So I think I have established that I really hate buses. The dust, the overbooking, the requirement that everyone purchase meat products on sticks through the open windows. My hopes for private transport were pretty high. Here is a sampling of a few typical conveyances:
“Special Hire” refers to a private sedan taxi whose driver is fittingly called a “special driver.” As in went to the “special” driving school for the lawless and slow-reflexed. Specials are usually not marked, so you have to either look for an early 90s era car with someone exiting and paying or take a chance by getting a ride with whatever random stranger pulls over and asks you if you are looking for a ride. I seem to remember that this is how johns troll for dates from Pretty Woman, so that makes the experience special in a whole ‘nother way.
“Boda-boda” are motorbikes with extra-long seats that are driven by lunatics. The advantage of bodas are that they can zip around the ever-present Kampala traffic jams and deliver you to your destination in a fraction of the time a special takes. The disadvantage is that they zip around the ever-present Kampala traffic jams by darting between cargo trucks, driving on the unpaved shoulders/medians, and taking speed bumps at high speeds. Locals ride bodas with a no-hands nonchalance borne of either long experience or fatalistic surrender to the inevitability of having an accident or being thrown from the back of the bike at some point. The women ride sidesaddle-style usually balancing purses, packages and/or children on their laps. Muzungus can be easily identified by not only their sunburns and North Face backpacks, but also my their habit of clinging to the seatback, driver or wheel cover for dear life before making a weak-kneed dismount more often than not involving an unpleasant skin-on-red-hot-exhaust-pipe flourish.
Shuttles are privately operated minibuses, usually slightly newer, bigger, slower, and better maintained than the matatu minibus taxicabs I avoid at all costs (think tiny, overcrowded, smelly versions of buses with drivers who are often somewhat intoxicated). My Impala shuttle from Nairobi to Arusha was not quite the air-conditioned luxury I had imagined during the 30-hour public bus episode, but I did manage to arrive at my destination intact, with all my luggage and not insulated by an inch of road dust. Here’s a little tip I picked up on the way…while my previous experience with African border crossings seemed to indicate that it was fastest to choose the line with the most whities and fewest locals (here’s lookin’ at you, unreconstructed South African immigration officials!), it is the opposite in East Africa. Muzungu tend to be baffled by the moneychangers, visa fees, half-mile hikes between exiting one country and entering another, and, most of all, by the need to just shove your way to the front on the line because there is no line. As a result, my local-laden shuttle made it to Arusha a full 30 minutes faster than the foreigner bus even given our frequent stops for meat skewers through the window. Plus ca change….
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Rafting Redux
Drinking Nile water was so fun I decided to do it again! I had a few days in Kampala before I was scheduled to head out to Tanzania again and it came down to either taking another long bus ride to Murchison Falls (the appeal of which was described to me as “great for people who like to see water falling off stuff”) or getting shuttled back to Jinja on the Adrift Rafting Company shuttle to hang out at the river camp and do nothing. Plus there was the added bonus of signing up for another day of rafting. Perfect for people who like to be on virtual spin cycle in water falling off stuff. I chose Jinja. Day One was pretty relaxed…talking with a Red Cross pilot on leave from her station in Chad, making the resident cat go crazy by teasing it with a guinea fowl feather, watching the bungee master fix the rope (note to self, do not attempt bungee), getting mysterious insect bites, and drinking Nile Special beers.
Nile Special is the beera franca of Uganda. Brewed right there in Jinja and presumably incorporating the river water someplace on the way to its 6% alcohol concentration, it advertises that one can enjoy it in the “new 500ml experience.” For those who have trouble with metric conversions, that is roughly 50% bigger than a standard can. It does not take many Niles to start to black out on that 500ml experience.
