Arrival

Well, we made it to Mbarara after a rather long trip. Barbara got off work at around 7 am on Thursday, came home and showered, and then we were off to the airport. Everything went remarkably smoothly. Our flight to Seattle was uneventful, the only frustration being that we were sitting on the left side of the plane. A morning trip to Seattle from Portland is much nicer to sit on the right side due to the fact that all the large mountains (Hood, St. Helens, Rainier), go by on the right, and they’re quite majestic in the morning light. From Seattle we caught our 9 hour flight to Amsterdam. While waiting there for our flight, we ran into one of the ICU nurses from Providence who is also spending some time in Uganda. We didn’t realize we’d be on the same flight, so that was rather fun. The other funny thing that happened was while going through the security line at the gate in Amsterdam, I beeped while going through the metal detector, so the security guard took me aside and checked me for any hidden items. He spoke to me in English the whole time, then asked for my passport and upon seeing that it is a Dutch passport, immediately apologized embarrassingly and finished the process in Dutch.

And that was the most eventful thing that happened, which given the length of the trip, I thought was pretty nice. We landed in Entebbe after an 8 hour flight from Amsterdam and a driver from our hotel was there to pick us up. All our bags came in ok and the immigration and customs control didn’t give us any issues, either. The hotel, which is right on Lake Victoria was a bit strange. It struck us as rather expensive for Africa, and we found out that Bill Clinton had stayed there while President. Needless to say, we didn’t stay in his suite.

We had no trouble obeying the signs not to feed or play with monkies given the fact that there weren’t any around. However, there were a number of pretty neat birds and one of the hospital staff chased a 4 foot lizard of some sort off the grounds.

Our driver to Mbarara, James, was exceptionally punctual, and we loaded our bags for the 6 hour drive and headed out. Probably the first thing that was striking was how green everything was. A variety of palm trees were scattered in amongst the other flora. The reddish clay seems remarkably similar to the clay we encountered on our trip to Nigeria two years ago (yes, yes, I told you I’d try to avoid the Nigeria comparisons, but it’s really hard not to compare!). Shops line the main road where you can buy all sorts of things from motorcycle tires to cell phones to fresh produce from whatever is being grown by the people that own the land nearby.

Traffic was heavy, and the main road was a single lane almost the whole way. Passing is common, and due to the common presence of large vehicles on the road and blind turns, drivers use their turn signals to warn people not to pass them when traffic is coming. Uganda was a British colony, so people drive on the left side of the road. Our driver James would use his right turn signal to tell drivers not to pass when traffic was coming, and we got the impression that he used it quite frequently. It was pretty common to be passing someone and have traffic coming pretty much head on with little chance to get out of the way, but we always made it. We also felt that James would come very close to hitting things as he was going by, but he never did and we weren’t really worried about it after a while.

About halfway to Mbarara, we took a quick stop at the equator to take a picture and grab a drink. There’s a souvenir store there that’s part of an AIDS help network, with all the proceeds going to support the fight against AIDS. You can also pay to watch water swirl down a drain in opposite directions on opposite sides of the equator line. They even have a drain right on the equator where it all just flows in straight, but we didn’t really think it was worth the money to see water go down a hole, so we just took a picture.

The roads were filled with vehicles carrying all sorts of things. We saw a motorbike carrying a passenger who was transporting a large pane of glass. I’m not sure if it was a window or a windshield but he was holding it perpendicular to the wind, which struck me as rather un-aerodynamic, but I have a feeling that holding it sideways would’ve been physically rather difficult. There were also numerous trucks carrying thousands of bananas each. These trucks are about the size of a standard UPS truck, but open on top instead of in the back. They were filled with bananas, all still attached to their bunches (I estimate about 100 in a bunch) to the point where they were overflowing out of the top. We also saw trucks carrying various other things, including cattle and lumber and other produce.

At any rate, we arrived safely in Mbarara thanks to James, and were happy to feel the air get cooler as we traveled. Mbarara is a bit higher in elevation than Entebbe and Kampala, and the difference in temperature was quite apparent. Mbarara is cattle country, and the main rotunda as you enter the city has a statue of a longhorn right in the middle. These cattle are different from the Texas longhorn that Americans are familiar with, their horns sticking out more vertically than horizontally.

One of the things that really surprised us was the prevalence of speed bumps. All along our drive down from Entebbe, we’d slow down in the towns and trading centers due to a series of anywhere from 3 to 10 speed bumps, typically spaced a few hundred yards apart. Most of these come in the 2 to 4 inch variety that you can drive over without really slowing down much, but in Mbarara they have some that are a good 1-2 feet tall. These are really great at slowing down traffic. In addition, they’re really good at keeping us up at night. One of these just happens to be on the main road right outside our apartment. Traffic slows down some at night, but those that do come by don’t typically take the bump all that slowly. These also tend to be large trucks transporting fuel or goods from Rwanda up to Kampala, meaing they’re large, industrial trucks. Large, noise, clangy, banging trucks. Very restful.

The other sound that has been keeping up at night are dogs. We have yet to figure out if it’s just dogs or if it’s dogs with the occasional hyena response, but either way, it’s noisy. As for other animals in the city, there aren’t very many of interest. Among birds, it’s a bit more interesting. Storks are incredibly common, and I keep praying that none of them will be dropping any babies off at our apartment. They’re certainly large enough to do so. We also nearly had an ibis walk in yesterday afternoon, but he thought better of it.