The Never-ending Journey

Getting on was my first mistake. Sitting at the back was my second. I grip the effete fabric of my seat as the rear end of the bus sweeps clear out over the high rise hills of Kabale revealing a straight drop to the valley below, and I wonder – as I often do – why I didn't just stay at home and force myself to be content with comfort and security. Uganda is playing with me.
Despite this, the bus thrusts on up the mountain delivering the distraught displacement of six struggling cylinders across ravines and rendering redundant gears that number more than wheels in contact with the ground at that same moment.
As we ascend to exospheric elevation and breath bashing views our driver seems as though he does this in his sleep and I begin to doubt his awareness of the bus filled with churning people following him. He is driving bare foot and has only three tarantula fingers, each wrapped around a tatty gear stick as though it’s a tasty meal.
Through must-stay-closed windows the spicy forest evergreen and other death dancing buses pass inches away from my nose. I see children cleverly using sticks to guide old tyres zestfully through Ankole-Watusi slaloms and roadside grocers flaunting their farm grown goods in woven wicker baskets; canary coloured bananas; swollen green jackfruit; and teasing tomatoes complete the spectrum.
We swing off the main track and onto a shortcut made of more local roads as our onboard flow of swaying bodies snaps back into agreement with gravity. It’s not long before I see the private face of Uganda. Shanty sheds align the roadside housing Waragi swigging gamblers and shabby dogs drinking from rancid disease puddles – a far cry from the tourist trail I just witnessed!
Another surprise hump causes me to career teeth first into the seat in front.
The ride is beginning to feel like those poorly pieced together gypsy fairs I went to as a child. The ones that arrive in town for a few days then disappear unannounced for the rest of the year leaving only fields of litter and piles of mystery excrement. They would travel assiduously from town-to-town, country-to-country, not stopping until everybody had been over-awed by flashing rainbow neon, chundered every dinner from that week, and discovered every physics-mocking-method rides could flip you upside down.
As the back of the bus flies out over another unforeseen drop I realise why I’m doing this: Uganda has secrets, and with every pants soaking jolt, bump and scene, it’s giving them to me.