Life with MK: Mini Bus Taxi, Rafting on the Nile, and Jinja

Sorry I haven’t posted in a few days, but those have been quite busy and I was tired and catching up with everyone. On Friday we went to work in the morning as usual and I worked on entering consent forms for the supplement study to the main study in Tororo which deals with the siblings of the children in the main study. It was basically exactly the same as what I had been working on before. I wanted to make sure they all got entered before I left for the weekend, so I worked through the lunch hour and had a Luna Bar while I worked. I didn’t think I would actually finish, but by some miracle (and a lot of really focused and quick work) I got them done just before the lunch hour ended at 2pm.

Right after I finished Joan and I went back to the guest house and got our things together before heading to the Taxi Park to get a mini bus taxi to Jinja. We were really lucky that a taxi headed for Jinja was about to leave and had two open spots so we didn’t have to wait around for one to fill up. The taxis are basically 15 passenger vans that they cram people into. The back two rows usually luck out and only have three people, but the front two rows are easily accessible and are usually crowded with more than comfortable number of passengers. We stopped many times along the way to unload and pick up more passengers along the route so the ride to Jinja took around an hour longer than I anticipated, but luckily we made it before dark since we left Tororo earlier than we had originally planned.

Once we got to Jinja there was some confusion as to where we would get dropped off, but thank goodness for the data I bought for my iPhone on my Ugandan sim, because I was able to use the Google Maps app to figure out where we were in relation to where we needed to be! We made it to the main house of Nalubale Rafting and went to check in only to find out that we were actually staying at Nile River Camp about six miles away. Thankfully just as we were going to get an expensive special taxi Rashmi and Sarah pulled up and their friends drove all four of us to the new place.

Nile River Camp was really nice and had amazing views! On Friday night we slept in a six person dorm room but since the dorms were all booked on Saturday night we moved to the bandas for Saturday night, which were great permanent tents. Anyways, the Kampala crew took a while to arrive but they eventually did and all seven of us were together again for the first time in two weeks. I had a great chicken sandwich, which was so nice, and we just hung out and chatted before going to bed.

Saturday morning we got up quite early and moved our backpacks to the bandas and meet the driver to take us back to Nalubale headquarters to begin our Nile rafting adventure! We had rolex for breakfast, which is a chapatti rolled with a scrambled egg omelet and it was really good. It was my first time trying to Ugandan rolex and I was quite happy to enjoy it. At the main headquarters we got our lifejackets and helmets and had a safety talk before getting on the bus to the put in spot.

When we got to the put in spot we got our paddles and walked down to the rafts. My feet are clearly not callused enough for the path because it hurt so badly! I had to go quite slow, but I eventually made it down the hill. We got in our rafting groups (there were four boats of people) and our raft was the seven of us plus a public health student from Case Western who was our same age (well younger than me, but older than most of our group). We ended up with a raft guide named Billy, who we later learned had only been rafting the river around a month, but we had a good time.

We started the trip with a raft safety talk, learned the commands, practiced pulling people back in, practiced flipping and unflipping the boat, etc. When all that was done we headed to the first rapid. This river really starts you out big because the first rapid of the day is a class 5 rapid! Some of our friends had never been rafting before and were nervous that most of us wanted to go as big as possible, but they ended up having a great time and were glad we did. On the first rapid you can try to go over a small waterfall, but we missed it and I was so bummed. The second rapid comes right after the first and you can either go left and hit a class 5 or go right and hit a class 3. We tried to go left, but missed it and went class 3 instead. I was again super bummed that we had missed the first two biggest parts of the river, but then I fell out of the boat on the class 3 somehow. It was fun. The Nile is very different from the American River in that it is quite deep and doesn’t have too many rocks so it is much safer to fall out and your boat cant really wrap around big boulders like it can in California. The water is also really warm and nice! Nothing but schisto to worry about (and we found a snail in our boat at one point; commence by own personal freak out).

The rest of the river was really fun and really beautiful. There were eight rapids in total with nothing less than a class 3 and only two or three were even class three. I love the big rapids! We never flipped, which was actually a little bit of a bummer, but it was still awesome. We even hit the dead center of a rapid called “Bad Place” and didn’t flip and all the guides thought it was nuts that we stayed upright. We also stopped for lunch and I was smart to tell them of my mayonnaise aversion in the morning so I had a delicious mayonnaise free wrap with pineapple and some kind of carrot cake-y thing. The trip down the river was amazing and I am so glad I did it. I got to swim a bunch in the Nile River, which seems surreal since we grew up only learning about it in history books and whatnot. Hopefully I don’t start getting schisto symptoms in 6-8 weeks. I make just take the curative dose of the meds when I get home just in case. We will see. I tried to be extra careful around the shore to not put my feet in etc.

When we finished rafting we got out and they had drinks for everyone. I had a delicious Fanta and wrung out my clothes so I didn’t feel like I was wearing a wet diaper instead of shorts. Somehow my thighs got sunburnt even though I wore a bunch of sunscreen, but I think my paddle rubbing on my thighs rubbed it off. Luckily I was wearing my shorts so it wasn’t all the way up my thigh! We rode back in an open-air truck and got to stand up on the bench and hold on if we wanted so it was an awesome ride back. The ride back took around an hour and we got brought back to the main office where we chilled for a bit until we got driven back to River Camp.

When we got back to River Camp we had one thing on our minds: SHOWER. We felt so gross from being damp all day so we rushed to get our shower stuff and got to the showers before anyone else. The shower felt amazing and was the first time in Uganda that I was kind of cold and really enjoyed just being in a hot shower. The shower and the water were amazing and I haven’t felt so clean in a while! After showering we ate dinner and then just chilled for a while because we were all so beat. I ended up getting the best night’s sleep I’ve had since leaving Ann Arbor and it was so wonderful!

This morning I woke up around 9am and got a fruit salad while overlooking part of the Nile. It was quite picturesque. When getting my things from the banda I even saw a ton of monkeys! They were so cute! We hung out at River Camp for a while and eventually took a special taxi (a taxi that isn’t a mini bus and is like our normal private cabs that take only you, but they are more expensive here than the mini buses and our only option since we can’t take the boda bodas which are motorcycle taxis) to Main Street in Jinja town. We shopped for some crafts and stuff for a while and I got some earrings and a bracelets, a hippo figurine thing (how could I not?!), a basket that I figure I’ll use as a fruit basket, and a small elephant painting on a piece of fabric. It all came to around $10 US, which I thought was pretty good. We also had lunch at an Indian restaurant because everyone else really loves Indian food. It’s not my favorite, but I had some really good naan.

After lunch we said goodbye again and Joan and I headed out to the Taxi Park to find a mini bus taxi back to Tororo. We got in one before the Taxi Park because we didn’t know where we were going exactly, but got out and eventually found the Taxi Park. We got into a mini-bus heading towards Tororo and Malaba and had to wait a while before it was full and we could leave. It was so hot while we were just sitting there, but I lived. I was sitting next to a mom and her two young kids (who were amazing by the way, not a peep) and some random guy who feel asleep on my shoulder twice by accident. I slept for the first 45 minutes or so and the ride back was much quicker since most passengers were going all the way to the Tororo and Malaba area and we didn’t have to stop to drop people of pick up people very much. It felt so nice to get back and now we are just having a relaxing night at the guest house.

Whew, that was a long post! Hope I didn’t forget anything. Enjoy!