Stuck in a New Jersey

Desha, Nathan and I met up at the Old Taxi Park at 9a.m. on Friday morning, Desha having completed her ambitious to-do list and eight interviews for the week, Nate having barely fought off the typical nausea-fever Ugandan flu that seems to have hit everyone on the project but me, and myself having sent out enough deliverables for the et als to chew on for a few days. It turns out when you use a myriad methods of measurement in a fuzzy science like ours, you run into blatant inconsistencies; I had to spend the entire week returning to various villages in our sample to find some reconciliation in our data. By Friday morning, needless to say, the three of us were more than ready for our impromptu and well anticipated vacation. We exchanged good mornings and words of utter excitement and proceeded through the old taxi park, already swarming with matatu vans, matoke vendors and mobile candy shops,
in search of a taxi to Mbarara - the country's sixth largest city and gateway to Kampala from the West. There was really no set plan for this trip, just this vague notion that we wanted to hit Mbarara, Kabale and Kisoro to see some beautiful mountain and lake-filled landscapes. It was the basic mountain gorilla itinerary without the mountain gorillas for lack of time and money.

We were promptly guided toward the new taxi park, which was basically more of the old taxi park but a few blocks away, and we climbed into the only matatu we found heading Southwest with a hint of skepticism when we found it less than full. So much for meeting and leaving early. This matatu wasn't going anywhere for a while. Nate, Desha and I had plenty of excitement and catching up to keep us busy and entertained as hawkers of various kinds attempted to sell us newspapers, necklaces, candy, plates full of matoke and other starches, men's underwear, straw hats, and matching pink, orange and red striped tank tops which we almost bought.

You know there's a real communication breakdown when - after a couple hours of waiting in an increasingly hot and crowded matatu, you turn to the conductor to ask him at what time the taxi is leaving and he nods back at you with an emphatic yes. In any case, we departed Kampala around mid-day, after the first of many waiting-for-godot experiences on this trip that seem to have characterized so much of my summer here.

The ride to Mbarara was probably one of the more pleasant and uneventful legs of our weekend travel in retrospect, and after much debating and pros-and-cons-cost-and-benefit-academic-style weighing of whether or not to go straight to Mbarara or attempt to hit a hike at Lake Mburo National Park on the way, we decided that time
and weather were not on our side and that an Mbarara visit was probably the optimal choice.

We arrived in Mbarara by late afternoon and our welcome at the taxi park should have tipped us off. Hardly had we crawled out of the matatu that aggressive men ordered us around the taxi park to head out to Kasese, Fort Portal or Kabale. When we asserted instead that we had every intention of staying in Mbarara for the night, we received the typical Ugandan high-pitched "Eh!" of surprise. After a quick
and dusty walk through the main strip, the heat, the weight of our bags, and the heightened mzungu harassment in a town where white people are even more scarce than in the capital, we decided to settle for the first reasonably clean and affordable accomodations we found. Though we tried our best to stroll around town, we
quickly realized that Mbarara had the hustle and bustle of a burgeoning economic hub without the charm of a small town. And there were definitely too many boda bodas per capita.

We had all worked up an appetite, and began our search for food, which ended up being much more of a quest for accurate menus and for meals other than matoke than originally anticipated. We tried a couple different places where only about 1/5 of the menu items were available - and they were all under the starches section, and I
remembered our friend Jamies's insightful observation on our trip to Mbale that the menus here have no bearing on reality. Don't even think of ordering the fruit salad, the avocado milkshake, or even at times the English coffee. What they have here is matoke, beans, chicken, beef, goat and potatoes.

We finally settled for a restaurant near our hotel with an outdoor balcony, and we all grew excited at the idea of being on a balcony - with a view of the town yet removed just enough to avoid the mzungu harassment. And when we realized there was a liquor store with Spanish red wine downstairs and the fish on the menu was not a
lie, it seemed like the evening could turn out to be quite pleasant after all. We sat down on the balcony with our own little booth and a view of the Mbarara sunset.

The fish, of course, ended up being Tilapia head. And the cork of my sweet little Spanish wine made of elastic plastic, some kind of material that resisted defiantly and victoriously our hasty attempts at opening the bottle and broke our newly purchased corkscrew. We received an apologetic Ugandan doughnut for our
troubles, the stale version of my grandmother's sweet and soft North African pastry.

Fish head, broken corkscrew, and matoke galore aside, what salvaged Mbarara was the company I had. Storytelling and laughter ensued, and if it had not been for Nate and Desha, I most certainly would have been stuck in a New Jersey - an expression Nate picked up from a play he once read about those kinds of days when nothing seems to be going quite your way.

We left this industrial town without looking back early the next morning, only to find out that the days of comfortable matatu rides were now behind us. For some reason, once you hit West of Mbarara, taxi conductors accept no less than four passengers per 3-passenger row. And so it was that our taxi ride from Mbarara to Kabale was one of the most physically draining parts of our trip. And with one sick woman one passenger away from me, I decided it was a good time to shut my eyes and drift off into daydreams. The changing landscape helped and I could not keep my eyes shut too long to the beauty of Western Uganda, where waves of matoke trees gently cover the country's characteristic, soft, rolling hills.

We arrived in Kabale around mid-day and rediscovered charm in this small town. Our hostel was manned by Francis, one of the kindest and most helpful locals yet. He set us up with our rooms and all the information we needed to know to enjoy Lake Bunyoni, a beautiful lava damp lake encircling countless island hills, each with its own name and story. We hired three bodas to the Lake - bodas had actually become motorcycles now, a necessity for the Western dirt roads - and Nate and Desha laughed at the "Jesus is the way" bumper sticker boda that took me and sped ahead.

I don't know if it was Jesus or my boda driver who led the way, but after a few failed coordination attempts, the three of us found each other at the foot of the lake, hired a guide and a dugout canoe, and paddled our way through the islands. Jonan our guide was a bright young twenty-year old student with an orange lifevest and hopes of becoming a travel journalist. He seemed to think all Bazungus knew how to swim and was hard pressed to believe me when I assured him it was not the case. It reminded me of a vendor at the taxi park in Mbarara, who exclaimed "Hey Mzungu, when I see you I see the face of G-d" with either anger or humor - I could not quite detect the tone.

We reached Bushaga Island, stopped at a trinkets shop in which we indulged after we found out that the trinkets were made by local cooperatives and the proceeds went back to the local people, and we set off with our trinkets around our wrists and our heads for our exquisite hike back to the village. We passed countless huts, smiling farmers, warm grandmothers carrying their livelihoods in a clay pot on their heads, shrieking children. Desha and I were asked if we were Nathan's wives, told we were worth at least 12 or 13 cows' bride price, and advised that it was a lot of cows. We passed matoke and beehives and all sorts of colors and scents and sights to awaken our senses. We returned to town exhausted and hungry, and two coffees and three showers later, found ourselves debating road culture and the rule of law over wine, curry and ciappati. It was a stimulating conversation, fueled in part by the wine and in part by the sheer excitement of the trip. Uganda's landscapes have certainly spoiled me. And New Jersey seems worlds away.