Dark Salad

 I’m not going to kid you. This post is what’s known in The Business as a “filler”, so if you’re looking for high adventure and life changing insights - walk on by. 

Obviously the Holy Grail of this trip was the almighty gorilla trek, but of course I had to actually get there, which is not exactly as easy as you might think.

My trusty steed. 

 Travel by car in Africa requires a whole different mindset. Back home, a 200 km trip - to Montreal for example - is 2 hours tops. Here, it’s a day - and by that I mean a WHOLE day. It’s not that the highways are bad per se. It’s more that the traffic in & around cities would have to improve a thousand percent to be considered “chaotic” and that once you escape,  the route is littered with roadside “villages” (or as Luc Doucet would say,” Man this ain’t New Orleans, but some shitty little town”), all of which have the dreaded speed bumps at the entrance, exit and every 50 metres in between. Not to mention the fact that every lodge I’ve been to thus far can only be accessed by dirt roads that resemble abandoned logging trails. More on that in a later post.

So…Day One: Entebbe to Lake Mburo -  250 km, 6 hours. By the time I got there, I had time to unpack, have a brief rest, eat dinner and crash. Looks nice.

Next morning, on to Lake Bunyonyi (260 km, 7 hours). Partly because of roads like this:

And this isn’t even the worst part. 

Lake Bunyonyi itself is beautiful, but it’s irretrievably marred by the endless number of budget “lodges” jamming the shoreline - mine included. An eminently forgettable evening, which included a toilet that had to be both wrestled with and cajoled to flush, numerous power outages and a disagreement with a curtain rod, which I decisively lost.

‘Tis but a flesh wound. The hairline cut is the result of yet another stinging loss at the hands of a glass bathroom shelf which refused to yield when I bent down to rinse after brushing. All behind me now. 

I did get the chance to hike up the mountain to where The Gods dwell (it’s actually called “Arcadia Lodge”. You couldn’t make this shit up) and somehow  convinced a security guard to let me in so I could take some photos. Idiot!

The view from Fat Cat City.

The only interesting (and unfortunately depressing) discovery I made was on the drive in. I kept passing rock faces with people literally swarming over them, digging furiously. I asked Charity, a girl at the hotel, what they were actually digging for  - some exotic, highly valuable mineral I assumed.

“Oh no,” she said matter-of-factly. “It’s rock for building.  They dig out the rock, then they have to crush it into tiny pieces (by hand, mind you). For every big wheelbarrow they fill, they get 1000 shillings.”

More quick mental calculations - 30 cents. 

“Whoa!” I thought. “Not possible.”

Guess what? It is. AND they work 10-12 hours a day, seven days a week. And, as I later discovered, they’re everywhere.  Remember what I said about job opportunities? Fuck me. 

Fun times. 

Next up: Serendipity raises its anything-but-ugly head.