#i drove 1.5 hours to work this morning and this was my only takeaway

[galaxysharks]

Adding to the list of Madlyn songs

Give your heart a break POV Ashlyn?

[jessiewre]

Day 13

Fri 17th Jan 2020

We were up at 4:30am - oh joy of joys - and ready to go at 5am, so we headed down to the reception.

There was NO sign of a boda boda or even a member of staff.

Ahh bloody hell, we could not be arsed with this...

Phil went up to the dining area and luckily found a security dude to ask for help, and so this guy went off to find the boss.

He came back after 10 mins to say

‘I couldn't find him’

WICKED MATE THANKS.

Then he went off again.

After 5 minutes a SINGLE motorcycle arrived and Bugs the boss appeared.

ONE BIKE though.

Surely we could not fit on one bike.

What am I saying, this is UGANDA. They could fit the whole cast of Cats on one bike.

So Bugs handed us our pre-made breakfast takeaway and we BOTH had to get on ONE Boda with ALL OUR BAGS. It was a like a circus act.

The light on the boda was beyond terrible and so the ride in the dark took 50 mins all the while we were both silently clinging on, wishing the journey would just be over with. We went super super slow at one point and the guy was trying to sort of ski along the dusty road - good times - then some random dude pulled alongside us and was like 

‘You need help?’

But he had a DODGY vibe, I don’t know why, just didn’t seem genuine - then when we said ‘No thank!’ our driver stayed COMPLETELY silent which made us even more uncomfortable, like he was scared of him?? Though we can’t be sure if the early morning weird situation was just getting to our heads and making us paranoid.  

Then we got into town FINALLY and recognized the petrol station as we passed it from when we’d arrived the other day and breathed a sigh of relief that we were nearly ready to get off the bike...

But then we got to a super dark part of town where the weird guy who had followed us was suddenly there, and we realised the only bus of the day to go directly to Kabale had already GONE.

Feeling uncomfortable, I thought quickly and immediately said to our driver ‘Please take us to the petrol station actually, we go now to petrol station YEAH’

And we sped off and went to the glorious haven of a Total petrol garage.

The staff there were really nice and there was also a gloriously clean non-smelly toilet WITH LOO ROLL. Pure luxury.

We sat at the station and talked to them there, trying to work out the best plan and one guy went and got us chairs. Was so nice. We even got an early morning call from Hillary to see if we had got the bus ok (we’d asked him the night before about travel advice) and he tried to help us with advice too.

Then a boda went off and found us a bus and bought it back to us to pick us up and all in all we only waited about half an hour before we went East to a random place called Rukingara. Didn’t need to go there but it would hopefully offer us up more options for onward travel.

On that journey Phil slept the WHOLE way while we went through so many villages & in each one you could see people queuing up with their big water containers at the village water tap, children and adults of all ages trying to get some water. In one village it clearly wasn’t working as there was a huge pile up of containers and people trying to fix it. Imagine having to do that.

We passed some young children trying to wrangle like 10 goats on leads, then a man sat behind me started to touch my HAIR (it wasn’t, like, terrible as he was super friendly and maybe had just never seen muzungu hair in real life before, and wanted to see what it felt like, and ok why am I making excuses for this) and also the driver stopped at one point and got out for a wee and so did Phil and the vehicle started to ROLL DOWN THE ROAD so I grabbed the wheel and started to try and steer it while he ran along and jumped in to push the brakes. He casually looked at me smiling and was like ‘Ah, hand brake don’t work!’.

The rest of the vans customeers were loving it though, they saw my cat-like reactions and thought it was impressive I think. Ok maybe they just thought it was funny that the muzungu with the weird hair slightly potentially panicked.

At Rukingara we found another crummy bus going directly to Kabale which was great, Wow we thought we were doing amazing, it was only 9:30am. 

The bus from Rukungari to Kabale should have been about 2 hours.

3 hours maximum.

