Indians & Crocodiles, Easter Pigs & Lovely People

I can’t quite remember when I was last in Jinja and what’s been going on since but the main event of the past few weeks was getting a long weekend off for Easter & heading out to Murchison Falls National Park. I had drunkenly agreed to go along on a trip to Murchison Falls with random American dude, Lansing Lee. We bonded over the fact that we had weird names, anchor man, excitement at meeting Peter Griffin at Bujugali Falls and far too many beers. A few days after that night out I got a call from Lansing seeing if I was still up for the trip. Having no real recollection of who he was but remembering the night was pretty good and he seemed cool, I agreed to head out with him. My bank card expired on the 31^st March so I had to head up to Kamuli to withdraw cash for the last time. I left class promptly and headed up nervous of whether I’d get any cash out, thinking the machine might just swallow my card and then I’d be, well…fecked! I got in to Kamuli on the matatu and went straight to the ATM. There was a queue of about 20 people because it was pay day for teachers and they were all withdrawing cash for the Easter break. The queue got longer, nobody got any closer to the cash machine...the only ATM in town was broken – Technical Problem, please wait while we get this fixed. Everyone was pretty confident it would be fixed, just nobody knew when – 10 minutes or 5 hours, ‘You wait!!’. I ended up going to the internet café where I’m pretty good friends with one of the guys working there. He told me it’d work in a few hours but that the teachers would all be there queuing for hours so best wait til eight-ish. I did just that and just as I left the café a huuuuuge storm broke out! Bad weather – power cut..power cut – no ATM…no ATM – no Murchison falls & no money! I ran off with Edgar to get shelter where we met a crazy homeless, shirtless scruffy man with a gun. He wanted to start boxing with us so we swiftly left him behind and sheltered at the bank. Once the rain stopped power came back and the machine started working so all the teachers started to withdraw money. As the line got shorter I was about to get to the machine…second power cut…! “Don’t worry, you wait, you wait. It will come.” “Are you suuuurree it will come back because I have to get home tonight and it’s late, taxis won’t be around all night.” “Somehow yes. Oh but you are right, it is late, but maybe you will possibly get a taxi. But it is late mister, it is late”. I gambled and waited. Power came back and I got my turn at the machine. Stuck in my card, pressed in my pin and bingo I got my cash. I turned around to leave and then got the bright idea of trying my Fortis card for money. Popped the card in, and then the screen froze as I was pressing my pin in. 10 people waiting behind me and the bank was shut!! My card was in there with the pin pressed so I wasn’t going anywhere. To cut a loooooong story short, after several conversations which went absolutely nowhere some guy turned up who knew the manager. Luckily he wasn’t far away so he came to the bank. “Come back on Monday..” I couldn’t so I chatted for ages and convinced him to go inside for 2 minutes, walk about 3 metres and get my card back to me – pretty tough to do out here! A taxi came, I had my cash & Murchison was back on!!

I was going to leave in the morning on Thursday but I got a panicked phone call from Herbert while I was teaching “Eeeemmm Cathal, I need you to come to the sub-county now, there are visitors.” I was teaching and not really in the mood to dash off to the sub-count HQ so I waited til class ended before I made my way over. Nawanyago was buzzing, the kids were going crazy and I found out why. Dance 4 Life, The Netherlands office had come over for a visit. They had brought a class of school kids from Sitard wo fundraised a load of money last year and won a trip to see D4L & SPWs work in Uganda. There was a bus load full of Dutch teenagers, one of which was projectile vomiting on to a random Ugandan’s lawn. I bet she loves the white kids now ey! The kids went off and I was in a taxi with a bunch of Dutch people. One or two from the D4L office and others making a documentary for D4L publicity etc. t was pretty cool and apart from being a good 4 hours late and delaying the whole trip to Murchison by a while I really enjoyed it! I met a killer photographer. I think he’s pretty famous. He’d been taking photos all over the place for around 15 years now and has worked in some crazy projects. He took the South Africa pictures for the exhibition when Nelson Mandela visited The Netherlands. We all ate out, free dinner and free beer with Dutch people – I couldn’t refuse!! There was a power cut in the restaurant so dinner was delayed. I hadn’t eaten and was pretty starving but food was coming out. After a 2h wait the Dutch got their food…I still hadn’t got mine..another 2 hours later, when everybody had finished and was leaving, I finally got my food! Worth the wait!! They dropped me off at a petrol station and I headed off to Kampala to meet Lansing ready for the Murchison trip.

