gray. Patrick, our helpful boy-guide, requested something waterproof and walked back inside Grace’s pack cover.

We had another night at Sipi, which featured very welcome hot showers and hot food, and then arranged a ride back to Jinja. We shared a vehicle with a guy from the Netherlands named Shuldth or something who was pretty nice. The five of us got dropped at Backpackers, the favorite SPW haunt, then went out for dinner at the lovely Ginger on the Nile. We sat under a big grass umbrella on the banks of the Nile, had cocktails, and watched some monkeys. Then it was off to the campsite at Bujagali Falls for a night of hanging out and then being kept awake all night by rats in our dorm room.

The next morning, we caught the shuttle truck back to Backpackers, where Jason, Jen, Grace and I got the prep talk for our day of Grade 5 rapids and Tom rented a mountain bike and had a day around town. Rafting was awesome! We flipped our boat in three of the rapids, and the times we didn’t turn over we were definitely on the edge. We did a lot of swimming. It was scary and exciting and fun. We relived it all on the projection screen at the campsite and then I did what I typically do when out with Grace, which was to get a bunch of free shots and act like a fool.

By then it was Thursday, and Jason and Jen left for Murchison Falls National Park (where I went over Easter) and Tom, Grace and I visited my placement, got dinner and souvenirs in Jinja, and rolled back to Entebbe to get some sleep before their early morning flight on Friday. It was rough seeing them go, but saying goodbye for 10 weeks is a lot easier than seven months.

I made the trek back to Jinja and snuck in late to the last couple days of our mid-placement training. It was pretty uneventful: sharing ideas, relearning Dance4Life (again), clarifying some policies. It was nice to see everyone and hear about people’s holidays. The other international volunteers set off to Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania, etc. and everyone had a pretty good time with the exception of maybe Lucy and Darcy, who both fell ill with malaria during the two-week break. Lucy got the malaria meds pretty early on but spent some time in the hospital in Kenya with a secondary stomach infection. She’s back to her old self now. Darcy is still in Dubai. She had a bad reaction to quinine and was in intensive care for a few days. It sounds like she’s past the dangerous point but I think they’re still keeping an eye on her liver and making sure it’s safe for her to come back. Everyone really misses her.

After training Lucy and I got to spend a day with Jason and Jen in Kampala on their way back from their safari time. We had an awesome meal (with the first real espresso I’ve had since January) before they set off to the airport with some Texans they met up at Murchison. Lucy and I stayed in Kampala for the night and saw the new Indiana Jones movie. It was silly. We had a great time.

So now it’s back on placement, and back to work until the end of July. Returning to Magamaga was happy. There was quite a chorus of “Welcome back! You are most welcome! You are lost!” etc. the first time Lucy and I made a trip to the trading center. I’m sad that the holiday is over, but it’s nice to be home and unpack, wash my clothes, and see everyone. The student turnout is always pretty low the first week after a break, but I did a lesson on Gender at Kagoma this week and will probably have a couple classes tomorrow.

One exciting tidbit from the mid-placement workshop was that our debrief has been moved up a few days so that we’ll have a week off at the end of the program to travel. I think I’ll be headed to Rwanda with Lucy and Katie and I’m excited that I’ll get to go. We did quite a bit on the Rwandan genocide in Core 350 at Whitworth and I’d really like to visit the genocide museum and see the area, plus it’s supposed to be a really beautiful country with a lot better infrastructure than Uganda. So it’ll be a nice educational/relaxing wrap-up to the trip.