hippos

I am having the sort of day in which you leave work at 7 pm, stop at two stores to find some Sweetarts (neither store had the chewy kind. harumph.), and then come home and put some rice on to cook, only to find 30 minutes later that you forgot to turn the heat on under the rice.

Genius.

...

I was reading this blog post just now about some national park somewhere, involving hippos. I am not so much an animal person. I like them and all, but I am not fascinated like some people are. (Tell that to the 7 rolls of film I took while on the Masai-Mara in Kenya in 2000, however.)

When I took a break from my frantic working in Rwanda and took this trip to Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda, I didn't really do the animals thing. I hired a guide, but I asked him to take me to the salt farm in the park instead. I was interested in the development side of things, not the animals. (Now that I think about it, this made it not really a break in the way that it should have been, since development work was exactly what I was doing every day. Oops. I did a lot of reading and sleeping, too.)

I also took a hippo tour. A hippo tour involves trawling about in a flat-bottomed boat in the shallows of the lake, looking at hippos, naturally. Hippos are weirdly awesome. They are lumbering and awkward and flat-headed, and they have this tendency to pop out of the water without looking up, which means that you need the flat bottom of the boat because they are liable to come up right underneath you with a thud. You (ok, I) just have to love an animal that is so clumsy that it will ram its head into boats. That's like me, in animal form.

There be hippos.

wandering loop around western Uganda

One weekend near the end of the two years I lived in Rwanda, I needed a break. I decided to take my break by driving to Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda. I didn't have a guidebook for Uganda, but some Canadian friends did, so I borrowed it and called the lodge at the park and made a reservation for two nights, and I set off across the border.

I am fairly certain that this was the first and so far only time I ever crossed a land border, with a vehicle, by myself. I've done it other times when I was by far the most knowledgeable person and I was the one responsible for the car, but I think that was the only time I've ever done it completely alone. I crossed the border without incident, drove up the tarmac road toward for a while, and then turned off onto a dirt road per the sketch map in the Lonely Planet.

The story I am about to tell is why I do not trust Lonely Planet maps.

After I drove up this wide, smooth dirt road for a while, I stopped to look at the guidebook and discovered that the overpowering smell of rotting bananas in my truck was due to a bag of, well, rotting bananas that were under the driver's seat. I had not put them there. I do not generally choose bananas as sustenance. They had been put there by someone else using my truck. Yuck. I threw them out on the side of the road.

I studied the guidebook for a while, trying to decide if I was to continue straight on the wide, smooth road, or turn off on the tiny, bumpy road that went off to the right. The guidebook showed no turns at all, all the way to the next big town, Ishaka.

I carried on. They were working on widening and improving the road, but soon I had passed all the construction equipment. The road got smaller and smaller. After a while, I was choosing my turns at each fork in the road based on the sun: I tried to go north, toward the park, rather than west, toward Congo, where there happened to be some fighting at the time. Periodically I stopped and asked someone. "Ishaka?" I asked, and they nodded and pointed ahead, so I kept going.

I might get stuck out here, I started to think, and wondered where I would spend the night, until I remembered that I was in Uganda and I could probably stop anywhere and stay at someone's house and be perfectly safe. So that was my plan, if it got dark: stop, befriend people, sleep in their house, thank them with money and words. I felt as safe as I've ever felt in my life.

Eventually I got to a town, and someone at the petrol station spoke English and told me which way to go, and after a while longer I suddenly came to a corner and hit a normal sized road, and a few miles later I bumped up onto tarmac again. (If you would like to see the round-about road I took, here is the google map. That nice yellow line straight up the screen is the road I was supposed to take. That squiggly line that makes a big loop off to the left is the road I actually took, including the tiny gray line.)

I got to the park right around dark and barely made it through the gate before it closed. I had a lovely time at the park and then, on the way home, the road was much clearer and I popped out onto the wide, smooth road just exactly where that tiny, bumpy road had gone off to the right, despite there having been no turn whatsoever in the Lonely Planet map.

