the murchison adventure: day one, of buses and jet lag and, well, this is africa

In their blog, Dre and Mari talk about living in Delhi:

"...we haven't felt true culture shock while we’ve been here. We’ve had internet, shopping malls, medicine, electricity, clean water, people who speak English and cater to our every need. Life has been confusing and uncomfortable at points, but never insurmountable..."

This rings true to me about our life here in Kampala, I think especially so because Austin and I spent our first four days here in places that don't entirely meet that description. Travelling here in our first four days meant a lot of feeling that things were rather out of our control and that Africa was going to take us for all we had, because we didn't yet know up from down. And it means that I'm still processing a lot of what we encountered, so the description of this adventure will come in fits and starts for awhile.

I suppose this jumping into the deep end was my fault. We could have taken a fully-organised tour - been picked up from Kampala, driven straight to a guesthouse catering to Westerners, and been told exactly where to go, and what to do for four days. But. It rubs me the wrong way. It's expensive, and I'm cheap. It's all predetermined by someone else - there's no individual choice. And it's removed from the context, which is, really, what I'm here to see. I could see giraffes in a zoo in the states; I'm here for the getting-there and the meeting-people and seeing, however much we can, what life in Africa is. I want the struggle; I want to be challenged, to learn, to think, to make decisions, to deal with personal dynamics, and to find myself ok in the unknown. What do you gain from making it easy?

So our first morning in Uganda, we paid too much for a car to the bus park, and asked for the bus to Masindi, about 130 miles northwest of Kampala. Our eventual destination: Murchison Falls. There is no public transportation from Masindi to Murchison Falls, and, well, we had no plan. This is the part where I thank Austin for rolling with the not-plan. 

As per the things you've heard about buses here, we got to the bus park at 9:30 or so, on a bus that supposedly left at 11, and rolled out of Kampala at 12:30 or so. Jet lag, the unbelievable 18-point turns of the arriving and departing buses, and the people hawking sim cards, toy cars, samosas, etc. made the wait very tolerable.

And so we left Kampala, in the not-scheduled, not-planned, not-on-time bus, toward a little town with no hotel reservations and no way to get to our next destination.