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Uganda
Taking the minibus from Kigali in Rwanda I was joined by Korean missionaries singing Christian songs in Korean, not quite what you would expect. Then I was in Uganda, time is running a bit short now and it's a shame to be moving on so quickly through some places. But Uganda is wonderfull to travel by bus, past green tea plantations, green mountains, green, green, green, truelly one of the most beautifull places I've been. First stop at Kabale and Lake Bunyonyi at the cool altitude of 1800m. We canoed out through a surreal hobbit like landscape, across this dark green tranquil crater lake with perfect reflections of the many terraced landscape to Jasper's island resort, a basic campsite used to raise money for the local school.

Eastern Africa - part 3

Stevemonty
2005-09-23 18:58:38

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view of them swinging through branches, their intelligent faces and mother carrying her baby clinging on below her.

By coach on the way to Kampala the woman next to me spotted smoke rising up from underneath. She panicked and caused mass histeria on the coach by shouting fire and that it might explode, making everyone race to the only exit at the front in one big crush and a couple of people started kicking windows out. From the back I scrambled across the tops of all the seats and managed to jump over the people that were blocking the exit. I don't want to die just yet thank you! But it turned out to be just mass hysteria. Apparently diesel doesn't explode and their was only smoke, not fire. But sitting in the roadside cafe we had to laugh with the other passengers as the sight of one man lying under the vehicle trying to put the smoke out by shaking a coca-cola bottle at it!

Kampala is a really nice city set around seven hills and extremely friendly. I met Angus a friend from UK at the airport here as he'll be travelling the last 3 weeks with me. I met again Neil from Nottingham, his housemate has a great website about House Gymnastics that created a media blur within two weeks of launch and was featured on the national BBC news. It's quite mad, take a look at:
http://www.housegymnastics.com.
With Angus, Kamir from Sweden, Vivian & Beerien from Holland we had two insane adrenaline fuelled days white water rafting and river boarding at the source of the Nile near Jinja, camping right next to the grade 4 Bujagali falls. Including 'the bad place', at 9ft the biggest commercial rapid in the world and three other Grade 5 rapids, the highest grade you can commercially raft. Also several grade 3 and 4 that we still managed to flip over on.
With Gus and I at the front we descended down the rapid before seeing the first giant destructive wave straight above us. We hit the 'G spot' or 'Total Gunga' full on making the raft shoot up almost vertical. The three of us at the front fell out, were sucked under into the washing machine for several seconds before being shot up fighting for breath over the remaining 300m of rapids. By the end of the day adrenaline had been building up for 'the bad place'. We walked the raft past the dangerous grade 6 area then launched ourselves out into the swirling noisy chaos at the tail end of the waterfalls to hit 'the bad place'.
This was really scary, we shot down the rapid sideways on and ran into a wall of foaming water. At this point I expected the raft to flip but instead it road the wave back down until we were surfing it, white foam and noise all around me in the boat. The next thing I remember another wave crashed and we suddenly flipped the opposite way. I was sucked right down where the water is dark, span around upside down, completely out of control and then spat out the other side, an awesome experience.
The second day was even more extreme as Angus, Kamir and I went river boarding down the same route. Hitting rapids like this just on a small polystyrene board meant we were annialated everytime. Words like wasted and trashed came to mind amongst other four letter ones. In the evening beers were aplenty and chocolate spacecake was passed around.

We went onto Crow's nest camp at Sipi falls on the slopes of Mt Elgon at the Kenya border for a day walking around in the lush green gorge and visiting a series of three stunning waterfalls along a river between 70 and 90m tall each. I'm now in Nairobi, back where this trip started and only one short bit left before I return to Blighty.