Day Two: not so relaxing. Went river rafting the next morning. My group, a cross section of typical Uganda budget travelers – backpackers from the US and UK, 20-something NGO workers and missionaries (referred to by the preceding groups variously as Godies, Thumpers, and Jesus People) – was guided by Tim, the America I met my first time on the river. Tim was now about 10x as experienced on the Nile which showed in several ways. We were treated to a lot more lifejackets-and-helmets-off stretches, made some of the tougher lines through the big rapids (including a 10-foot waterfall…backwards) and, best off all, he managed to sweet talk the safety boat rower into letting us tie on and get pulled through the flat places on the river in lieu of paddling. As a result, we had enough energy left over at the end of the trip to really go after the Nile Specials provided by the support crew at the take out point BBQ. The crew headed back on the truck to Jinja to spend another night at camp consisted of myself, Fleur (the press officer for the US Embassy…in Kabul), and Tim and Liz (a brother-sister pair of bungee-jumping, Kili-cllimbing young Brits…UK Tim was all of 18). The river guides heading back were the muzungus Tim (who after my Nile special #2 increasingly started to resemble the love child of an Ewok and Pauly Shore with his hoodie, teeth showing through facial scruff and somewhat nasal surfer dude laugh) and Tom (a St. Louis native living the life of a jet set rafting guide in Uganda and New Zealand) and the locals Tutu (the safety boat hero who was approximately .01% body fat) and Juma (head guide and referred to by Ewok as “the Mack Daddy of the Nile,” a claim he backed up on the dance floor after my 6th Nile Special).
Instructions for boarding the truck consisted of “don’t forget your shit on the raft and grab as many beers as you can carry.” As a result, by dinner I had consumed over 2 liters of beer. Fleur, whose State Department postings have included Kabul, Baghdad, Darfur, and a few others in the scary category, drank like beer was an endangered commodity (which I guess it is in some of those places) and was the unofficial pace car of the group. The Brits dropped out early, but after that things got a little more determined. All I remember of the night after Nile Special 9 (may not have been my last) and a few shots of improbably colored local liqueur called Zappi, is stumbling back to my cabin and sleeping the first hour in a camp chair outside my door until I could figure out how to disarm the padlock again. I may have also dropped/thrown my shirt off the balcony into the Nile. The entire experience was capped off by a wake up call from the Ugandan scout troop camped across the river singing and dancing in harmony at 6am the next day. I stumbled down to breakfast in time to hear Ewok give a semi-coherent pre-trip briefing to 25 Thumpers and thank my lucky collection of empties that I was not going to spend the day getting my innards agitated by class 5 whitewater.
Nile Special is the beera franca of Uganda. Brewed right there in Jinja and presumably incorporating the river water someplace on the way to its 6% alcohol concentration, it advertises that one can enjoy it in the “new 500ml experience.” For those who have trouble with metric conversions, that is roughly 50% bigger than a standard can. It does not take many Niles to start to black out on that 500ml experience.
Day Two: not so relaxing. Went river rafting the next morning. My group, a cross section of typical Uganda budget travelers – backpackers from the US and UK, 20-something NGO workers and missionaries (referred to by the preceding groups variously as Godies, Thumpers, and Jesus People) – was guided by Tim, the America I met my first time on the river. Tim was now about 10x as experienced on the Nile which showed in several ways. We were treated to a lot more lifejackets-and-helmets-off stretches, made some of the tougher lines through the big rapids (including a 10-foot waterfall…backwards) and, best off all, he managed to sweet talk the safety boat rower into letting us tie on and get pulled through the flat places on the river in lieu of paddling. As a result, we had enough energy left over at the end of the trip to really go after the Nile Specials provided by the support crew at the take out point BBQ. The crew headed back on the truck to Jinja to spend another night at camp consisted of myself, Fleur (the press officer for the US Embassy…in Kabul), and Tim and Liz (a brother-sister pair of bungee-jumping, Kili-cllimbing young Brits…UK Tim was all of 18). The river guides heading back were the muzungus Tim (who after my Nile special #2 increasingly started to resemble the love child of an Ewok and Pauly Shore with his hoodie, teeth showing through facial scruff and somewhat nasal surfer dude laugh) and Tom (a St. Louis native living the life of a jet set rafting guide in Uganda and New Zealand) and the locals Tutu (the safety boat hero who was approximately .01% body fat) and Juma (head guide and referred to by Ewok as “the Mack Daddy of the Nile,” a claim he backed up on the dance floor after my 6th Nile Special).
