DRIFTING DOWN THE NILE

IN REHANA'S WORDS

Thursday, 31 October

Got a brand-new alternator, got a tiger in our tank – Jules and I are queens of the road again!

I’m going to spare all of us the boring, irritating and maddening details of trying to get a car part quickly from SA to Kenya. Believe me, it’s not possible.

Last Saturday, after Garmin took us on a quick tour of what looked like Nairobi’s Alexandra township (we still drive in circles when we leave places, but we’re getting better) we finally left Nairobi.

To turn my head and see the rift valley dotted with blue lakes, not an unplastered strip on a wall in a cheap guesthouse, makes me feel free at last. It’s a perfect day for driving. We have the right sounds – Simphiwe Dana accompanies us out of Nairobi. A rainstorm chases us all the way to Lake Victoria and occasionally catches us.

Free at last doesn’t last long. Trucks trundle uphill at 20km/hour on the single-lane highway. Suicidal drivers try to overtake up to 10 cars tailing behind lumbering trucks. They frantically try to squeeze back into the lane they left when they realise there are cars speeding towards them.

When Google or Garmin say a 200km journey will take four hours it can take much much longer, depending on the roadworks. When will an accurate ETA will be possible in the countries we’ve visited – how long will these Chinese roads last, who will maintain them?

When you don’t travel for a while you forget the tendency of campsites to put photos of the view across the lawn, and not of their toilets and showers, on their websites. You forget how much you hate looking for a place to stay when it’s getting dark.

After what seemed like hours, we finally found Rida Haven Guesthouse in Kisumu, our last destination in Kenya. The house had no water, other than that it was very comfortable. They carried buckets to our room upstairs and promised that they had found a fundi to fix the burst pipe. We had water and a discount on our second day.

Our haven of comfort

We found the perfect restaurant, Haandi, just up the street. Jules had palak paneer for fourth day in a row - she started this trend at Saffron restaurant at Yaya mall in Nairobi. I had masala grilled tilapia - the sweetest fish, better than snoek - on day one and breyani (goat, of course) on Sunday.
The restaurant owner was from Watford, the same place as Jules! Her parents were born in Uganda and kicked out by Idi Amin. Her sister married a Ugandan and moved there. She met her brother-in-law's Kenyan cousin at the wedding, married him and moved to Kisumu.
Her parents were left childless in the UK, she and her sister were persuading them to move back home to Uganda.

Kisumu was a sweet little town, most of its commercial buildings erected by Indians and most businesses seemingly still in their control. A lot of the CBD's architecture is Indian. 
They were brought to Kenya by the British as indentured labour to build the railway line from Mombasa to Kisumu, a port on Lake Victoria. Those who survived - many were starved or worked to death and/or eaten by lions while they built the line - remained in Kenya and thousands joined them.
There is a Sikh temple and a Samaj centre on Mosque Road in Kisumu.

Why go to India when this is all over Africa?

Our guesthouse was in the Houghton part of town, many of the houses had high walls, razor wire and electric fences. Kisumu was hard hit by the election violence in 2007 and Indian businesses were horribly targeted by looters. I wonder when the walls went up so high.

Jules and I spent most of Sunday at Hippo Point next to the sewage works; there was no smell. It seemed a popular weekend spot. Cars were washed in Lake Victoria and a herd of cows came down to drink and loitered for a while, shitting everywhere.

Nice thing about having our car again is that we have everything we need, everywhere we go. Our chairs came out and we sat under a cashew tree’s umbrella branches. Jules read the Sunday paper, sharing aloud with me the latest Uhuru Kenyatta outrages. We had lunch. We sat under the tree till it got dark and it was time to head to Haandi for another feast.

Been a while since we were on a lake and this one's huge

The  restaurant owner wanted us to stay another day and so did George at our guesthouse. But we couldn’t. Our Ugandan visas were expiring in our passports.

Our border crossing was made long and tedious by a Ugandan customs official who wasn’t sure what he was doing. Like most of the borders we crossed, this one had deep potholes filled with water, long queues of trucks blocking entrances and exits, and dingy, damp offices with piles of official forms on the floor. Kenya had no new, discernible security measures at its second border we crossed since the Westgate siege.

Uganda looks exactly like I expected. The soil darkened from orange to ochre, the foliage grew thicker and the people’s skin darkened. Since we left Nairobi we’ve been on, slightly above or below the equator and we're feeling it in the thick air and seeing it in the towering white clouds.

This looks like a place where seed will grow to plant in a matter of days and you need to mow the lawn at least twice a week. Some plants are familiar, but all much bigger than what you see at home. There are spectacular varieties of palm – ones with bright green trunks and exotic fans.

