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Published: April 1st 2008
I hope you all had a lovely Easter and enjoyed the snow which I hear hit England.
I went on my first trip out of Kampala and had many adventures which will entertain you all I hope.
We (Duncan and Gemma from my house and Cheryl and Aurelie who are volunteers who arrived in Kampala at the same time as me) met at the taxi park and left Kampala in a matatu without much drama. At Entebbe the driver took us on to the ferry port, which meant I delayed having to go on the dreaded boda boda (motorbike taxi). One month in and I’m still a boda virgin ... I think I’m going to have to get it over with soon. We were about an hour and a half early for the ferry, having built in a lot of contingency for traffic jams etc, and spent the time acquiring bananas and pineapple slices for the journey and general people watching. When it came to boarding the ferry we managed to secure a special ‘first class’ area for ourselves - mum will know the proper name for it but it was a section at the back of the boat behind the engines. Although there were no proper seats we were in the open air and not as squashed as the seats inside. Or at least we weren’t until various groups of people came out to look at the view and tried to infiltrate our space. The most annoying of these was a man who having tired of filming the same view for about 20 minutes started zooming in on us ... I think he will have some lovely shots of people giving him very dirty looks. The most interesting sight on the way over was a fishing boat which had a novel division of labour - one man standing up pulling in a net, one steering and the other bailing the boat out! The other event was meeting a Dutch guy who works as a freelance journalist in Kampala - more of him later. After about 3 and a half hours we arrived at .... island - we thought we’d avoided paying as a man had taken our names but not charged us anything. But instead we had to queue to buy tickets ... after 3 and a half hours of doing nothing! I had a small altercation with video camera man as he tried to barge in front of me ... needless to say I won!
We were met off the boat by two of the staff from the Hornbill Camp which was to be our home for the next 3 days which seemed like a good sign ... all hopes were dashed when mad Tina (one of the owners) showed us into our ‘luxury’ dorm. We renamed it ‘the stable’ as that’s pretty much what it looked and smelled like ... although stables are usually cleaned out daily. The place smelled terrible - the main smell came from behind a locked door and we never found out what lurked there ... possibly the decomposing body of something or somebody. There were many insects and much general unsavouriness, but the good thing was that the smell put the mosquitoes off. Having observed a washing-up bowl full of cooked fish and a pair of manky rubber gloves next to it outside the stable we decided not to eat dinner at the camp (fish samosas are a speciality of the place ...) and naively asked for directions to the town ... they were a bit vague but we set off anyway as we were told it was only 15 minutes away. After slogging uphill for 20 minutes with no town in sight we were getting a bit worried, but were picked up by a local in a big estate car who took pity on us ... he was very kind and drove the long way round to show us the footpath we should have taken. He dropped us at the local ‘restaurant’ which was optimistically called ‘Antonio’s’ - it didn’t look very promising and we were being observed by the Dutch guy we met on the boat so we wandered around a bit, established that Antonio’s was pretty much the only option and then had to come back. Matoke (mashed green banana) and beans was the only meal on the menu so we opted for a chapati each which we ate in record time and left feeling slightly embarrassed. By this time it was dark and we set of stumbling down the footpath - we went a bit wrong at one point and ended up at a dead end where there were a load of men standing around drinking and listening to music which was slightly scary. One of them followed us and guided us back onto the right path and we arrived back in the camp about an hour after we left and still quite hungry. As we hadn’t ordered dinner we had to fend for ourselves and cobbled together a meal of bananas, biscuits, a cereal bar and some of Gemma’s precious chocolate eggs ... and beer which tasted like nectar after a day travelling. We avoided the bar area (gap year children and loud Canadians) and camp-fire (uncharacteristically unfriendly Ugandans) and sat on the beach and had a very nice time chatting and laughing about our day. At about 10pm the entertainment started - our hosts were quite drunk/stoned by this time and were dancing very badly to Bob Marley. I think there was even some headbanging - I will never forget the image of Tina’s hair flailing around with her glasses glinting in the moonlight. Rather disturbingly they told us that they had a pig which they were going to kill the next day and spit-roast after feeding it lots of grass ....
