After my day of Rafting in Jinja Uganda, I rode the short distance (less than 100Km) from Jinja into
Kampala (Uganda's capital)… And I have to say that while the traffic congestion
in the city isn’t as bad as it is in Nairobi, its still pretty bad and I don’t recommend
driving here if you can help it. It took a bit of driving around and a few
wrong turns and questioning some passers-by, but I eventually found a
backpackers that I was looking for, and after sitting about for an hour or so
thinking about what I should do next, I decided that Id be the classic Tourist
and I would cough up the big bucks to go see the mountain Gorillas… Its
definitely very expensive at $500 per person but that’s a lot cheaper than the
$750 charged for essentially the same thing over in Rwanda… So Im going to do
it in Uganda instead… Everyone Ive spoken to who has done it says its well
worth while so while I expect it will be a real tourist “circus”, Im gonna do
it anyway J
Well, that is if I can get a ticket!... Its just started high
season now and the usual story is that you have to book and pay months in
advance to do it… But as usual, Im just not that organized and Im hoping
because Im just a single person that there will be an opening sometime in the
next week or so… I could be pushing it this time tho!
So, I navigate my way over to the Wildlife Service HQ which is
fortunately very near-by, and I mosey on up to one of the service staff waiting
to assist all the tourists (by the way, you can see that this “”Gorilla tracking”
thing is big bucks for Uganda by how nice their HQ building is and how many
people they have set up to help the tourists… very professional J )… And
so I ask if they have any openings and Im rather surprised to find that they
do... Not sure if its just a single or they have lots, but it doesn’t matter,
they have an opening in four days time, so I say yes please J
Now the only problem is to pay for it because they don’t take
credit cards… Off to find a bank… but they wont give US cash on short notice at
smaller branches, so I end up using a combination of local currency and some of
my US$ reserves.
So now I have a meeting booked with our other nearest relatives …
I wonder how it will compare to the Chimp experience in Tanzania??
I head back to the backpackers and “think about what Ive done”,
and I decide that since my time is scarce im going to use the intervening four
days to go see Rwanda… Its actually a reasonable plan since the park where the
Gorillas are is way down in the South of Uganda and right next to the border
with Rwanda… It will take me one day to drive the 600Km or so down to the
border. Then Rwanda is a really small country (about 160Km N-S and the same
E-W), so three days should do a reasonable job of seeing what it has to offer.
Next morning I head off South and cross the Equator again (Ive
been crossing back and forth every other day while I was in Kenya doing short
visits to different areas. It’s a pretty long day but the roads are mostly very
good and I get to where Im going without problems. I have to say that the
country is indeed green but its not particularly mountainous until I get way
down in the South and then the road starts to get windy. At the end of the day
I was slowed up a bit by lots of road work (which made for lots of unpleasant
dusty riding) going on but I managed to find a place to stay with about 30min
of buffer time before the impending thunder-storm lets loose with the rain J
The next
day I headed across the border into Rwanda.
Id been
warned about it but you really do notice it as soon as you get into Rwanda… No
more dust and no more litter on the sides of the road. Its true, its amazingly
clean here!
I
discovered why a little later, but in short there are two main reasons why its
so clean…
1) The whole country has a ban on plastic bags (which
account for a huge percentage of visible litter in most places)
2) There is a law that for half a day (second last
Saturday of the month I think), once a month everyone is required to work for
the community rather than themselves and that often means “cleaning up”… and
once you make people have to pick up the mess on the street, people pretty
quickly figure out that they should stop making the mess in the first place J
Other
things to notice are the high quality roads which you suddenly have to drive on
the other side off (since it’s a former French colony and you drive on the
right whereas Uganda was British like Kenya and you drive on the left).I figure
the high quality of the roads is probably largely due to the foreign aid money
that has been being poured into infrastructure since the mid nineties
(post-Genocide).
Its also very mountainous and very densely populated
(about 12 million people at present!) so that everywhere you look the land is
being cultivated, and with the steep slopes that means terraces everywhere. And
any land that is not suitable for agriculture is still put to use by growing
Australian Eucalypts for timber… There is virtually no land in the country
other than in the national parks (which have been reduced in size to much less
than half their former size in the past 10 years or so!) that is in something
like its original habitat!... There is just so much human population pressure
here… A bit sad really L
It took me the morning to get through the
border and then ride the 100Km or so into Kigali (the capital) and while riding
along in the amazingly pretty countryside, you cant help but feel you are
somewhere in SE Asia rather than central Africa… the terracing has such a
strong effect J
Another
thing that you notice while riding is that you are virtually alone on the roads…
There is barely any other vehicular traffic at all… very odd?? But that only
lasts till you get to the city… but even then, compared to Kampala its hardly
congested at all…lots of people but almost no private cars!
It seems
that Kigali is rather like Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh in that there isn’t really
that much to do there for tourists other than visit the memorials and museums
devoted to “The Genocide”!... And like everyone else, Im going to do my moral
duty to go learn about what happened, pay my respects to “those that were lost”
and then spend some time thinking about it/us etc…