We set off in the morning. It’s a fair drive from Kampala but we had a cool crew of people in the car. A Dutch couple from Amsterdam who were working in an orphanage in Torroro in the East, Lansing (who turned out to be just as awesome as he was at bujugali), Rupter Rana (an Indian LEGEND!!) and a couple of Americans who live in Cairo (the girl was half Egyptian) and study there. The American guy was from Alaska. We chatted loads and had a great trip up and then I realized i'd forgotten my socks and a hat so I grabbed a few pairs quickly & bought killer hat which makes you feel like bill&ben the flowerpot men, good times!

Murchison was aamaaaaaaaazing!!I went with Red Chili on a standard tour - see the falls, game drive, boat ride etc..We saw elephants, antelope, Uganda Kob, warthogs, crocs, hippos, hippo being eaten by a croc, giraffes, jacksons hartbeest, baboons, a lioness...sooo much cool stuff. I though it would be a little touristy and feel very fake, a little like visiting a zoo again or something but it was amazing. It's incredible to drive along a path and out of nowhere a huuuuge elephant bull just walks out from the bush. You really do feel like you're visiting animal territory. The hippos sometimes even wander up to the campsite at night, warthogs will come into your tent and eat food if you're not careful, and while chatting up late an african wild cat just strutted straight through the camp. It's pretty incredible to think that given any reason to, any of these animals could kill you. It was awesome though!! We had a great crew. Within about 30 seconds of crossing the Nile to where the game drive starts Rupter left the van for a pee. On his way back the baboon cut him off from getting back to the van. Instead of slowly making his way back to the van Rupter decided to go as close as he could to the angry baboon, sit and mimic his every move whilst SCREAMING 'TAKE A PHOTO, TAKE A PHOTO' (in the best indian accent ever). It was hilarious!! Obviously the baboon wasnt too happy and chased Rupter for a while narrowly missing a swipe at his legs!! In our close encounter with the croc, Rupter got over excited when trying to get his camera and knocked his glasses into the river. We were about 1m from the croc, the glasses in between us and the croc. The crocodile was chilling out and the guide told us to be reaaaally quiet..so what does Rupter do?? He was persuaded the croc was dead because he wasnt moving much so he yelled 'It's dead, It's dead!!!' At which stage he tried to get his glasses...bad move!! The croc turned his head pretty casually and showed Rupter his set of teeth! He freaked hahaha, ran off going, 'It is ok, no problem crrrroc, no problems, I vill sacrifice dose glasses for mister crrroc!! ' Needless to say he provided us all with a lot of entertainment!!

There were a group of cool american students there who are studying in Mukono for a semester so we chilled out with them a little and in the morning we all headed up to the Falls. They're pretty powerful!! Not a full drop but broken into 2 or 3 smaller drops but it's really cool when you get up close and see how powerful the waterfall is! I wouldn't like to get stuck in there..it's making me realize how crazy the white water rafting will get!!!

The day before yesterday Anna, Megan and Emily came over to Nawanyago for the night. They'd had Easter out at Megan's placement where Emily killed a chicken and they had a big meal with cakes , chicken and loads of cool stuff! They came by for the night to play Scrabble and relax and then the next morning we visited Herbert's pigs accompanied by aaaallll the kids in the village which was really cool!! They loved having visitors!! After that we all went to Jinja and stayed over. It's been a reaaallly good weekend again and I think there might be many more to come. April is exam time for most and runs up to the end of the term for lots of the classes so Im not sure how busy it will be compared to last month but I'm having a great time and looking forward to working & travelling!! Trying to upload photos to Facebook but it always fails so I'll give it a last shot and then I've got to run off!! Take care!! xx