Longcut

So we arrived in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, with no agenda except to get to Kampala in Uganda for a short volunteering stint. I notice that a lot of the decisions we make don’t have a lot of logical backing, but anyway in this case we thought it would be ‘fun’ to overland up to Uganda instead of taking the two hour flight. So its taken 17 days and we are not actually there yet….

Total bus rides: 3, 27 hours
Total boat rides: 3, 16 hours
Total recovery days (from the various forms of transport):5
Tours/excursions: 3 days

One good thing about doing it this way is (no, don’t believe that hype about ‘getting to meet and know the locals’ – that only happens if you really live and work with them), that each consecutive place we’ve visited seems to be getting better and better. Maybe we are finally getting ourselves off the track beaten by hoardes of safari going muzungu (tourists) and its getting quieter.

We have just washed up on the shore of Lake Victoria at a place called Bukoba this morning after an overnight boat crossing from another port city called Mwanza. It was looking to be a sad ride because we did not manage to get any sleeping berths and were expecting to sit exhaustedly amongst piles of cargo for the night. But a crew officer came up to us and offered us his cabin (for a price) which we joyously accepted. We felt a bit guilty for the other people who had to sit all night but it didn’t last that long – cos we went to sleep. Willy says that this boat experience was very colonial (catch phrase for Africa) in that the rich foreigners were in first class and the poor locals were in third class and there was a divider between them. I thought it was a lot like Titanic. Were pretty impressed by the navigational system though, and we didn’t hit any rocks so that was good. Prayed pretty hard though. A ferry in 1996 that sank with 1000 people had stopped passenger ferry traffic between Tanzania and Uganda.