Instructions for boarding the truck consisted of “don’t forget your shit on the raft and grab as many beers as you can carry.” As a result, by dinner I had consumed over 2 liters of beer. Fleur, whose State Department postings have included Kabul, Baghdad, Darfur, and a few others in the scary category, drank like beer was an endangered commodity (which I guess it is in some of those places) and was the unofficial pace car of the group. The Brits dropped out early, but after that things got a little more determined. All I remember of the night after Nile Special 9 (may not have been my last) and a few shots of improbably colored local liqueur called Zappi, is stumbling back to my cabin and sleeping the first hour in a camp chair outside my door until I could figure out how to disarm the padlock again. I may have also dropped/thrown my shirt off the balcony into the Nile. The entire experience was capped off by a wake up call from the Ugandan scout troop camped across the river singing and dancing in harmony at 6am the next day. I stumbled down to breakfast in time to hear Ewok give a semi-coherent pre-trip briefing to 25 Thumpers and thank my lucky collection of empties that I was not going to spend the day getting my innards agitated by class 5 whitewater.
In praise of Schmanz
Schmantz are my name for those hideous shorts/pants with the zip off lower legs. They are universally unflattering and are usually only seen on foreigners kitted out for the “safari of a lifetime!!” Schmantz are for posers.
Well, as I mentioned in my earlier post, I am down to 2 pairs of pants. A seemingly sturdy pair of cords fell victim to an Aleppo (Syria) sidewalk mishap. A pair of brown cotton slacks gave up the ghost after a slippery Algeria staircase-induced seat seam tear, a bad patch job and the cumulative effect of many hours of being vibrated apart by buses of various nationalities. My jeans are hanging on but have begun to unravel in immodest places. The only thing left in my backpack that is anywhere close to intact are the schmantz I bought as an emergency backup in case I had to do any hiking. They are olive green ripstop nylon canvas and ugly as all get out, but they have so far survived a trip up and down (and up and down and up and down and up) a Ugandan hillside tracking gorillas, a clinging-for-dear-life boat ride on Lake Victoria and any number of double digit hour public transit rides. They are (relatively) odor resistant and dry quickly, so I have been wearing them for 5 days non-stop.
Schmantz makers of the world, I owe you an apology. Also apologies to anyone I will be encountering during the rest of my trip because I don’t know that those things are getting washed any time soon.
Well, as I mentioned in my earlier post, I am down to 2 pairs of pants. A seemingly sturdy pair of cords fell victim to an Aleppo (Syria) sidewalk mishap. A pair of brown cotton slacks gave up the ghost after a slippery Algeria staircase-induced seat seam tear, a bad patch job and the cumulative effect of many hours of being vibrated apart by buses of various nationalities. My jeans are hanging on but have begun to unravel in immodest places. The only thing left in my backpack that is anywhere close to intact are the schmantz I bought as an emergency backup in case I had to do any hiking. They are olive green ripstop nylon canvas and ugly as all get out, but they have so far survived a trip up and down (and up and down and up and down and up) a Ugandan hillside tracking gorillas, a clinging-for-dear-life boat ride on Lake Victoria and any number of double digit hour public transit rides. They are (relatively) odor resistant and dry quickly, so I have been wearing them for 5 days non-stop.
Schmantz makers of the world, I owe you an apology. Also apologies to anyone I will be encountering during the rest of my trip because I don’t know that those things are getting washed any time soon.
East African Public Transit Episode 2: I feel the need, the need for…SWEET BABY JESUS SLOW DOWN
I am apparently a glutton for punishment.
I arranged a “safari” for Uganda before I left the US. Safari tends to refer to anything in Africa involving wildlife and in this case it is a trip to a park that has some of the few hundred Mountain Gorillas that have managed to survive habitat loss, poaching, and various border wars in Central Africa. There are only about 25 permits a day issued for the gorilla tracking and it helps to have a safari operator handling the logistics. They also arranged for a trip to a nearby national park that is home to a population of lions that like to climb trees. Who wouldn’t want to spend a day looking at lions in trees? The agency prepared a package that included private 4x4 transport from Kampala for $100. Back in March this seemed like a needless extravagance meant for travel-shy old people. No thanks, guys, I’ll take the bus was my genius reply. It’s only 6 hours to Kabale, right?
Six hours is a hideously long time. That’s a flight from Boston to London. That’s two viewings of the director’s cut of Battlefield Earth. That’s a fun afternoon of waterboarding with Uncle Dick. Only in the context of 30-hour cross border journeys does it seem manageable. And since Dar-Kampala was already on the agenda, a little ride to Kabale seemed pretty easy. Any guesses about how this story ends?
