Travelling

Kampala -Kabale -Kigale (Rwanda) -Kabale - Fort Portal - Mubende - Kampala

So, since I wrote my last blog a lot of stuff has happened.The school year finished towards the end of November , when the children sat their end of term exams. If they pass they move up to the next class, if not they stay behind to resit. There are some of the children who have already done their year several times. Justine and I had the treat of marking the exam papers. Most people did pretty well although there were some ridiculous answers given to some questions. Q. Where does the foetus develop? A. In the brain….hmm…

After around a week, of doing not much at project, we left for Kampala, where we stayed overnight at the backpackers. The next daywe caught the coach to Kabale, a town in the far South-West of Uganda, from where we would travel to Rwanda. I had a bit of an interesting journey, even before reaching the bus park. Because we left at 6am, we ended up taking our doxycycline (anti-malaria tablets) without food which sometimes makes you ill. So, me and Becky got the matatu into town and when we arrived Becky ended up throwing up outside the taxi park in the middle of hectic Kampala.At the same time I had just realised that I'd had my purse stolen so was frantically trying to work out what had happened to it. Great start tp the travels…After talking myself onto the bus - I'd lost my ticket - we sat there for an hour or so waiting for the bus to leave.For some reason, in their crazy minds, they decided that the scheduled departure time of the bus was obviously the right moment to choose to take the front windscreen out of the bus. An hour or so and a new windscreen later we finally set off…

The journey took 10 hours, and when we arrived we walked all the way through Kabale with our massive bags to the place we were staying - only 5,000Ush a night - about £1.50! The next day we travelled to the Rwandan border. This was only a short way which was lucky seeing as I was squashed in a taxi car with another 9 people! I was in the front seat along with the driver, Richard and a random Ugandan man in a pink puffy jacket who the driver had to reach over to change the gear. I can tell you that handbrakes don't make the comfiest seats ever!When we passed the "traffic police" half the passengers had to get out to be cycled past them, only to get back in the car as soon as we'd passed. Pretty obvious really that there happens to be loads of people cycling along that one stretch of road!

From the moment we entered into Rwanda things went pretty badly for us. We crossed the border easily enough and piled into a matatu. However, when our bus got halfway up a hill, we went over a speedbump and the window shattered sending broken glass flying all over the place. The bus then just about managed to make it into Kigali (the capital of Rwanda) at which point the engine failed and we ended up being pushed by a gang of men, including a drunken man and one so old he looked close to death.Pretty embarrassing really. The hunt for accommodation didn't really go any better than the bus trip. The first place we got to cost $10 a night for camping, which for us, being the cheapskates that we are, seemed a bit ridiculous, so we moved on. After a lot of difficulty we then managed to get a matatu to take us to another place mentioned in the guide book - Hotel Gloria. Clearly our attempts at speaking to the driver in French didn't go to well as we soon rocked up outside Hotel Gorilla - which we discovered to cost $95 a night - not a chance. Then, the next place we tried was in the book as $10 a night - yet when we arrived turned out to be $24, which we definitely couldn't afford. By this time it was getting dark and we didn't have much choice but to stay there, so we managed to bag an apartment for $13 each and squished us all in :)

The next day we had planned to leave Kigali and head to Lake Kivu in the West of the country, but instead we decided to just leave the country completely. Although you would have imagined this to be simple, in fact, it turned into a bit of a mission. We got into a taxi, which we thought we had bargained down to 15,000Rwandan Francs. However, after about 15 minutes the driver informed us it was actually going to be 50,000RwF - a lot of money!! But as apparantly the border was closing in an hour and there were no buses running - we didn't have much choice but to pay!!

After spending another night in Kabale, we finally left to Fort Portal, a small town in the West of Uganda. We opted to take the night bus, which turned out to be a bit of another ordeal. We thought the bus left at 12, but instead we ended up spending 2 hours sitting in it, before it finally left at 2. This wasn't a smooth process though. The engine kept cutting out and they had to bump start the bus by rocking it back and forth. Just perfect when you're trying to sleep. The journey got even better when we hit a mile long stretch of speed bumps, in the middle of nowhere. T.I.A

Fort Portal turned out to be a very nice town and we stayed in a place which called itself "Exotic Lodge." Although nice enough, the name was a little bit misleading. The toilet was literally the worst toilet I have ever seen, and I've seen some pretty grim toilets. It was basically just a toilet bowl sunk into a concrete slab and raised a few feet of the ground, right beside a big window. And one of the other volunteers had the lovely experience of slipping and nearly ending up in the toilet bowl.

Our last stop off on the way back to Kampala, was Mubende where Becky and Naomi live. Their project is very different to ours with electricity, a flushing toilet(!) and they live with a Ugandan family who cook them lots of nice food! So, it's a pretty good project to visit. We stayed there for a few days, did a marathon of hand washing, and then headed back to Kampala to get ready for Christmas....