So yeah the journey took 4.5 hours and it was soooooo annoying, Phil was ready for a meltdown. It took 30 mins to leave the actual bus station despite telling us we would leave in 5 minutes (not that we ever believe it when they say that, but still), then they kept stopping constantly, sometimes for aaaaggees, lots of shouting, it would empty of people and then fill up wiith like 50 people, at one point we were nearly the only ones on the bus so they drove around shouting KABALE! to try and get more customers and honestly it was just so boring. It’s the constant stopping and waiting without any idea of what is going on. 
The real problem was that we were not just letting it be what it is, these buses are always like this and we just need to let them do their thing. But the early morning stress had put us in a far from tolerant mood so it was definitely harder to be mindful in that moment. Plus Phil had a bit of the journey with his legs bent up towards him and I think they went numb for a short while so...we’ll allow the near meltdown on this occasion.

We FINALLY reached Kabale not a moment too soon and had arranged to meet Hillary as he was in town. It was only 1:30pm at this point but felt like 5pm.

We got off the bus and GUESS WHO WAS THERE STRAIGHT AWAY.

Yes of course, the annoying taxi guy (still do not know his name, deliberately forget it every time I hear it).

Like ok this was getting freaky now, why was he EVERYWHERE WE WENT.

We ushered him and everyone else away and went to Skyline restaurant to meet Hillary.

After 5 minutes, the taxi guy appeared wandering down the street looking around and spots me and walks over all like ‘Hi where are you going, how was Ishasha’.

For frigs sake like GO AWAY MATE.

So I said ‘We will call you if we need you OK thank you bye’.

Lunch buffet vegetarian style was beans, chips, rice, potatoes and veg, some of which were sour as fook, so basically I just ate carbs. Hillary arrived and we treated him to lunch on us with a coke and he seemed pleased. We wanted to thank him for all his help. The extremely camp waiter asked me to organise him a job in England which I politely explained might not really be possible but I told him to give me a call if he managed to sort it and get to England. Good luck to the guy.

Turned out we’d missed the nice bus direct to the Rwanda border by 15 minutes so we headed to the only other option we knew about - Bizmarken Buses.

We waited at this mosquito infested bus office for over 1 hour, then a total downpour of rain arrived and we felt grateful to be inside, but then after much pressing from Phil, the bus guy revealed the bus was STILL 1.5 hours away - so we decided to call it a day and find a hotel. It was a relief to make that decision, was nearly 4pm by this point and we didn’t want to arrived in a new place super late and in the dark and blah blah.

We got a boda boda to Hillary’s recommendation of Kwanzi hotel but they only had a dorm room and there were no mosquito nets or WiFi and obviously it wasn’t private and even though we were knackered and massively couldn’t be bothered to move, we just thought Naaaaahhhhh.

But we managed to get ourselves another couple of boda boda and went to Kings Hotel Kabale which was pretty tired looking, but actually fine. No WiFi, but an amazing shower weirdly - the best so far, what a surprise - and some beautiful hanger art where they had hung 1 hanger onto another hanger which was then hung onto another hanger, on a towel peg. Wow. Really. Wow.

We walked round to the bus station to try and find a new solution for our destination-Rwanda conundrum and met another bloke called Hillary (lets call him Hillary 2) who told us he could organise a shared car for us at 8am the next morning. It’s easy to be suspicious of everyone but we decided we liked him and thought frig it, better than the other morning option we’’d heard about - standing on the roadside at 6am hoping a big bus would pass, flagging it down and hoping it had seats. No thanks.

We got a boda up to a place called Miami restaurant and Phil’s first words were ‘This looks dung’, so we walked to Cafe Barista and saw muzungus sat outside - a very cliche sign that the food is going to be ok, or at least stomachable.

The first thing I spotted on the menu was Irish Balls - NO LIE. But we ended up ordering a pasta dish, a veg biryani and then Mexican Irish potato dish plus guacamole. I don’t know what we were thinking, but basically we had a carb party and it was fantastic.

Walked it off by going by foot to our lovely glorious hotel and watched dubbed Indian soap operas before heading to bed hoping that Hillary number 2 was not a con artist and would come good in the morning.