The Rain Down in Africa

There was no snow, no turkey (not that we would eat one!), and no countdown on New Year's Eve.  Nonetheless, we had a great time over Christmas and New Years in Uganda.  We arrived in Uganda on Friday, December 17, and came back to Cairo on Wednesday, January 5.  It was a nice long vacation, filled with sometimes exciting, sometimes breathtaking, sometimes heartbreaking, and sometimes amusing moments.

I know that I've already blogged about gorilla tracking, but I just have to share pictures.  We were able to get so close to the gorillas, and they were so big and so calm.  They are absolutely amazing creatures. 

We were fortunate enough to meet some very kind Brits while gorialla tracking, who offered to let us ride in their private jeep back to the capital city.  This was more fortunate than you can understand if you haven't traveled by public transit in a developing country.  The bus ride to the village from which we gorilla tracked was 10 hours long, crowded, and not air-conditioned. It never even stopped for food.  Actually that's a bit of a lie, it did slow down to let us buy meat on a stick, bbq'd corn, and water through the window.  Anyway, on the way back we stopped to eat, to take pictures of zebras, and to stand on the equator.  Thank you Kitty, Ernest, and Bosco!

After a little sight-seeing in Kampala, Uganda's capital, and eating our first rolex's (street food consisting of an omelette rolled in a chapatti... yum!) we took a matatu (mini-bus taxi) to Jinja, a smaller and supposedly more laid back city .  The supposedly 1 hour ride east of Kampala took 3 hours due to traffic.  Being Christmas Eve, the city was packed with shoppers and chickens for sale on the street... seriously, cages upon cages of them!  We were able to find a Catholic church in Jinja to celebrate Christmas Eve Mass.  It felt like it was straight out of the movies.  Everyone was dressed in beautiful colourful clothing.  The music was jivy and people waved their arms in the air.  The priest was enthusiastic and got the parish to respond in unison.  We quite enjoyed it.

On Christmas Day we moved to Bujagali Falls, a much much quieter place, largely populated by travelers staying at camps and rafting or kayaking in the day.  We had a non-traditional but tasty Christmas dinner overlooking the water, then spent the evening making phone calls home and sending e-mails.       

We soon traveled to Sipi Falls, the town of three waterfalls.  We stayed in a tiny room whose balcony overlooked the falls.  It was much cheaper than fallsview rooms in Niagara!  We took a walking tour of the falls, also passing through a coffee plantation and lots of banana and matoke (plantain) trees.  Our guide was really informative, so we learned a lot about Uganda, how to prepare coffee beans, and how to tell apart a banana tree and a matoke tree.  This knowledge may come in handy one day when I'm on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire".

We headed back to Bujagali Falls to get on the water ourselves.  We opted for a day of class 5 white water rafting.  Class 5 is pretty high... and there were several class 5 rapids, not to mention lots of class 4 and 3, as well as some class 2 and 1, which felt like the waves from a motor boat when we're in our canoe at home. 

We were in a raft with only two other rafters, an Irishman and a Norwegian girl, plus our Ugandan guide.  We apparently lost the raft guide lottery.  As we approached the first big rapid, we were told that it can flip you over, but that it's very unlikely.  We flipped over and I found myself under the raft.  The second big rapid was called "50/50", because 50% of rafts flip while the other 50% make it through.  Again, we flipped.  This time I lost hold of the rope on the raft, and had to do some swimming then some holding on to a kayak to get back to the raft.  The third big rapid was a pretty easy one.  Guess what?!  Capsized again.  We named ourselves the "White Nile Swim Team" since we spent so much time in the water. 

We made it through the next rapid in the raft... woohoo!  I think we flipped twice more in the afternoon (or maybe 3 times?!), in addition to getting stuck on the wrong side of a small waterfall.  I make it sound bad, but we actually had a blast.  Obviously it's much warmer in Uganda than in Canada right now, so being the swim team was not a problem.  We watched the rafting video back at the restaurant that night after our bbq, and saw that our guide often jumped out of the raft before we even flipped.  Next time you are white water rafting in Uganda, make sure that you don't get Peter as your guide if you want to stay in the raft.

Our last big Ugandan event was to be a safari.  Although we'd seen zebras on the side of the road and monkeys outside our hotel rooms, we wanted to see much more of the East African wildlife.  We booked our safari through a hostel in Kampala and headed back the night before the safari, New Year's Eve.  Arriving around 9pm, we figured we'd have a quiet enough night in the lounge area with a few other travelers.  We met a couple of European girls who were volunteering as teachers in Uganda and chatted with them over beer.  They were friendly and seemed fairly tame.  That was until their friend arrived... a Ugandan guy dressed for a night out.  They talked us into heading to a club to celebrate the new year.  I'll admit that it didn't take much arm twisting.  We wound up at a salsa club, with very few (if any) people dancing salsa.  There were however a couple of muzungu (white) men dancing quite badly, with some Ugandan women leading them to believe that they were Fred Astaire.  When I asked whether it was common for Ugandan women to dance with foreigners, I was quite seriously and dryly told "yes, for prostitutes."  Ok... don't ask a question if you don't want to know the answer.  There was no official countdown at midnight, although our crowd of five had our own countdown.  Soon after we could see fireworks in the distance.  I'm told that this is really common... even in the US.  I don't have any recollection of ever seeing fireworks in Canada on New Year's Eve.  Is it just me?

We left for our safari on New Year's Day.  Of the 8 of us in the matatu, only one guy partied way too hard to celebrate the new year.  Luckily he got his head out the window on time every time.  The first day was mostly travel, plus a stop at Murchison Falls.  The falls were not overly tall, but there is a huge volume of water flowing.  There was so much mist that there were constantly rainbows showing up over the falls.  It was very pretty.  We spent that night playing cards with the other people who rode in the matatu with us.  You haven't really laughed playing "asshole" until you've heard a Korean guy tell a sweet Korean girl "just deal the cards asshole!"

Day 2 was the big safari day.  In the morning we did a game drive, in which we rode in a jeep with the top up through the national park.  We started by seeing elephants, then giraffes, hartebeests, antelopes, buffalos, lots of warthogs (they were even at our camp the night before), hippos, and monkeys.  Unfortunately we didn't see any lions.  It was really hard to take a picture of both us and the animals, since we were in a pretty small space.  That didn't stop me from trying!

In the afternoon we went for a boat ride to see more animals.  We saw more elephants, lots and lots of hippos (they are big!), more warthogs, some of the most beautiful birds I've ever seen, plus snake-headed birds (Billy wouldn't like these), and several crocodiles.  We really enjoyed seeing all the animals in their natural habitat.  That night we played more cards, and learned a new game called "shit head".  I'm not sure what happened to good old family games like go fish, crazy 8s, and euchre.

We headed back to Kampala the following day, stopping at a rhino sanctuary en route.  After a short drive and an even shorter walk, we were able to see a rhino mom and her son Obama (yes, that's really his name... supposedly because one of his parents in Kenyan and the other is American.)  The rhino sanctuary is a project to bring back rhinos to Uganda after they all disappeared due to poaching.  I was blown away by how big rhinos are.  The ones we saw were pretty lazy though.  The mom literally stood up once for about 10 seconds.  Otherwise they laid in the shade.  In their defence, it was a hot day.

I think that's all the big stuff.  Otherwise we got in some running, which was very funny to the Ugandan people.  We ate lots of Ugandan and Indian food.  We felt rain (often) for the first time in months.  We played a lot of cribbage, read, and met really interesting people from all over the world.  We had a fabulous time and were a little sad to leave.  That being said, we're going to have the most traditional Christmas we can next year!