Holidaying in Uganda

Writing in a blog seems a very foreign thing to do.  As my fingers parade over the keyboard, I think back to the last time they typed up my life adventures.  It’s been long, too long.

And that is solely due to the fact that there HAVEN’T been any adventures as of late, unless you call teaching a year 6 class at a start-up international school in Kampala an adventure.  There hasn’t been much to report, and even less time to do so.

But, my position has changed at the school, and now I am teaching a lovely, easy, small bunch of year 3 students, and the idea of blogging has slowly begun to seem possible again.  So here I am.  And I actually DO have a small adventure to tell.

Last month, Bruno and I were able to get away from Kampala for the first time since arriving here at the end of July.  It was mid-term break, so we escaped to Lake Victoria, Africa’s largest fresh water source.  Our destination – the Ssese Islands, an 84-island archipelago off the coast of Entebbe. Named after the Tsetse fly, which overwhelmed the population decades ago, it hardly sounds like a paradisiacal destination, but Bruno assured me that it was the Caribbean of Uganda.

 Since traffic is unfathomable in Kampala, no matter the time of day, we didn’t make it far the day we left for our trip.  So we opted to spend our first night in Entebbe, at the infamous Wildlife Education Center.  The UWEC is essentially a zoo, but all of its animals are rescued from the wild, and unable to return, so it’s a sort of rehabilitation center.  We saw all of the typical African animals, but it was certainly less impressive to see a leopard in a cage than in the wild!  What WAS cool was reaching our hands out to a red-tailed monkey and having him pick the dead skin from our fingers (giving us a very interesting manicure) and eating his harvestings.  It was also interesting to observe the rather large group of orangutans in the largest enclosure of the zoo.  The zoo-keeper was sending fruit into the river separating us from them (orangutans hate water, so there was no need for a fence) and they were fishing them out with long sticks cut from the trees.  Watching this, as well as one of them do the exact same yoga moves I had done the day before in Kampala, reminded me how closely-related these amazing creatures are to humans!

Bruno and I liked Entebbe, which was much smaller and calmer than Kampala.  We strolled along the banks of Lake Victoria and took a drive through the rural villages.  Too bad they don’t have an international school there!

By mid-morning, we were in line for the 3-hour car ferry that was to take us to the Ssese Islands.  I don’t want to dwell too much on the negatives of that ride, but between being strip-searched before getting on, told that we needed to leave our gas cookers on the mainland, and barely being able to fit the vehicle onto the platform, Bruno and I were happy that there was a different ferry on the other side of the island that we could take on our way back.

Bruno had been to Buggala Island, the largest and most accessible of the Ssese Islands, a decade ago. He remembered it fondly – white sand beaches, forests, peace and quiet – which is why he wanted to take me there.  Yet Buggala, like so many other places, has changed and developed in the last decade, and it was no longer exactly the little slice of heaven that Bruno recalled.  Nonetheless, we parked our camper along the edge of the lake, which was still white and sandy, and we enjoyed 3 nights of fresh lakeside air, watching animals and listening to the gentle waves roll onto the beach.  For me, this was a huge relief, as I had been working for 2.5 months non-stop and had a lot of stress to let go of.  I slept A LOT – and like a little baby, which was a relief, as sleep has not come easily since August.  I read “Harry Potter” (yes, I’m re-reading them in order to take me to a magical land far-far away from my reality).  I cooked outside over our gas fire.  And Bruno and I talked, and laughed, and joked, and actually spent quality time together!  We walked along the beach, watched eagles sunning themselves along the shore, gigantic hornbills (with a horn-like sound) flying overhead, and the infamous vervet monkeys playing around the campsite.  Ahhhhhh, holidays….

The ferry was painless, but the overland distance to cover was greater than before.  We passed the Equator line along the way, and I turned West and waved to my brother, who’s sitting along the equator line literally half a world away!  Bruno and I opted to spend a night in the Mpanga Forest Reserve, 35km outside of Kampala, and leave the city traffic and chaos until the next day.  The forest looked really beautiful, and we saw a band of red-tailed monkeys in the trees, and even a black and white Columbus (for a brief moment – beautiful!), but the campsite was so basic and the toilet so dirty that I opted to do my business in the woods.  Long gone are the days of the clean, fancy campsites of Southern Africa…

Once again, Mpanga saddened us because it’s been cleared of its wood by local residents, and worse, the rangers hired to preserve the forest!  Ugandans seem very dependent on wood, and perhaps because they’ve always had so much of it, they don’t look at it as a precious resource to be preserved or harvested carefully.  I fear that if Bruno and I make our way here in another decade, Uganda might be as barren as nearby Sudan.

Kampala came too quickly, as did the start of the second half term.  I’m more into the swing of things now, but will likely not get away on another adventure until Christmas.  Bruno has begun working on the vehicle, fixing the roof and redoing the inside of the vehicle, which leaves us a bit stranded.  Expect to hear from me in the New Year, hopefully with more East African travels to share!