the Journal 5
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Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania

With Andy already at the Mission Hospital after ten hot frustrating days extracting the bus from the claws of the Kenyan Ports Authority in Mombassa, it was a relief to be on the move again. Granted, they had sprung an enormous extra charge on us; granted, the bus had been looted and the contents turned upside down; granted, there were a few extra scrapes along the chassis from careless docker driving, but at least it moved!

The rear paneling had been prized away from the stairwell, the bolts holding it to the bottom of the chassis were sheared off and the heavy duty padlock was missing, the steel appendages that held it to the door warped. The damage could only have been done realistically with heavy duty separating equipment or a large crow bar wielded by a strong docker. In essence, we arrived to a scene where the door was held closed by a plastic security tag and nothing else. The two safes inside had been opened by force; the laptop, PS2, GPS and camera equipment were gone, along with our music, DVDs and stereo. The bastards had even stolen money from the donation box! We felt livid, let down, shocked, but there was little we could do other than get a report from the port police, not easy and, of course, subject to further charges. Paper evidence left by the robbers suggested that they were Italian freight dockers, and the empty whisky, wine corks and ransacked items left us cursing all things Italian. All connected parties (Kenyan, British and Italian) deny any responsibility and it is highly unlikely we will be able to recover any of our costs.

Having complete our charity work in and submitting an appraisal of the work done by the Impact Foundation in Kenya we decided we needed a holiday. After a quick transport change in Nairobi, we set of for Uganda. We crossed the border on an overnight bus before dawn, and alighted in Jinja, exhausted.

We pitched our tent at ‘The Best Bar in Africa’, a somewhat exaggerated notion, what with the empty seats and expensive beer, but it served it’s purpose. Suffice it to say it was no Cat and Fiddle! Just half an hour after arriving we found ourselves beginning a game of Centurion. This game involves one shot of beer every minute for one hundred minutes, a task that doesn’t seem too daunting… in theory. The result, however, was group memory loss and bed by 9pm, clearly not the drinkers we thought we were!

The next morning we were up bright and early for a day of rafting on the largest commercially raftable rapids in the world, on the Nile. This doesn’t really do them justice! The walls of water that hit us and regularly flipped the raft seemed to tower over us like tidal waves, and caused Barry to whimper. ‘This can’t be f****g safe’! At the lunch stop, more than a few rafters were reduced to tears. One woman exclaimed ‘this is the worst thing that has happened to me in my entire life’, possibly an exaggerated comment, but she made her point. The final rapid of the day was the largest, affectionately known as ‘The Bad Place’. The point of this rapid was not to stay in the boat (not that Andy had really found this to be a problem for most of the day). As the boat neared ‘The Bad Place’ it became even more evident that we were going swimming and, sure enough, seconds later, we were all thrown into the water as the boat flipped over backwards. We were then treated to what seemed like an eternity of noise, tumbling and gasping for air. It was actually only about five seconds, but we bobbed up about 80m downstream with smiles on our faces and a knick bleeding on Jonny’s nose.

Deciding that discretion was the best part of valour, Andy chose to forgo a second day on the rapids, this time in a double kayak. Barry and Jonny’s kayaking experience amounted to paddling around cold flat rivers and lakes, and the prospect of grade 5 rapids was more than a little daunting considering our inability to do a single successful Eskimo roll. Fully expecting to swim for the majority of the day, we fared better that we ought to have, and were thoroughly battered but alive by the end of the day.

After a more muted celebration than the previous night we departed north for Masindi in search of chimpanzees. Jonny worked in a primate research station east of Masindi a few years before, and we revisited Budongo where we were much more likely to encounter chimps than in the tourist sites. In the research station was an American graduate student with a bad case of cabin fever having been alone, save the other trackers, for three months. A quick walk out to the neighbouring forest was all that was required to find a small group, the first visual signs of which were a large male blocking the path.

We rushed back to Kampala and enjoyed a dinner with the (oo)Mpalumpa family in a plush French restaurant before returning again to Nairobi by overnight bus. The Kenyan border official was a huge, bald smiling, mute man with thick spectacles and jutting out white teeth. Disregarding Jonny’s plea to try and squeeze the stamp in on a passport page that had already been used, he slammed down the stamp, and grinned widely until we left.

In the lap of luxury in some friend’s house in Nairobi (Ronny and Astra, you are stars!) we met up with the Impact East Africa director, who treated us to a fabulous tikka meal whilst explaining what Impact and he had planned for the future. Days passed quickly, with rugby viewing and eating out at Carnivore (a restaurant serving flame-grilled meat including crocodile, ostrich etc until you lower the white flag on your table!) setting the tone. The drive to the Tanzanian border was made in two stages as we paused to visit an ostrich farm where some other volunteers were located. The night degenerated into three alcoholic ‘Rings of Fire’, and ostrich burgers, before we drove towards our next country, the silhouetted Mount Kilimanjaro looming ever closer.

