Uganda, Part Mbili

And the saga continues....

That night, we spent the night on a tiny (like you could walk the circumference in about 15 minutes tiny) island in the middle of the Nile River. To get there, we took a little dugout canoe from the shore that was so old and rickety, I probably held my breath the whole way (which wasn’t that hard, since it was probably less than a five min trip). The island was super pretty and an awesome place to just relax after the adrenaline-high of rafting and soak in the gorgeous scenery. There was good food to eat, lots of hammocks and a volleyball net in the river to enjoy, and plenty of monkeys to watch when we needed entertainment. We spent most of the next day there before heading back to our original camp just in time to catch our sunset river cruise. Ok fine, I won’t sugar coat it- it was a booze cruise. And of course it was a blast- there was really good food (lots of appetizers, including several different kinds of bruschetta, and toooons of delicious barbequed meat), an open bar with good quality booze (don’t worry, we got our money’s worth), a friendly crew (the captain even let me drive the boat!) and of course beautiful sunset views of the river. The next morning we slept in and enjoyed one more good meal (English-style breakfast complete with cappuccino) overlooking the Nile before starting our long journey back to Tanzania.

This time there were five of us travelling over land/water (either people were more broke by the end of the trip, or our tales of how awesome a journey it was convinced them) and we got a bus back to Kampala. We couldn’t head back the same way we had come, because the Mwanza-Bukoba ferry only runs three times a week in each direction, and we want to sit around and wait for it for a couple days. So we went to the port to see what we could find and managed to convince the captain of a cargo ship to take us back to Mwanza directly. It wasn’t even that difficult- he was a nice guy (with one of those big, contagious laughs), and I’m always amazed how often people here are willing to help strangers on their journeys. We even managed to get exit stamps from Uganda from a tiny little immigration office right at the port. The ship was leaving in just a few hours, so we had just enough time to grab dinner and some supplies for our 22 hour sea voyage back to Tanzania. The captain gave us a room with bunk beds, and we made it a cozy little place where we slept, played cards, read aloud to each other, ate sandwiches from the supplies we’d bought, enjoyed homemade wine, took ridiculous photos, and just generally chilled out. We also wandered around the boat quite a bit, had a Titanic-style photo shoot on the bow, got a tour of the engine room from the ship’s second mate (I think that’s the term for the “vice-captain”…my nautical vocab is a bit rusty), and just marveled at the inability to see any hint of land in any direction for almost a full day and yet know that you’re not out on open ocean. When we pulled into the port at Mwanza, the captain told us we had to hide in our little cabin for a bit while he made sure that there weren’t any immigration officials around (insert bad Mexican joke here), but it was about 6pm so of course no one was working and we didn’t have any difficulties.

Upon arriving back in Tanzania, it felt a bit like coming home. Everything was familiar again and I’d actually kinda missed speaking Swahili. We had a nice dinner at a safi (literally means clean in Swahili, but also slang for really nice or fancy) restaurant overlooking Lake Victoria, got a room for the night, and were up early (like before dawn early- yuck) to catch a bus the next day. From Mwanza I headed to Morogoro where there was a new class of education volunteers in training. I planned and facilitated two PSDN sessions and six sessions on how to teach English in Tanzania to the new volunteers and stayed in Morogoro for about a week before finally heading home. I got back to my site the Monday that was officially the first day back to school (after the two week break), but it usually takes schools about a week to get going here anyways, so I didn’t even miss any teaching time. All in all, it was an amazing trip.


“I’ve got some friends, some that I hardly know, we’ve had some times – I wouldn’t trade for the world.”