Tuesday August 31, 2010 – Rwanda to Uganda again

Tuesday August 31, 2010 – Rwanda to Uganda again


We’re up and organized early. Julius’ housekeeper arrives shortly after 8 and we hand over the keys and load our stuff back into the car for a long driving day back into Uganda to Lake Mburu. We’re becoming pros at finding our way around Kigali, thanks in no end to the gps which keeps us on the straight and narrow. We wind our way out pretty directly and get on the road to the border, a short one hour drive. The road is up and down and back and forth, and Sarah keeps talking about motion sickness but never changes colour so we make it without any barfing. We follow a valley all the way, initially it is marsh and rice paddies, then there are sugar cane fields, then extensive tea plantation, and then grasslands for cattle, many of which are Holsteins or Holstein crosses. And always people on the sides of the road – walking, bicycling, and always carrying something. It’s amazing what people can put on their heads and then carry. Elizabeth actually spots a woman who drops her basket, perhaps blown off by the gusting wind. A pretty unusual occurrence.
The border goes well. There are no buses of people, and although the road is lined with lorries, they don’t seem to have any impact on my visit to customs. The Rwandan exit is straightforward, with a very nice lady giving me a wad of toilet paper to deal with Sarah’s perpetually running nose. There is quite a line up of important documents posted up on the inside of the immigration window – identity papers left behind. We exit Rwanda, cross to the other side of the road to start driving on the left again, and then I visit the customs entry. The man asks if I have papers, I tell him I have many papers but he needs to show me the one he wants. That is apparently quite funny, and her picks what he needs out of the pile and we’re off. Then the immigration, where we pay our 50$ each and hand in our cards and passports. There is a brief moment of panic when the man at the counter tells Elizabeth she has only given him 1 passport, she tells him she gave him two, and he starts looking rather frantically under his newspaper and between the pieces of paper on the desk. The woman next to him points out that the passport is in the passport reading machine, and everyone relaxes and laughs.
And so we are in Uganda, an hour out of Kabale where we make a stop for lunch and groceries. We decide to try another restaurant listed in the guide book, which doesn’t have quite the ambience of the café we ate in previously , but the potato chapattis are fine, and we fill ourselves up on carbs and means for the trip to come. A visit to the Hot Loaf bakery, where we buy a double loaf of “butter bread”, some cookies euphemistically named “Vienna pastries” and a couple of the double decker jam cookies I’ve bought before. Solid and filling and quite edible. A trip to an Indian grocery for some fresh stuff to serve as snacks, and then on our way. I rather like Kabale. The dusty roads are filled with bicycles – I feel like I am in the wild west with herd of bicycles instead of cattle moving down the roads. The main road is lined by colourful shops, and many of the buildings are from the 1950’s and have the names of Indian proprietors over their lintels.
And east we head, about three hours of driving to go. But the road for the next few hours is tar so it passes quickly. We gradually move into more agricultural land, acres and acres of plantain and pineapples for a while until we move back into dry cattle territory. The hills gradually smooth out, and all of a sudden the good road ends just around Mbarara, where they are working on it. So we have a few km of dust and dirt and bypasses where the construction is going on, and then we are onto a brand brand new incredibly smooth road that just calls to me to go more than 60 km per hour. We sneak it up to 70 and sometimes a bit more, but there are traffic police in white uniforms, and regular police in blue camouflage, and other police or army scattered along so staying within the speed limit is probably a good idea.
Just before Katuma we leave the main road and re-enter murram road territory – passing through a number of small villages where most of the local populace is gathered around a central building – turns out it is local elections today. And eventually we come to the park gates and Lake Mburu National Park. Just beyond the gate we see a family of vervet monkeys, which sends Sarah scuttling back into the car. Formalities all go well – the girls’ student cards and my letter from UWA giving us reduced entry rate, and all of a sudden we are game viewing. Zebra, impala, birds, warthogs – grazing along the road or standing in the middle of the road. And the game seems really used to people as they just saunter off when we get close, unless I back up for a different view which activates the “backup beeper” and that seems to get them excited. Rwonyo camp is the headquarters and the site of a few very sad looking bandas. We head down to the lake to check out the campground, which is a large expanse of grass sloping down to the lake, and there is a restaurant with a large open thatched dining area. Hippos, warthogs, and birds abound. We decide that the pretty site does not make up for the lack of amenities, and head back up to the office to check into the platform tents that we have booked.
The office is closed but the appropriate person is found and we drive a km or so into the bush, past the parks employee homes, to a rather dilapidated group of large canvas tents raised up on wooden platforms. Each has two single beds with mosquito nets (actually Elizabeth gets the couple’s tent – two single beds pushed together with one mosquito net) and there are bathroom with running water and sit-on-toilets – much better than the very smelly pit latrines at the campsite, and showers. Patrick starts the fire for hot water so we can shower after dinner, and it all seems good. We unpack a bit, do the daily reorganization, and then just as the sun is setting head to the restaurant for beers and dinner. Beers are good, the ambience is good, but dinner, which we ordered up from a limited menu an hour and a half ago for 7:30, still doesn’t come til 8 and the chips aren’t really cooked and everything tastes a bit odd. Not exactly gourmet dining. It becomes full dark while we are eating, the stars come in a clear sky, and as we drive back to the tents, a few km away, we manage to see a white-tailed mongoose and several groups of hippo walking along the road. The showers are a bit of a disappointment – the water system is a bit odd with me turning on a tap in one shower and soaking Elizabeth who was in the next shower/toilet room, and the water coming out the hand tap seems to be about the colour of the average puddle on the dirt roads after a rain. So we pass on the showers and retire to our tents, thoughtfully provided with a burning kerosene lantern so we can see our way in the dark. Under our mosquito nets, and asleep in a flash.