Here’s one little nugget of wisdom I acquired the hard way: bus companies serving the hinterlands are generally crappier than ones serving big capital cities. My 5am bus (yes, 5 AM) left Kampala at 6:30, having spent 90 minutes trolling the city for additional passengers. We would occasionally stop at some intersection in Kampala and the driver would get out and smoke (please let that have been tobacco) with some buddies who would congregate in the headlights. Bus-filling is apparently a communal responsibility, since they took turns handing over the cigarettes and climbing into the cab to honk the horn and yell out an alarming long list of towns at which this bus would be calling. Kabale was towards the bottom of the list.
We finally got underway and I acquired another wisdom nugget: the front row is worse than the back. First, you are located close to (and in my case on top of) the engine box, which adds some unneeded heat to the environment. I lost my cheapie Nike watch in the Dead Sea in Jordan (watches being one of the only things that don’t float there) and bought a commando-looking Casio from a Filipina lady at Qatar duty free. It has a compass/barometer/altimeter function, so I have the dubious pleasure of being able to find out the temperature at any given moment. It is set to centigrade, so I only have a vague idea of what the numbers mean, but trust me 37=HOT. Second, being in the front affords you an unobstructed view of the driver’s activities. In this case it included texting, phone calls, meat skewer eating, ablutions of various sorts, and enthusiastic waving and hand gestures at passing drivers. While driving on roads that were half paved, half dirt. And the dirt sections did not tend to come in predictable and contiguous sections, but rather as large furrows and potholes every few yards.
This trip’s visual entertainment also included a long-ish stop after a road checkpoint when the driver and a large portion of the male population of passengers got out and gathered at the front grill of the bus looking quizzical. Which leads to the third reason rural bus companies are of dubious quality. Apparently buses are equipped with speed control devices intended to limit them to 70km per hour. That seems pretty road condition-appropriate to me. Our driver had a different idea and finally managed to disable the device with a hex wrench and some kicking to great cheers from the gathered passengers. We took off again and immediately I saw the giant speedometer, placed for the viewing pleasure of the front row, redline at 120km per hour at about the midpoint of the driver’s acceleration. Even with the new speed threshold established, we only managed to make to Kabale at 2pm. 6 hours my ass.
I also had the special joy of sharing my 2 seat row with 2 other people (one relatively unwashed), leading to some (passive) aggressive shoulder/elbow maneuvering.
The combination of the previous day’s river rafting (a pretty thorough workout of the quads and back as well as the arms) and today’s bus ride contortions made me feel about 10,000 years old. Good thing all I had to do this week is hike up and down a mountain a couple of times in search of primates. I booked an “upscale” hotel in Kabale ($23 US) that blessedly had a bathtub and hot water (my first in Uganda). All of you who were hoping for Dead Sea muscle soaking bath salts are out of luck unless you want to re-distill them from Kabale’s waste water supply.
I arranged a “safari” for Uganda before I left the US. Safari tends to refer to anything in Africa involving wildlife and in this case it is a trip to a park that has some of the few hundred Mountain Gorillas that have managed to survive habitat loss, poaching, and various border wars in Central Africa. There are only about 25 permits a day issued for the gorilla tracking and it helps to have a safari operator handling the logistics. They also arranged for a trip to a nearby national park that is home to a population of lions that like to climb trees. Who wouldn’t want to spend a day looking at lions in trees? The agency prepared a package that included private 4x4 transport from Kampala for $100. Back in March this seemed like a needless extravagance meant for travel-shy old people. No thanks, guys, I’ll take the bus was my genius reply. It’s only 6 hours to Kabale, right?
Six hours is a hideously long time. That’s a flight from Boston to London. That’s two viewings of the director’s cut of Battlefield Earth. That’s a fun afternoon of waterboarding with Uncle Dick. Only in the context of 30-hour cross border journeys does it seem manageable. And since Dar-Kampala was already on the agenda, a little ride to Kabale seemed pretty easy. Any guesses about how this story ends?