Our first night was a bit disturbed due to various noises/insects/smells/general discomfort and we all started the day feeling quite grumpy. This wasn’t helped by the sheer horror of the toilets (long drop pit things which were never cleaned) and the 2 hour wait for coffee and breakfast. But things looked up when Thompson, a local ‘guide’ turned up to take us for a forest walk. We started off with the 5 of us, 6 Ugandan girls who were very feisty and a chap called Paul who was sporting the most amazing leopard print cowboy hat. After about half an hour we were joined by a group of Chinese people who fitted the stereotype of typical Japanese tourists - complete with enormous cameras and interesting headgear (see picture of lady in sun-visor/welding mask). The walk did become slightly farcical - Thompson was enjoying pontificating on island life/forest folklore etc but being challenged at every turn by the feisty ladies. The best one was his story about why there are no sheep on the island - apparently they’re taboo and if anyone brought a sheep (or anything woollen???) they would be struck down by lightning. I don’t think there are sheep at all in Africa so I think he was being a bit creative. We walked through a fishing village and saw a lady making rope from grasses, fish being salted and dried in the sun and some men emerging from the forest with mushrooms. Our Chinese friends took lots of pictures zooming right in on villagers, including a baby who very sensibly started crying very loudly ... I didn’t really enjoy traipsing through people’s backyards as it seemed like an invasion of their privacy. However I did enjoy having a good nosey around one of the other holiday camps on the islands ... lovely clean and shiny bands with beds, nets and clean things. There was a surreal point on the walk when the sassy ladies bullied a local man into letting them have a go on his bicycle ... as most of them couldn’t ride a bike there was an interval of shrieking and careering into ditches. In the middle of this our journalist friend and his girlfriend came running along the road - quite freaky really. The walk ended with a stroll along the beach past all of the much posher resorts - we booked dinner at one of them so we had something to look forward to the next evening ... including nice clean toilets.
The rest of the day was like being on holiday - we had samosas for lunch at the camp and ignoring the risk of bilharzia went swimming in the lake, which was absolutely amazing. Really clear warm water and feeling fresh and clean afterwards. Thomson had reliably (???) informed us that the beach area was bilharzia free as there weren’t any reeds nearby. We spent the evening eating spit roast pig by the camp fire and being ranted at by our charming host Dick ... I’m quite convinced that he has cannabis psychosis as he threatened to wee on the camp-fire if we didn’t join him at the bar and was muttering about how their guests were all m*****f*****g a*******s. Duncan and I both decided that this didn’t make for much of a fun evening and retired to our festering pit - I don’t think we missed much except for Dick nearly falling into the fire and possibly concussing himself on a rock (would he have noticed??) I think somebody must have smuggled an illicit sheep onto the island as there was a huge storm on Saturday night - possibly a typhoon? The thunder and rain was so loud that we couldn’t hear what we were shouting at each other - it was very scary, particularly as there was a lot of lightning and we were in a metal roofed hut. I think everyone had their ipods plugged in at full volume with something soothing. Not the right time for the Ramones at all!
