Mbale, Ramogi, and Jinja

Hi all, hope everyone's doing fine. So I'm going to backtrack a little in time to my trip from Kampala to Mbale, before I did the Mt. Elgon climb. I can't remember if I mentioned this in an earlier post, but even if I did, it's worth going over again. The Kampala bus park/station/field of chaos is the craziest thing I've seen of its kind in Africa. It's one big fenced in area with one exit and one entry. Inside are several hundred minibuses in no discernible order of any kind. All the buses look the same, so you can ask someone where a bus to Mbale is and they'll point across a sea of buses that all look the same, and all you can do is try to not cry and hope to eventually get on the right one. Once you do find the right bus you'll be on it at least an hour just trying to get out. There are no lanes for buses to go on to get out, so it takes yelling, honking, and mostly enormous amounts of time waiting just to get out of the bus park. After this you have another hour of going through the horrible Kampala traffic to get out of the city before you can start moving at reasonable speed to your destination. Since all the drivers are nuts and once they have an open road they go 140km/hour, so very quickly you almost wish you were stuck in traffic going 1km/hour, but at least not going to die in a high speed collision.

Alright, so I'm going to Mbale and I see another mzungu on my minibus. The mzungu, Wes, turns out to be a peacecorp volunteer based just a few kilometers outside of Mbale, and I heard all sorts of interesting things about his health projects, Uganda, and just life as a volunteer in general. That night he was meeting some other volunteers in Mbale for someone's bday, and he invited me to join them all. His group of peacecorp folks were very nice, and I had a great time hanging out with them that night. They came in from all over the country and I might go visit some others around Kampala in a few days.

After the Mt. Elgon hike I pretty much passed out, but the next day I went an hour north of Mbale to Sipi falls, which I had heard amazing things about for several weeks now. One person even told me they thought it was the prettiest place in Uganda. Well it ain't. It's a very pretty falls, but I had just done a three day hike with some of the most amazing scenery I had ever seen. So I was not overly impressed, and I've seen some pretty amazing waterfalls in my life, including on this trip, so while it's a nice place, it's quite overhyped.

Still, there was a nice place to get pancakes overlooking the falls so I spent half a day reading, eating, and resting my sore body from the hike. The other reason I went over there was because this was the exit point for Nico, the guy I met halfway through the hike. We planned to meet there to figure out rafting on the nile a few days later. Met up with him and we set up the rafting for yesterday.

Before the rafting I made a quick visit to a small village called Ramogi. A group from the synagogue I grew up in Portland had volunteered in this village several months ago building a school building for the village. The town is just outside of Tororo, very close to the Kenyan border, and about an hour from Mbale. I went to the office of the group that organized the project in Tororo and introduced myself. The director was very happy to see me, and immediately had two of his workers take me out to the site in their truck. I saw the building they worked on, and the village in general, but most of the people were outside the village at a local soccer/football match. Still, there were a group of schoolgirls that came up to me almost right away and asked to sing for me. So I got a very nice mini-concert from the very nice group of kids, and every person I met in the village was very kind. The area is poor, and its drier than the west of the country and the area immediately surrounding Mt. Elgon. Still, they have some decent agriculture going on and they have a plan to have tourists visit the area and profit a little from that. You can see Mt. Elgon in the distance and its a pretty area in general. So I had a quick visit, but it was nice to see the site, and afterwards I headed to west for the rafting trip the following day.

The rafting takes place on the Victoria Nile, just north of Jinja, one of Uganda's larger cities. There are a few dams on the outskirts of the city that provide most of the electricity for the country. They're building another, which will flood most of the rapids I went on yesterday, so that'll be a shame. The rafting is considered to be some of the best in the world with four class five rapids, and the day was a blast. We flipped our raft a few times, I jumped in a few others, and had a great time. We were a pretty small group, only five of us, but good folks. Nico, from Mt. Elgon, myself, two older volunteers from the UK, and an american who is working as a pilot for NGO workers in Goma, DRC.

Today I was considering heading back in the direction of Mbale to visit the Ugandan Jews. I don't know the entire story, but there is a group of several hundred Jews living just outside of Mbale. They're completely Ugandan, but some time ago adopted Judaism, and while they're not recognized by the rabbinate in Israel, they practice the religion. I was too tired to get on a bus again today, but maybe next Friday or Saturday I'll make it out there. So instead of going there I went fishing today on the nile. The rafting hostel has some fishing poles and I spent my morning doing that, and caught a grand total of zero fish. Still, it was a nice time. I think I'll go take a nap now, and tomorrow lazily make my way back to Kampala. Tengo algunas cosas to take care of on Monday, and than I don't know what I'll do. There's no lack of things to do in Uganda, but I just have to decide.

On Monday or maybe even Sunday evening I'll be posting pictures from Murchison Falls and Mt. Elgon(which are really good) and I'll have those links on the blog. Hope everyone is having a nice weekend, and I'll post again soon. I need to write about the boda-boda(motorcycle taxi) drivers, who provide me with a constant source of entertainment. Anyways, que les vaya bien. B