Here’s one little nugget of wisdom I acquired the hard way: bus companies serving the hinterlands are generally crappier than ones serving big capital cities. My 5am bus (yes, 5 AM) left Kampala at 6:30, having spent 90 minutes trolling the city for additional passengers. We would occasionally stop at some intersection in Kampala and the driver would get out and smoke (please let that have been tobacco) with some buddies who would congregate in the headlights. Bus-filling is apparently a communal responsibility, since they took turns handing over the cigarettes and climbing into the cab to honk the horn and yell out an alarming long list of towns at which this bus would be calling. Kabale was towards the bottom of the list.
We finally got underway and I acquired another wisdom nugget: the front row is worse than the back. First, you are located close to (and in my case on top of) the engine box, which adds some unneeded heat to the environment. I lost my cheapie Nike watch in the Dead Sea in Jordan (watches being one of the only things that don’t float there) and bought a commando-looking Casio from a Filipina lady at Qatar duty free. It has a compass/barometer/altimeter function, so I have the dubious pleasure of being able to find out the temperature at any given moment. It is set to centigrade, so I only have a vague idea of what the numbers mean, but trust me 37=HOT. Second, being in the front affords you an unobstructed view of the driver’s activities. In this case it included texting, phone calls, meat skewer eating, ablutions of various sorts, and enthusiastic waving and hand gestures at passing drivers. While driving on roads that were half paved, half dirt. And the dirt sections did not tend to come in predictable and contiguous sections, but rather as large furrows and potholes every few yards.
This trip’s visual entertainment also included a long-ish stop after a road checkpoint when the driver and a large portion of the male population of passengers got out and gathered at the front grill of the bus looking quizzical. Which leads to the third reason rural bus companies are of dubious quality. Apparently buses are equipped with speed control devices intended to limit them to 70km per hour. That seems pretty road condition-appropriate to me. Our driver had a different idea and finally managed to disable the device with a hex wrench and some kicking to great cheers from the gathered passengers. We took off again and immediately I saw the giant speedometer, placed for the viewing pleasure of the front row, redline at 120km per hour at about the midpoint of the driver’s acceleration. Even with the new speed threshold established, we only managed to make to Kabale at 2pm. 6 hours my ass.
I also had the special joy of sharing my 2 seat row with 2 other people (one relatively unwashed), leading to some (passive) aggressive shoulder/elbow maneuvering.
The combination of the previous day’s river rafting (a pretty thorough workout of the quads and back as well as the arms) and today’s bus ride contortions made me feel about 10,000 years old. Good thing all I had to do this week is hike up and down a mountain a couple of times in search of primates. I booked an “upscale” hotel in Kabale ($23 US) that blessedly had a bathtub and hot water (my first in Uganda). All of you who were hoping for Dead Sea muscle soaking bath salts are out of luck unless you want to re-distill them from Kabale’s waste water supply.
Monday, June 15, 2009
East African Public Transit Episode 1: Only an idiot would take a 30 hour bus ride
The 30-hour bus ride between Dar Es Salaam and Kampala was an odyssey. The bus left Dar in the wee hours (6:00am) from the craziest bus station ever. It was basically a huge parking lot arranged in a U around a central divider of plants and shotgun shacks. Dozens of giant coaches were parked at weird angles to each other and often blocking the flow of taxi, dala-dalas and motorbikes ferrying passengers into the areas. The standard developing world practice of substituting the horn for the brakes meant a lot of noise and swerving from vehicles of various sizes. The buses themselves didn’t tend to stay parked either. Before departing drivers tended to make a circuit or two of the U honking and yelling out the destination to try to pick up a last few passengers.
The only lighting came from headlights (used only sporadically) and the various stalls selling drinks, food and cell phone top up cards, most of which were painted in the colors of their corporate sponsors (red for Coca-cola, magenta for Zain telecom seemed to dominate) casting the whole place in a kind of hellish hue. And swarming everywhere were bus touts yelling out company names and destinations which both added to and served to navigate the general chaos since there were no signs or other indications of where to find anything. My taxi driver gave up on trying to find my bus and handed me off to a porter/tout who took off at high speeds through the crowd with my backpack. I had all expensive stuff and money in a daypack, but at this point, I would gladly trade my laptop and hard currency for my spare pair of pants (yes I am down to two pair), so I took off at high speeds after him. Apparently petty theft was not on the agenda, because I found him at my bus waiting with my bag. Despite the relatively obvious logic that I might want to stay within visual range of my possessions, I think he equated speed of bag delivery with size of tip because 1000 shillings was not particularly satisfactory. True, it’s only about 50 cents, but everyone else was tipping with coins that come in much smaller denominations, so I figured any paper money would cover the standard tourist inflation.
