This weekend we took a much needed vacation after working for two straight weeks and through a weekend on our projects. We escaped to southwest Uganda to gorgeous Lake Bunyonyi up in the mountains outside Kabale. Bunyonyi means "the place of little birds" and did not disappoint; it's also known for it's cooler temperatures so we were excited to escape the heat of Kiboga for the weekend.
The trip there was pretty brutal: We worked Thursday morning in the hospital, bolted down some food, and caught a mutatu out of Kiboga by noon (after waiting only half an hour!). It was a billion degrees or so, with matching humidity, so as usual I kept my head stuck out the window like a dog the entire 2.5 hours.
We needed to take a big coach bus from Kampala to Kabale since the trip is supposed to take 6-7 hours, so we had to face the bus depot again. The first time we'd tried to take a bus to Kiboga we were hassled, lied to, and screwed out of quite a bit of money. The second time we'd attempted to take a bus we got trapped between two buses by a wall of yelling men who wouldn't let us leave without paying ridiculous amounts of money and buying tickets for a bus leaving in 3 hours. We had to actually fight our way through the men--Shalina knocked one over with her giant backpack and created just a big enough hole for me to wiggle through so we could run out of the bus park. So we were super looking forward to dealing with the bus park people again.
We were mobbed as usual and found the right bus with the "assistance" of a crowd of men. The conductor tried to charge an extra 25% to each of us (as a kickback to the gang of men following us around and "helping" the mzungus), but luckily I opened the crumpled tickets he handed us and saw the actual prices we were supposed to be charged, so Shalina just grabbed the extra money back out of his hand. We also managed to force him to tell us an accurate departure time, so we knew we had half an hour to get to the bathroom and back. One of the men who had been "helping" us actually helped us to a public toilet, and then made sure the bus waited for us until we got back. He was so surprisingly nice we tipped him (only 10% of the ticket price, but still a decent chunk of change), which we felt much better about doing since we gave it to him for helping us vs. being screwed by the conductor taking kickbacks.
So off we went on our journey! Except it was extremely long and painful! It took us an 1.5 horus to just get out of Kampala, and later in the trip we were pulled over by the police for an hour while our conductor was arrested. Good times!
At one point of the journey I was standing while we were stopped when the bus driver suddenly floored it so i was thrown down into my spiky metal arm rest. I hit my lower back right on my SI joint, and I'm pretty sure I damaged some ligaments back there. Spraining your SI joint makes every activity super painful--I'm still crazy sore--and I quickly developed a gnarly deep purple bruise right about where my pants sit on my hips. Ouch.
We arrived in Kabale, the big town in the area, around midnight. We had planned on arriving around 9 and taking a taxi up to our hotel on Lake Bunyonyi, but no such luck at that time of night. Our only choice was to ride boda bodas--motorcyles--up a dark, winding, rutted, dirt road in the freezing cold. We had really avoided riding bodas until that night due to the obvious dangers, but we agreed to pay two men a ridiculous price to haul us up to our hotel. We arrived safely, but MAN it was cold. I chose one of the bigger men there just so I could use him as a windshield, and after I almost flew off going over a big bump I was glued to him with both my arms and my legs. We made it to our hotel (which had stayed open late just for us) before 12:30, about 13hrs after we left our place in Kiboga.
So obviously we slept in the next morning, and then got to experience a new kind of hot shower--their hot water heater was a giant vat propped up over a wood fire that hotel staff lights up whenever guests want a shower. The shower room was in a shack, and the water was BOILING hot. At least we scalded all the road dirt off of us!
After we had a big breakfast we headed out to the local market that happens Fridays and Mondays in the local village. It was actually cold out!
Most of the farmers bring in their goods from around the lake via canoe, so it was fun to watch the canoes filled to the brim with fruits and veggies arriving.
We did one walk through and then stopped at a hotel on the shore further down for some real drip Ugandan coffee! So exciting! We meandered back through the market and got some fresh fruit that we ate back at our hotel (with an AMAZING pizza we ordered. It's great being a tourist sometimes).