Plants look familiar ... but better

The villages and towns we passed as we entered the country had mostly brick houses and very little litter – which can sometimes indicate that people are too poor to generate much plastic waste. Many villages were drenched in the caramelly smell of roasted coffee beans. Plantations of sugar cane grew next to rows of psychedelic green tea bushes. All that was missing was a herd of milk cows.

Our first stop, Jinja, was a small town with some charms. It’s on Lake Victoria at the source of the Nile, which heads from here to the Mediterranean. 
The Nile we saw in Ethiopia was the Blue Nile. Jinja’s is the Victoria Nile. It meets up in the north of Uganda with the Albert Nile. They merge at the border of Sudan to become the White Nile. Ethiopia’s Blue Nile and Uganda’s White Nile spill into each other at Khartoum before continuing north as the Nile. But Burundi claims that it is the sole source of the Nile.

We camped under a jacaranda tree that shed the last of its purple on us in the garden of a nearly-empty backpackers in Jinja. There was DSTV: we watched India beat Australia in a chase that ended in the last over and South Africa’s improbable victory over Pakistan when they collapsed even more spectacularly.

I will never be able to explain why but three days in a row we waited for the morning cloud to lift before setting off to town. It was a 30 minute walk but it felt equal to climbing Kilimanjaro because of the heat and the humidity.

Main Road, Jinja

We asked for directions to a spot where we could be alongside the water. Jules and I climbed onto a shared motorbike taxi (no helmets) and headed to the spot where the locals went.
What greeted us was a place – also next to the sewage works – from which ferry and cargo boats departed.
Not a harbour, just a grey beach lined with wood and iron shacks where vendors sold drinks, fried fish and chapattis.
There was no place to walk along the lake. No beach.

The waterfront at Jinja

After three days in town we moved to a campsite on the banks of the Nile River – a thick green and brown slug moving slowly between high banks of soil and trees.
There were two fish eagles circling above our camp, their cries a surprising soft trill considering their hooked beaks and talon toes.

The cicadas screamed into the heat all afternoon. Sunset brought the promising rumble of thunderstorms but they all evaporated without shedding a drop.

Jules and I were proper little homemakers. I put up a washing line and filled it, Jules made lunch and supper. 
Eden Rock Resort had a huge, lush garden that we have to ourselves – and a pool! We spent all day next to and in it. 

There was one of these pool tables at Eden Rock

We made friends with Lyn, and American woman battling bureaucracy to adopt a 5-year-old Ugandan boy Kisalu. Also made friends with Jenny, an Australian woman who spends six months a year in the tiny village of Bujigali to teach women literacy skills.
She says she has to teach them English that relates to their lives. We encouraged her to teach them, "it's your turn to collect wood, you lazy bastard".

Daniel, our guide on our Nile sunset cruise in a leaky boat with one outboard motor argued with Julia that the majority of Ugandans did not speak English, they spoke Engrish. I agreed with him. 
For once, we put our foot down when the ripoff came. We were offered a two-hour cruise and were back where we started in less than an hour. We refused to get off the boat, so they had to ask the next batch of mzungus they collected if they didn't mind company. 
We enjoyed our second sunset cruise with the English mom, dad and daughter and their newly acquired Welsh husband and son-in-law. 

Cruising the Nile. No belly dancers in this version

We left the banks of the Nile with huge second thoughts. Shouldn't we stay?   Jenny and Lyn were such good company; its been a while since we had adults to talk to and a child to play with.
But we'd been in Jinja and its surrounds for almost a week. Our visas expire in a month and there are places to go, things to see.

We stopped on the way to Kampala at the Mabira Forest for a two-hour walk. The trees towered and blocked off the sun in places; still it was on the hot side of warm. The highway into Kampala cut through the forest, the thrum of truck engines reverberating off the huge trees.
The vegetation was lush green and fecund, butterflies slow danced in the thick air.

If this is the size of the leaf ...

These are the roots, imagine the size of the tree

Kampala was a shock to the system. It took nearly an hour to drive the last 10km into town and then another hour to travel 700m past a market and a taxi rank. We put up our tent in the dark. No-one can tell us what to visit in the city, besides the malls.
We walked to the Gaddafi mosque this afternoon, were underwhelmed. We took a motorbike taxi to the National Theatre, once again three on a bike, no helmets. We found an Indian restaurant packed with locals and spent the afternoon there, reading the local papers.
We took a motorbike taxi back to the backpackers where we were camping in what felt like the yard at the back under a tree that rained down small black seed that got into everything.
We're leaving Kampala tomorrow. We might skirt it again when we head north. We're heading for the middle of Lake Victoria, to the Sesse Islands.

Kampala's motorbike taxis are called boda-boda

A view of Kampala's suburbs