The bus was only about half filled, so I got a two seat row to myself. It was enough space to somewhat stretch out either my upper or lower body, so I spent the trip from Tanzania to Kenya in a serious of awkward contortions which had the added benefit of being an upper-body workout since the roads were mostly under construction and featured frequent diversions to temporary dirt tracks built in ditches alongside the tarmac. Approaching one of these diversions did not usually entail any reduction in speed from the driver, he would just suddenly jerk the wheel 45 degrees, plunging us down a steep incline to the track. He kept good control of the bus, but I ended up clinging for dear life to whatever I could to stay on the seat.
We crossed into Kenya after about 12 hours and the border was pretty straightforward since I already had my visa. I got stamped out of Tanzania at one shack and walked about 500 yards to another shack where I got stamped into Kenya. At the second shack I saw a bunch of tourists looking fresh and recently air-conditioned stepping out of a late model minibus with a hotel chain logo on the side. My “luxury” bus was a windows open sort of affair (both for cooling and ease of buying bottles of Fanta and skewers of roasted meats of unknown provenance at every roadside stop), which given the state of the roads meant that I was covered in dust of various African shades. The meat skewers were also relatively dusty, but apparently that did not deter most of my fellow passengers, who treated the trip as one big mobile barbecue feast. I checked the guidebook and apparently the private minibuses covered about half of the Dar-Nairobi route for only $25. Doh.
We made it into Nairobi at about 9pm, and my next bus left at 10:30, so I planned to stick close to the bus park mindful of Nairobi’s reputation for unchecked street crime. The one other young-ish tourist-ish girl on the bus asked me where I was headed and if I wanted to share a taxi. I told her Kampala by bus and she gave me a “you crazy, white girl” look (which in reality should be a “you crazy, very tan or just dusty girl” look). Apparently despite the convenient back-to-back scheduling of bus arrival and departure NO ONE does this route straight. Except me.
Included in my $60 bus ticket was a voucher for a meal at the bus park café, which advertised itself as “last chance for hot food that is SAFE.” Any restaurant that feels compelled to bill its safeness is probably anything but. Having already tempted fate with some roadside samosas someplace in northern Tanzania, I decided to give the free dinner a pass and gave my voucher to a bus station agent who helped me find my bus at 10pm and load my bag. He seemed shocked that I would turn down the offer of delicious mystery meat and chips but pocketed the voucher and told me to get on the bus sooner rather than later. I grabbed a box of oat biscuits from a vendor and got on. Good thing too, since the bus decided to leave at 10:10 to circle the city yelling out for other passengers. No takers, so I asked the conductor if I could have the whole 5-seat back row. He gave me the YC,WG look and motioned for me to go ahead. I unpacked my biscuits, water, a spare Snickers found at the bottom of my bag, and the sarong/bedsheet I had thought to grab out of my backpack and settled in for a night with both upper and lower body stretched out, planning to wake up at the Uganda border completely relaxed and rested. I had forgotten the laws of physics meant that the back of the bus would experience potholes and speed bumps with a greater degree of violence than the front. At least a dozen times during the ride, I felt my whole body get airborne. If I ever build Six Flags East Africa, Horizontal Bus Jolt will definitely be one of the rides. That said, I imagine the entire experience would have been much more unpleasant with a GI filled with bus station food.
The Uganda border was also easy, though this time accomplished in near total darkness and in a semi-conscious state. Not a problem for the passport stamping part, but considerably more challenging for the using the squat toilet part. The rest of the trip was relatively uneventful – unless you count epic traffic jams, potholes of legendary proportions and a few more rounds of window-side meat transactions.
I am flying back to Dar.
