Traveling to Uganda

Last month, my friend Bernard and I were working on a pedal-power seminar in Uganda, so we took the bus from Arusha. There are buses that go directly to Uganda, but we needed to run a couple of errands in Nairobi, so we stopped off there for a few hours. I went to a phone store and they were able to program a sim card so that I could have my old phone number (when my sim card was stolen, I lost lots of valuable contacts), and I just have to say that Safaricom really has their act together with that sort of thing*.

We had bought tickets and dropped off our bags with Kampala Coach for the 9:30 PM bus. It's nice, since the seats are comfortable, so it's easy to sleep on the way. Unfortunately, our bus didn't show up until 11 PM, so we were pretty tired by that point and fell asleep as soon as we were in our seats. We made it to the border at 9 AM and it was a pretty easy crossing. The bigger hassle was about 2 hours up the road at a checkpoint for the Ugandan Revenue Authority, where they held our bus and made sure that everyone had paid the necessary taxes on what they had brought into the country (one man had 3 of some kind of electronic device, so they figured he was some kind of smuggler). We were glad when they finally let us keep moving.

We admired the view of the Nile as we passed through Jinja and a fellow passenger told us all about the hydro-power station there. We arrived in Kampala at 3 PM (the bus was supposed to arrive at 10 AM) and we discovered that our bags never made it onto the bus. Always make sure that your bags make it onto the bus! After a lot of arguing with the staff, they said that they would make some phone calls and that it would be there the next morning. We went and found a small guest house nearby and grabbed a room and then found some supper before crashing.

Saturday morning, I went back to the Kampala Coach station to ask about the bags and they hadn't arrived. The man made some more phone calls and said that they would be there the next morning. I had to accept that, since I had to go to a meeting. The city was pretty crazy the whole day (and the night before) in preparation for the big Uganda-Kenya soccer match. If Uganda won, they would receive a spot in the 2012 Africa Cup of Nations. The way that people were blaring their vuvuzelas and running around town hollering and waving flags, you would be forgiven for assuming that they had already won. The match came out as a 0-0 draw, which meant that Uganda will have to try again for the next Africa Cup of Nations in two years. A friend explained that it was because they started their international players who hadn't practiced with the rest of the team, and that they had won the rest of their matches until the last two when those players came back.

I also met with a colleague who attended the Unreasonable Institute in Colorado in 2011 (I attended in 2010) and we talked a lot about his project in Uganda and it was great to sit down with him and talk. He also took me to a small restaurant and introduced me to the rolex, which is a Ugandan food consisting of a scrambled egg rolled up into a chapati (get it? rolled eggs / rolex) and eaten with ketchup and chili sauce. It is delicious.

On Sunday morning, we went back to the Kampala Coach station and waited for the bus to arrive. It was supposed to be there at 10, so we arrived at 9:45. It rained most of the morning, so I got soaked searching the luggage compartment of one of the buses before someone told me that the bus hadn't come from Nairobi. I managed to take my mind off of the situation by watching an episode of a South African soap opera that seemed pretty compelling. We were ready to give up hope on the bus at 2 PM, when it finally rolled up and we managed to grab our bags (well, after waiting another hour for them to process all of the parcels on the bus). We were so excited to have fresh clothes after about 84 hours without a change of clothes.

* Safaricom is owned by the same company as Vodacom, which is my phone provider in Tanzania. However, in spite of how wonderful I've found Safaricom, I'm equally frustrated by the service of Vodacom Tanzania.