Moral of the story: Lonely Planet maps, do not trust.

(Note: the exact same thing happened to S. and me on Phu Quoc Island in Vietnam, except on a motorbike. Anecdote number two in support of my moral of the story.)

[10] things forgotten, part 2

Another thing I had nearly forgotten about the Rwanda years is the drive to Kampala. I drove that road five or six times in my two years (I also flew a couple of times). At the beginning, I always made the trip with my colleague D., but by the end I drove it alone or with a few friends.

The drive from Kigali to the border with Uganda is all tight curves through green mountains, like most driving in Rwanda. The road runs along a valley, and the hills rising in front are round and full. Uganda begins the same way - the southwestern corner of Uganda is all rugged deep-green mountains blending into the volcanoes it shares with Rwanda and Congo. The mountains ease into rolling pale green hills studded with cattle, and then flatten to dry plains covered in thorn trees, with long, flat, empty roads where you can open up and see how fast a Prado really will go. And then, before Masaka, the bulrushes creep closer and closer to the road as things get wet again near Lake Victoria.

Don't ask me about the Masaka - Kampala section of the road. It's all a blur at the end of a long day of driving. When I drove up with S. and E., in the left-hand drive Prado on the left-hand side of the road, having driven all day, I got snappy by the end. Driving that road is difficult, especially when your driver's seat is over by the curb and you can't see how far your bumper extends on the side where passing vehicles are cutting too close. In Rwanda, a drive to and from Kigali was not complete unless you thought you were going to die at least once. The drive to Kampala is far worse. The tar road in Uganda is crumbling at the edge, making it too narrow for cars to pass one another in some places, and you share it with enormous vehicles: buses and lorries overloaded with people and goods. These big vehicles stay in the middle of the road. They do not give way for anyone. The only thing you can do is keep your eyes on the edge of the road and stay as far off the edge as possible without losing control in the crumble. If you dare look at that huge intercountry bus, or that lorry piled high with sacks of grain, passing three inches from your inner bumper, you will lose your sh1t.

I mean that literally.

The towns in Southern Uganda are short rows of colorful shops set back a dusty span from the road. They would flash past, except that each town has huge speed bumps before and after, and a few in the center of town for good measure. Humps, they call them, and if you drive with a Kenyan friend or colleague, you will hear the joke that they call them "sleeping policemen" in Kenya. (You will possibly hear this joke multiple times, depending on the particular colleague.) The humps in Uganda are gargantuan. Not even the largest of lorries can take them at full speed. Little cars inch over them as if up and over a hill.

My colleague D. had particular stopping points in each major town: the hotel up on the hill in Kabale if you are already tired enough to need chai after two hours of driving plus the border crossing, the hotel next to the lake in Mbarara when you are desperate for lunch, the rest area at the turn in Masaka for some samosas midafternoon. He knew people at each of them, and every stop was prolonged while he greeted them. He would talk, and I would wander off to look at the view, or to watch the music videos on the tv, or, in Masaka, to carefully hold up the legs of my trousers while I used the porcelain squatty-potties.

On my own, I rebelled, and I stopped in a tiny town in the middle of hours of nothing to buy a Ugandan sim card (to get a Ugandan phone number) for my mobile. The man behind the counter in the tiny green (I think it was green) shop looked up at me, the unexpected white girl, in surprise.

"I could live here," I would think, every time I drove through the light green hills. "Maybe I could buy some land, and some cows, and run a little school. I want to move here, and own a house."

Several police officers flagged me down on an unpopulated stretch of road. "Where are you going alone?" the nearest one asked, from under his helmet. "And why?" They ignored the sheets of paper I had painstakingly procured from multiple offices on each side of the border, permission to take the Prado out of one country and into another. "Why must you go alone? A woman, driving alone? It's good that you drive, you a woman, but not that you go alone."

I smiled, and drove on.