We spent the afternoon canoeing lazily out on the lake. We didn't really aim to go anywhere so it was very relaxing and nice hanging out in the sun without melting in the heat. Plus we found three crested cranes--Uganda's mascot!--which are totally bizarre and awesome looking.
We ventured out to another hotel/resort for dinner, which ended up taking forever and making us sick. :(
The next morning we feasted at breakfast again and then went out with some new Canadian friends on a motorboat tour of the lake. Gorgeous!! And it's insane how steep all the hills are that local people live and farm on. We saw women and children toting huge loads up the hills on their heads--it made us tired just to watch them from afar.
There are lots of islands in this twisty, fingered lake that fills the valley between hills. This tiny island has a sordid history; it's named Punishment Island. Parents would take their daughters who became pregnant before they were married out to this island and abandon them to die. None of the locals used to know how to swim (it caused a lot of deaths in this big deep lake before lessons began to be taught) so the girls had no means to escape. The one chance for survival was if a poor man wanted a wife but couldn't afford to pay the dowry to get one--he would canoe past the island and pick up a woman if he saw one he wanted. Charming history, eh? Luckily this practice was banned, but not until 1962.
After the ride we decided to hike around the lake for a bit and visit different hotels, and ended up hiking quite a ways to visit a non-profit primary school and orphanage called Heart and check out the crafts they sold. By the time we hiked back we were sweaty and starving, so we put on our swim suits, and laid out by the dock. We had juice and pizza served to us down there (our hotel, like everything in Bunyonyi, is built up and down a steep incline). It was wonderful to swim and lay out like lizards all afternoon! We eventually showered and had dinner and ended up going to bed early.
The next morning we left with our new Canadian friends to catch the bus in Kabale, which came only an hour after it was supposed to arrive. This bus ride was the opposite of the slow torturous ride out to Kabale--this driver went INSANELY FAST over sketchy roads and around hairpin turns. For awhile the woman across the isle from us was pretty constantly puking into the scarf she'd pulled off her head (what a lovely Sunday morning!). After only 5hrs we got off the bus in Mpigi district to hang out at the equator!!
This trip to Uganda is the first time I’ve crossed into the Southern Hemisphere, so it was fun to commemorate the occasion with some goofy photos.
We were super excited to test out the Coriolis effect: would the water swirl opposite ways on different sides of the equator? One of the Canadians had done his research and said you needed to be 50km on either side of the equator for it to work... My dad thinks that it holds true for hurricanes, but not for toilets...
We ponied up a buck each and got to see a demonstration. Maybe we were tricked, but we have video proof of water swirling different ways on either side of the equator, and just draining straight down on the equator! While we skeptics still suspected there were magnets or some shenanigans involved, it was still really fun to watch flowers swirl around pools of water in opposite directions.
After doing some shopping in the craft stores and having lattes at a shop benefiting AIDS orphans we had to hitch a ride the 70km back to Kampala. We tried to wave down some mutatus, but they were all packed. Finally a minibus stopped for us and agreed to a reasonable price, so the four of us piled in for the hour and half ride back. My favorite quote of the day came from Shalina during this leg of the trip, when in exasperation she said, “Maren, the next time you go anywhere you need to just bring a man with you.” I do get a lot of attention here, especially from men who seem to quickly fall in love with me. It came in handy when I needed volunteers to help translate my project into Luganda, but in this instance it was from the conductor’s nephew who asked him if he could get on the bus too and go with me wherever I was going—it didn’t matter where he ended up, he just wanted to go with me. Awkward as per usual, and on a long day of travel Shalina no longer wanted to be my body guard.
We made it back to Kampala, made it to the taxi park, and caught a mutatu back to Kiboga, arriving home around 9pm. Including our stop at the equator it was a 12.5 hour trip—rough, especially considering Shalina had twisted her ankle pretty badly the day before and I had almost dislocated my knee cap (more great bruises, don’t worry) on top of my lower back injury, so we were a sad pair hobbling home at the end of the weekend.
It was still completely worth it though! Hanging out and relaxing by a lake in the mountains, and being slightly cold half the time, was very homey for both of us Northwest girls. A lovely weekend trip, and now just this last week left in Kiboga!
