greetings from uganda!!!! today i'm in kampala, the pulsing capital of this great country. soooooooooooooo unbelievably different from kenya and sooooooooooooooo unbelievably similar as well!! so green and lush, so chilled and relaxed, still with the many 'mzungu, i love you' or 'marry me mzungu'! its wierd cos in kenya they have tuk tuks, but here only taxi cars and motorbike taxis. anyone who knows about my morbid fear of motorbikes will know that its a huuuuuuggggggeeee deal that i actually got on one! yes me, ange got on the back of a motorbike, for the first time since i was about 8 years young and fearless! and not just once either, 4 times!!! its was funny cos today on my way into town by matatu, i saw two separate crashes where a car ran into a motorbike taxi and just drove off! so after that i was like hell no, i'm not getting on one, thats gotta be some kind of omen! but i had to go to the rwandan embassy and it would've taken me like three hours to walk so with much fear and hesitation i took a motorbike taxi. and hence the title of this entry, and here comes my death, which is what i was thinking every time the idiot driver pulled out in front of oncoming cars, or failed to slow down at all at a speed bump, or took sharp corners at way too fast speeds!! its wierd how when you think you're about to die, you just close your eyes and try and find a happy place! but i didn't die, i'm sitting here typing this, so someone must be looking out for me.
so uganda, nice place, really diverse countryside. i spent two nights at lake victoria on the sesse islands which was really nice and chilled. not much to do there but did a boat trip around the islands, some nature walks and just general chillin and contemplating. all the guidebooks say lake victoria is notorious for bilharzia, some kind of worm that lives on the snails that live in the lake, that basically burrow into the skin and can eat away at your stomach or some such thing. but all the local people i asked were like no, no bilharzia here, even though there were litrally billions of the snails in the water, on the shore, pretty much everywhere on the islands! so i didn't swim, but it wasn't overly hot anyway.
ventured into one of the richer parts of kampala today where the rwandan embassy is, and had lunch in a cafe full of white people, which was really wierd. there were these ladies sitting near me, i'm guessing the wives of diplomats cos they were all 'high commission this' and 'high commission that', and i overheard them saying that aussies are uneducated!!! i really had to bite my tongue! how dare they! i'm here off my own merit, because i choose to be here and what about them, only here cos they're husbands forced them to be here! how very dare they!!!
so anyway thats my rant for the day. thanks for bearing with me. tomorrow i'm off to murchison falls, the source of the mighty nile river in the north of uganda. you can also track chimps in the jungles up there so that should be awesome, and then its only 2 weeks till i get to rwanda to see the gorillas yaaaaayyyy!!! i met a guy at the hostel i'm staying at who'd just tracked the rwandan gorillas the day before, and OH MY GOD, the pictures were so amazing! he said they got to within a couple of metres of them and the silverback was just chillin out having a snooze, munchin out on some bamboo, playing with the babies all that. i soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo can't wait!!! take care peeps, miss you all truckloads, peacee..
