Uganda, Rwanda

Hey Everyone.

Turns out I haven't blogged for the entire duration of the olympics. Clearly blogging and olympics watching eat into the tiny amount of spare time that I actually do have. Apologies for that. This post will cover our last few African adventures.

When we last reported in we were about to scurry off for the opening ceremony. We hit up the cafe next door, ordered a coke and sat down waiting for the action. Alas, there was none. Undeterred we harrassed the cafe staff to search all 392 channels of DSTV to find the ceremony. They couldn't and we were subsequenty furious. FURIOUS. We jumped on mototaxis and barrelled home to complain. Anyways, our mototaxi driver tells us it starts at 2pm. We find this odd as it is nearly 230pm according to us. Turns out nobody told us that Rwanda is an hour earlier than Uganda and we'd been living the wrong time for nearly 3 days. That of course explains why nobody else was at the restaurant for dinner the previous night.

Back at our hotel we discover the olympics on the TV in our room (like any decent 1 star hotel). We decided to forgo lunch and dinner and sat through all 4 hours of the opening ceremony. It was spectacular and all rather impressive. If only it were real...

The next day we headed out to the genocide memorial. This was donated to Rwanda after they misbehaved in the early 1990's by an apologetic European nation. It is thus a western style fancy museum. It is utterly fantastic and devastatingly sad. They chronicle the genocide and then compare and contrast it with other 20th century genocides in Cambodia, Yugo, Armenia and Germany. Let's just say that after it all we didn't really feel like speaking for a good hour or so and were generally peeved with the human condition.

To cheer ourselves up, we did as we are inclined to do, we watched olympics and dined out. For 3 straight days that is! We had chinese, indian, chez robert (pronounced shay roberrrrrrr) and watched more olympics than anyone. We even switched hotels to find one with more supersport channels. This cost us unnecessary extra which was recouped through missing meals in the pursuit of other peoples perfection.

Oh, as an aside, don't buy Hugo Boss Deep Blue aftershave from some guy on the street. No matter how well packaged it is, it is still toilet spray. I hope that $5 bucks made him happy. It was excellent toilet spray though. Country Garden flavour to be precise.

Next was the return trip from Kigali to Kampala. We were dreading this one as it was our last on african buses and we knew it was gonna be 9 hours plus. To mitigate our upcoming pain we decided to upgrade and book on the Jaguar Business Class coach. However, these people, they were not serious. Turns out the business class coach is broken and we have to go on the cramped regular coach. This didn't mean we got a refund for our higher priced ticket. It simply meant they could squeeze another 30 people onto the bus who were all paying the business class price. Grr. This bus ride was also amusing insofar that the first 3 hours are on the right hand side of the road and the last 6 hours are on the left. Admittedly the differences between the two sides of the roads are less apparent on that particular pot holed strip of tarmac. 9 gruelling hours later and we crack into Kampala.

To celebrate we eat fast and then run to the mall to catch Batman (we knew to adjust our watches this time). It was excellent despite not finishing til 1am. The next day was spent shopping and drinking coffee at the 1001 cups of coffee, coffee house. Excellent.

Next day - Rafting!!! We woke early and left Kampala for Jinja to hurtle down 35 km of the Nile on a 4.5 metre boat. Cool!! I was dressed in togs while Kate opted for a nice pair of my old boxer shorts. Hilarious. 2 hours later and we're sitting there practicing our stroke. After quickly learning how to unflip the boat we were off. First stop was a waterfall of grade 5 fury. It was awesome. Especially awesome was the bit where we suddenly flipped and got destroyed in the white water. He he. The rest of the day followed much the same pattern. Kate got progressively more terrified. It was great.

Sore and tired we got home late and slept in nice and good. After a couple of hours in the Emirates office sorting out our tickets we headed the 37km to Entebbe to stay the night in relative peace. We didn't count on a power cut and the squishiest bed in roll-together history...

Our last morning in Africa was spent in a wild life sanctuary. We visited injured chimps, eagles, rhino's, lions and shoebill storks. I photographed them all and plan to pass these photos off as genuine wilderness photos..

Our last act on the continent was to hire 2 dudes for 1500 shillings each ($1USD) to take us on the back of their scooters to the airport. We were one step up from the Kerrigans and happy as larry. 90kg of Jeff and 20kg of pack made the 50cc scooter struggle mightily though.

Next stop...Dubai.