oh my god what a mission! i have never experienced anything like the bus trip i just had, and i certainly hope i never have to experience anything like it ever again! so first of all we were an hour late leaving kampala. its not so bad, i say to myself, its only an 8 hour trip anyway, i'll still get to kigali at a reasonable hour. boy was i wrong. after driving for 2 hours we break down and spend the next 3 hours on the side of the road. in the meantime there's people on the side of the road cooking corn on a fire to keep our tummys happy then a carload of AK toting police arrive just to keep an eye on the proceedings. they then get the bus going again, it makes it 10 minutes down the road to a servo where we sit for another two hours. and thats basically how the trip goes for the next 12 hours, driving for 10-30 minutes then breaking down and parking on the side of the road for a few hours. we spent more time on the bloody side of the road than on it!!! but this tale of woe doesn't end there. we make it to a town thats one third of the way to kigali at 4am, so thats only 8 hours after we should've arrived at our final destination, and after sitting there till 7am, they decide the bus has reached the end of its line and pack us all into 2 matatus which, so they say, will take us to the border of uganda and rwanda where we will be met by another coach on the rwandan side of the border. so they pile about 20 of us into each matatu (they're only licensed to carry 14 passengers) and off we go. until we get about half an hour down the raod and there's a police check point. great. so the driver gets fined for carrying too many peeps, then after some harsh looks and words they let us go. so we finally arrive at the border and surprisingly, this is the easiest part of the trip and i'm thinking thank god i already got my visa before i left kampala cos there's no way i'd be able to handle that whole process on like 5 minutes sleep! so once everyone gets through immigration, we're all standing around going, right, where's this coach thats supposed to meet us? and it never came! so we pile back into the matatus, swearing and cursing the bus company, and preparing ourselves to rip it up them when we get to kigali and demand some of our money back! so after all this, i finally made it to kigali at 1pm, only 18 hours late, feeling very tired, hungry and with a mammoth headache from inhaling diesel fumes all day. and while i certainly wasn't laughing at the time, already i'm starting to see the funny side of it, but yeah at the time, i very nearly lost my shit!
so kigali seems like a nice place, its very clean and there seems to be an ounce of order to the place, unlike most other cities i've seen so far. i just went and booked my gorilla permit for thursday (sing hallelujah!) so i'm totally chompin at the bit to get out there and say g'day to good old magilla gorilla. till then my primate friends, take care, god i need some sleep but i'm happy and love and miss ya's!!