The only lighting came from headlights (used only sporadically) and the various stalls selling drinks, food and cell phone top up cards, most of which were painted in the colors of their corporate sponsors (red for Coca-cola, magenta for Zain telecom seemed to dominate) casting the whole place in a kind of hellish hue. And swarming everywhere were bus touts yelling out company names and destinations which both added to and served to navigate the general chaos since there were no signs or other indications of where to find anything. My taxi driver gave up on trying to find my bus and handed me off to a porter/tout who took off at high speeds through the crowd with my backpack. I had all expensive stuff and money in a daypack, but at this point, I would gladly trade my laptop and hard currency for my spare pair of pants (yes I am down to two pair), so I took off at high speeds after him. Apparently petty theft was not on the agenda, because I found him at my bus waiting with my bag. Despite the relatively obvious logic that I might want to stay within visual range of my possessions, I think he equated speed of bag delivery with size of tip because 1000 shillings was not particularly satisfactory. True, it’s only about 50 cents, but everyone else was tipping with coins that come in much smaller denominations, so I figured any paper money would cover the standard tourist inflation.
The bus was only about half filled, so I got a two seat row to myself. It was enough space to somewhat stretch out either my upper or lower body, so I spent the trip from Tanzania to Kenya in a serious of awkward contortions which had the added benefit of being an upper-body workout since the roads were mostly under construction and featured frequent diversions to temporary dirt tracks built in ditches alongside the tarmac. Approaching one of these diversions did not usually entail any reduction in speed from the driver, he would just suddenly jerk the wheel 45 degrees, plunging us down a steep incline to the track. He kept good control of the bus, but I ended up clinging for dear life to whatever I could to stay on the seat.
We crossed into Kenya after about 12 hours and the border was pretty straightforward since I already had my visa. I got stamped out of Tanzania at one shack and walked about 500 yards to another shack where I got stamped into Kenya. At the second shack I saw a bunch of tourists looking fresh and recently air-conditioned stepping out of a late model minibus with a hotel chain logo on the side. My “luxury” bus was a windows open sort of affair (both for cooling and ease of buying bottles of Fanta and skewers of roasted meats of unknown provenance at every roadside stop), which given the state of the roads meant that I was covered in dust of various African shades. The meat skewers were also relatively dusty, but apparently that did not deter most of my fellow passengers, who treated the trip as one big mobile barbecue feast. I checked the guidebook and apparently the private minibuses covered about half of the Dar-Nairobi route for only $25. Doh.
We made it into Nairobi at about 9pm, and my next bus left at 10:30, so I planned to stick close to the bus park mindful of Nairobi’s reputation for unchecked street crime. The one other young-ish tourist-ish girl on the bus asked me where I was headed and if I wanted to share a taxi. I told her Kampala by bus and she gave me a “you crazy, white girl” look (which in reality should be a “you crazy, very tan or just dusty girl” look). Apparently despite the convenient back-to-back scheduling of bus arrival and departure NO ONE does this route straight. Except me.
Included in my $60 bus ticket was a voucher for a meal at the bus park café, which advertised itself as “last chance for hot food that is SAFE.” Any restaurant that feels compelled to bill its safeness is probably anything but. Having already tempted fate with some roadside samosas someplace in northern Tanzania, I decided to give the free dinner a pass and gave my voucher to a bus station agent who helped me find my bus at 10pm and load my bag. He seemed shocked that I would turn down the offer of delicious mystery meat and chips but pocketed the voucher and told me to get on the bus sooner rather than later. I grabbed a box of oat biscuits from a vendor and got on. Good thing too, since the bus decided to leave at 10:10 to circle the city yelling out for other passengers. No takers, so I asked the conductor if I could have the whole 5-seat back row. He gave me the YC,WG look and motioned for me to go ahead. I unpacked my biscuits, water, a spare Snickers found at the bottom of my bag, and the sarong/bedsheet I had thought to grab out of my backpack and settled in for a night with both upper and lower body stretched out, planning to wake up at the Uganda border completely relaxed and rested. I had forgotten the laws of physics meant that the back of the bus would experience potholes and speed bumps with a greater degree of violence than the front. At least a dozen times during the ride, I felt my whole body get airborne. If I ever build Six Flags East Africa, Horizontal Bus Jolt will definitely be one of the rides. That said, I imagine the entire experience would have been much more unpleasant with a GI filled with bus station food.
The Uganda border was also easy, though this time accomplished in near total darkness and in a semi-conscious state. Not a problem for the passport stamping part, but considerably more challenging for the using the squat toilet part. The rest of the trip was relatively uneventful – unless you count epic traffic jams, potholes of legendary proportions and a few more rounds of window-side meat transactions.