It didn’t take long for trouble to find us in Tanzania. A hefty road tax and expensive visas on the border left us broke and low on fuel. The excitement mounted however as we drew closer to our next goal, Kilimanjaro, empty flat roads providing a decent driving surface. A noticeable drop in the engine performance just before dusk, confirmed that our problem with the rear left brake was a recurrent one. We jacked up TAS on the roadside and went about trying to release the jammed mechanism after removing the wheels, watched by confused Masai warriors. One boy in particular stood there in mute curiosity: propped up by his spear, white paint indicating that he was soon to be circumcised. We were later informed that lucky young male Masai are not allowed to flinch under the knife, the whole party cancelled and the man forever shamed if he shows any sign of pain.

The next morning we passed the UN Rwandan Genocide War Crimes Tribunal in Arusha with two passengers in tow surprised by the affluence of the town and the number of ex-pats. Our guests worked at ‘Light In Africa’, a loosely organised dubiously funded orphan’s home run on a philosophy that was likely to be non-sustainable and therefore of limited use. It had been set up by a British woman in her sixties, who had had a divine vision, and was commanded to Africa. By totally random processes she ended up in Arusha having sold her husband’s house and car whilst he was at sea. We drove away 10000 Tanzanian Shillings richer, but a lot more critical of African orphanages.

In Marangu, at the foot of Kilimanjaro, we spent a day acclimatizing and trying to fix the brakes. Kindly, Seamus, the Marangu Hotel manager, agreed to kit us out for free and gave us a very competent group of 2 guides and 4 porters for the five-day jaunt up and down. There was a large amount of pre-limb drinking and another Ring of Fire with a Gap year group constructing toilets. Their responsible leader was slumped in a chair by 10pm and had to be carried out by her charges!

The first day of the climb was through rainforest, and was very easy going. The campsite offered stunning views over southern Kenya and Jonny’s knee – not built for mountain climbing following two operations – buckled but didn’t lock. Advice was to take things easy, so we walked for the next two days at an incredibly slow pace, rising from 1200m to 4700m, well above the cloud line, making the sunsets incredible. As we approached the last hut before the scree slope final ascent, Barry began to develop altitude sickness, mild but bothersome. There is little that compares with the frosted peaks of Mawenze and Uhuru in the early morning light in air which is leaner and clearer than anywhere we have seen. Our attempt for the peak began at 12.15am. Trudging up the scree in zigzags for four hours was dull, and Barry’s headache and nausea were growing. We passed every other climber, and felt good enough to continue all the way to the top. The temperature at the crater rim dropped. With every item of clothing on, and at around –13 degrees without wind-chill, we trudged around to the peak and arrived just before sunrise. Down in the crater crags of ice were dotted around, but other than these, it was surprisingly unremarkable. Down the Rongu slope however, a sheet of ice 100m thick sloped over the peak’s rim like icing, an astonishing array of blues and greens up close. In 20 years time climatologists suspect that all the snow and ice will disappear, talking some of the splendour away form one of Africa’s most famous landmarks.

We remained at the peak for as long as possible to catch the first rays hitting the ice with the sky a brilliant technicolour of greens, oranges, purples, blues and greys. We had taken pleasure in looking back down the scree slope sat the line of torches snaking up the ascent behind us, and now we enjoyed even more passing them on our way down. We took a short break at the highest hut, Kibo, after sliding down the scree slope – a lot of fun, but bad for your knees! A 10 hour walk brought us back down to the first hut in the rainforest at 1700m. We ascended the height of Ben Nevis, and then descended three times that height all on that day. A spirited farewell to our competent guides and porters was followed by a windy six hour drive towards Dar-Es-Salaam. We slept by the side of the road and then continued, desperately hoping we had sufficient diesel to reach the capital. On arrival, we left the bus at a hotel on the northern beaches and headed form Zanzibar by fast ferry.

The weather showed few signs of improving, and you could guarantee that it would be tipping it down first thing in the morning and then again in mid-afternoon. As we docked in Stone Town on Zanzibar the sun finally appeared, and remained long enough for us to get burnt on the pristine white beaches and turquoise Indian Ocean of the northern beach at Kendra. Truly we had arrived in paradise. As luck would have it, that night the beach hosted the monthly ‘Full Moon Party’, an alcohol (and drug) fueled mix of modern African and Western music until the early hours. Sensation Divers kindly took us Scuba diving two days later, revealing hundreds of tropical fish and at least 20 turtles gliding effortlessly through the clear waters.

Back in Stone Town we experienced the throngs of the nighttime quayside fish and seafood BBQs and negotiated the labyrinthine alleyways of exotic Omani and Eastern influenced architecture before getting caught in the mother of all rainstorms whilst searching for carved bargains.

Back on the Tanzanian mainland we began the arduous 2000km drive to Blantyre in Malawi, passing through the vast plains of southern Tanzania (pausing only to view elephants, buffaloes, giraffe, zebra and baboons) and the mountain passes marking the reentry into the Great African Rift Valley. Forcing the Tanzanian border guards to re-open the Songwe border post into Malawi, we began to contemplate our entry into Southern Africa, two thirds of our adventure behind us, TAS, our nine tonne baby, has got us this far, but the brake problem is grating and causing concern. Meanwhile, the HIV orphans of Open Arms Infant’s Home in Blantyre await our arrival.