Sunday 4 April – Trip to Uganda

On Tuesday I will go to Uganda for the rest of the week on a little holiday. I will take the bus to Kampala first and then go to Jinja, a town on the shore of Lake Victoria, where one can do all kinds of fun stuff. They have white water rafting (very popular), horseback riding, hiking, mountain climbing, bungee jumping and much more. I’m only going to be there for two days and will do the rafting and the horseback riding. Everyone who has done the rafting say they’ve never been so scared before and that the rapids are very powerful. I’m looking forward to an exhilarating experience! Kampala is also exciting. It’s a big city where you can find a lot of things you can’t find in Kigali. The prices are much lower, the restaurants are good, you can shop all kinds of things that you can’t find here, like nice clothes for instance. Also the nightlife and cultural supply is much more developed. In short it’s a nice change from Kigali that feels quite small when you’ve been here for a while.

The bus to Kampala takes 10 hours and it’s not a pleasant ride. The road serpentines through the mountains and the roads on the Ugandan side are quite bad. There is also the border-crossing which will take time when you are a whole busload of people buying visas and queuing up to get a stamp in the passport. It’s relatively expensive as well, 50 dollars for a visa. I wonder if it’s less expensive for me now that I have a Rwandan visa which makes me a resident… I will have to find that out. Anyway I don’t really look forward to the bus ride but I guess sometimes good things come to those who are willing to put up with bad things to get there, or something like that! I'm a little bit worried about the weather as well. We are now in the most intense part of the rainy season and the last week have been very wet. I do hope that it will be better next week. I guess it does not matter if it's raining when you're rafting and actually most things can be done despite the rain. There might be a risk of getting stuck somewhere if the roads get to wet and muddy though. I don't know, there's nothing to do but hope for the best.