I am flying back to Dar.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
The source of the Nile; see also source of my future intestinal distress
Survived a day of whitewater rafting on the Victoria Nile. Contrary to popular belief (or more rather the screenwriters of Sense and Sensibility), the source of the Nile is not Abyssinia, it is a little town called Jinja in Uganda.* Despite the best efforts of the hydroelectric industry here, this part of river is filled with CRAZY rapids. And despite my own best efforts, I am now filled with a significant volume of river water. The names of some of the rapids we covered should give some indication of how it got there. The Bad Place, Vengence and my personal favorite 50-50, referring, of course, to the odds that the entire boat will flip and everyone will finish out that particular rapid on their own, sans boat.
The rapids on the commercially rafted stretch are a mix of class 4, 5, and 6. Those numbers refer to the number of enhancing adverbs of a religious nature attached to the obligatory “S**T!!” that your terrified brain compels you to shout as you paddle that passage. Needless to say, the combination of frightened shouting and 6-foot waves results in some unplanned hydration.
Our guide, Tim, a jovial New Yorker who has spent the last five years as an itinerant “river person” in the US and Australia, was on his fourth whole day on the river. Not fourth consecutive, fourth total. And today was the first time he was actually doing the guiding as opposed to getting his feet wet (har har). As a result, he was concentrating extra hard on not flipping the raft (though some of the more experienced guides can flip it at will and on request from clients) and dealing with a massive case of sunburn brought on by taking anti-malarials that increase sun sensitivity.
If my intestines survive whatever parasites happen to be hanging out in the water, I might go back for another trip.
Lobster-pink Tim, The Bad Place and all.
*Quiet your itchy comment-typing fingers, I know there are two sources of the Nile and one is indeed in Ethiopia. Or at least I just found out from Wikipedia.
The rapids on the commercially rafted stretch are a mix of class 4, 5, and 6. Those numbers refer to the number of enhancing adverbs of a religious nature attached to the obligatory “S**T!!” that your terrified brain compels you to shout as you paddle that passage. Needless to say, the combination of frightened shouting and 6-foot waves results in some unplanned hydration.
Our guide, Tim, a jovial New Yorker who has spent the last five years as an itinerant “river person” in the US and Australia, was on his fourth whole day on the river. Not fourth consecutive, fourth total. And today was the first time he was actually doing the guiding as opposed to getting his feet wet (har har). As a result, he was concentrating extra hard on not flipping the raft (though some of the more experienced guides can flip it at will and on request from clients) and dealing with a massive case of sunburn brought on by taking anti-malarials that increase sun sensitivity.
If my intestines survive whatever parasites happen to be hanging out in the water, I might go back for another trip.
Lobster-pink Tim, The Bad Place and all.
*Quiet your itchy comment-typing fingers, I know there are two sources of the Nile and one is indeed in Ethiopia. Or at least I just found out from Wikipedia.
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Good Sign or Bad Sign: Transit Edition
Qatar Airways, which ambitiously bills itself as "the World's Five Star Airline", has an interesting flight path from Doha, Qatar to Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania.
Our captain announced the flight path over the PA. North from Doha to Bahrain, then turning west to fly over Riyahd and Sanaa then south over Addis and Mombassa to Dar. Not the most direct path through the air. I am no expert in aviation routes,but it seems like the planners are expending considerable effort to avoid Yemeni and Somali airspace.
I would guess that our geographic meander adds about 20% to the flying time. Not the biggest hardship fo me since I managed to snag an exit row with empty adjacent seats. Since I have no status with Qatar Airways and do not look like a typical Qatari frequent flyer, I wonder if it is just the luck of the seat lottery or my reservation somehow got flagged since QA's corporate twitter account is following my blog.
Our captain announced the flight path over the PA. North from Doha to Bahrain, then turning west to fly over Riyahd and Sanaa then south over Addis and Mombassa to Dar. Not the most direct path through the air. I am no expert in aviation routes,but it seems like the planners are expending considerable effort to avoid Yemeni and Somali airspace.
I would guess that our geographic meander adds about 20% to the flying time. Not the biggest hardship fo me since I managed to snag an exit row with empty adjacent seats. Since I have no status with Qatar Airways and do not look like a typical Qatari frequent flyer, I wonder if it is just the luck of the seat lottery or my reservation somehow got flagged since QA's corporate twitter account is following my blog.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
