Safari Part 2: Craziness

I mentioned earlier how crazy transportation is here. Well, we tried doing public transport for our entire trip, and we really had no idea what we were doing. We were sooo incredibly lucky with the timing of everything - at first we were so annoyed because our taxi got 2 flat tires and what should have been an hour and a half trip took about three hours. We missed our bus to get to the next city, and had to take a different bus on a different route that happened to be leaving pretty quickly. We first thought we were really unlucky, because it was the most miserable ride any of us have ever had (there were 5 of us - me, Richard, my old roomie Jen, her cousin Meg, and our friend Remmick) The entire 5 hours we were on the bus, we were jostled and bumped and thrown around...it was like the Indiana Jones ride at Disney Land...for 5 hours. Richard was so sick after that...poor guy.

We met a guy named Eric who knew all about the area we were traveling through and to - he is a soldier who works there. I didn't realize it, but we were traveling through what was recently a very dangerous place to be- the Karamojo area. These people have been historically very hostile and agressive toward any outsider. Unfortunately, we found out thatwe were to stay over night in one of these Karamojong cities - called Kotido. Kotido was a very dangerous place to be about 2 or 3 years ago. We were scared, and we stayed in a shifty hotel that night (look at the pictures in our web album in the previous post), but we were safe, and it was ok! Eric helped us the next day, to find free transport to the next city, which was awesome - picture 16 people in the back of a tiny pickup truck, loadedwith all of our baggage, plus like 20 boxes of groceries. It was great - totally Ugandan-style. :) The rest of our trip there was fine, but on the way back, we had acrazy/scary time getting home. We took a really roundabout route toget home, because it was the only way we had a chance of getting home in the same day. I met a man (George Mark) on one of our busses who claimed to be a driver, and said he would take us all the way from Lira to Mbale.. When we got off the bus, we were swarmed by about 10 other taxi drivers who were also drunk, and they were saying all kinds of things to make us worry about driving with George. At that point,we had gotten in the car with him, and Richard was like "we are not going with them, let's get out." so we did, and George got so angryand started yelling. We were so scared! But it felt worse to get outof the car, and think of staying there, so eventually we got back in his car with him promising to take care of us and keep us safe. We were all just praying that we would be okay, and after awhile, werealize that we were in good hands. We got home at 5AM the next morning, and we were so exhausted! It was such an adventure.

I am just so amazed at how everything worked out - it really can't have been by chance that we made all the friends that we did, and had a successful (yet frustrating) trip. I hope you all are doing well! We love you lots and miss you all! I will write more next time about our projects we have been doing.