There was a real morning after the night before feeling the next day - the camp looked even worse than normal as there were a lot of branches and very damp tents. The Canadian girls had the worst of it - a big branch had fallen onto their tent and put a big hole in it so they’d had to seek shelter in one of the empty huts. Despite the omens of possible bad weather we decided to take Thompson up on his offer of a boat trip to see some of the other islands - we gave him a deposit to go and buy fuel and waited for him on the beach. There was a small degree of concern that we might not see him or our money again but he did reappear ... with a police boat and two policemen , one of them complete with uniform and gun! By this time we’d acquired 2 new friends who we’d persuaded to join us and we all clambered into the boat. The lake was a bit choppy and so our progress was a little slow ... I got the familiar ‘we’re doomed’ feeling that I always get when I venture out onto open water and Duncan and I sang ‘Favourite Things’ from the Sound of Music quietly to ourselves. Steve kept asking which landmass we were heading for in a ‘I’m not scared but I would like some crumbs of comfort’ sort of way and every so often one of us would say ‘I think I could swim to shore from here’. Hilariously just as we were making some progress towards land and could see the fishing village we were heading for we changed tack (can you tack in a motor boat?) and pulled in to a deserted island. This is where things really went tits up for me - in the process of climbing out of the boat to go and play Swallows and Amazons on the island I managed to lose my balance and landed in the water. The thing that bothered me most about it was that somebody had just seen a monitor lizard in the water and didn’t want to be savaged by it! Giddy at the prospect of another nature walk Thompson led us into the interior of the island ... as we lost Duncan who had hung back to take a ‘short call’ we didn’t get very far which was probably a good thing as to my admittedly untrained eye an uninhabited jungley island was prime snake territory. And you know how I feel about snakes ..... So back onto the boat of death, another fall in the water while attempting to climb back in, and a short trip to the inhabited island. Thompson took us for a walk around the village after a perfunctory introduction to the village elders (all very drunk on millet moonshine) - and after meeting a lot of children, more drunk men and seeing various methods of preserving fish (freezing and smoking this time) we were led into an area of probably snake infested grass. At this point we rebelled slightly and started heading for the boat, but as the weather had turned even worse and rain was heading our way we were told that we’d have to spend 'some time' in the village until the storm had passed. This meant sitting in the only bar watching a very strange film about pygmy gansters and trying not to notice our policeman boat driver drinking about 4 strong beers. The harbinger genes kicked in and I was convinced that we’d end up trapped on the island overnight or have to travel back in the dark if we were to avoid missing the 8am ferry back to the mainland. So Duncan and I set off to find Thompson who had gone off a while ago to ‘monitor’ the weather while Gemma herded the drunk policeman and his sidekick out of the bar. We all marched down to the boat and set about getting back in. There was another comedy moment when the man in charge of the boat said ‘We need Mummy first’ meaning that he wanted me to get into the boat so he could supervise it and try and avoid another dunking ... I thought he’d said ‘We need money first’ and was about to launch into a tirade about corrupt policemen etc ! The journey back was fairly uneventful as the lake was a lot calmer so we practically sped along - we had to have a ‘short call’ stop for the boat-driver due to the volume of beer consumed and Thompson resumed his made up stories and identification of birdlife.
We were very happy to be 'home' and practically skipped into our stable to change out of damp clothes ready for our night out. It had been a very wet day on the main island and most people looked a bit bored and fed up so the boat trip was definitely a good option. We walked along the beach to the Mirembe resort, and at one stage were surrounded by mating bullfrogs and cicadas which were incredibly loud. We stuffed ourselves with pork, fried fish and about 6 different forms of carbogydrate (sorry Paddy!) including surprisingly delicious cold chips. The lady in charge was lovely and very welcoming ... a big contrast to our mad hosts. We were all quite tired from the day and headed home for an early night - the boat left at 8am the next morning and we wanted to board early and get a seat. Despite arriving at about 7.15 the boat was already quite full so we had to stand on the car deck for 3 and a half hours - for the first hour we all just communed with our ipods (how did travellers survive without them?) and barely spoke. Every so often there would be a small flood on the deck, accompanied by a lot of shrieking from the people who'd been hit by the wave, so our bags ended up very soggy. As we got close to the mainland we got more cheerful and had straightforward journey back to Entebbe as there were loads of matatus lined up waiting to go to Kampala. Duncan and I abandoned the plan we'd made to go and have lunch somewhere in Kampala and headed straight home for Italian deli sandwiches, tea on the veranda, baths and naps in clean beds. It was really lovely to be 'home' ... I think being away from Kampala and the guest house made me appreciate them even more. And if there was ever any doubt I am definitely a city girl and need my home comforts ... a bit of hardcore travelling is fun but there's no place like home!
I will add some photos seperately ... it's like swimming through cold treacle doing it here so I'll need a spare few hours!
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clare lay
non-member comment
Love it!! Lays and boats are always a bad combination, but we're like moths to a light. Lots of love from us all xxxxxxx