Road Trip A: African Style

Note: I've changed the names in this story. Everything else is true.

Don’t ever complain to me that you’re dirty. I don’t care if you’ve just rolled in mud with hogs; NO ONE has ever been as filthy as the people in Van B on the Great Ugandan Road Trip, 2008.

It began as a desire to see some of the country. There were eighteen of us volunteering in Uganda, some teaching sexual reproductive health, some teaching organic farming and small business management. We had a long weekend coming up for Easter, and everybody was eager to make plans.

We were based out of a town called Jinja. Ten hours away, to the north and west, was the famous Murchison National Park. There were waterfalls, campgrounds and all manner of African wildlife for us to explore, and eventually thirteen volunteers agreed to go.

God bless the volunteer who organized it, whom I’ll call Rex. Have you ever tried to rent a car in Africa? How about rent some tents? Lemme tell you…it ain’t as easy as it sounds. Rex managed to find two cars and seven tents. Two cars for fourteen people? Well, whatever. We’d sit packed shoulder-to-shoulder with the tents strapped to the roof and our backpacks on our laps. You only live once!

The weekend came around, and to our great surprise the cars were actually spacious. Large van-like vehicles that had seating for eight, plus room for storage. Perfect! One of the vans even came with a driver, Moses, which was for the best since none of us had a real clear idea where we were going. The only setback: only I and Rex could drive the cars. All the other volunteers either had no drivers’ licences or were uncomfortable driving on the left-hand side of the road (Uganda is like England for how the cars and roads are set up). I’m not crazy about driving on the left, either, but we didn’t have a whole lot of options.

The first seven hours were spent in typical road trip style. Arguing about i-pod playlists, playing I-spy, eating junk food. Then we hit the Road to Hoima. That’s in capitals for a reason. Imagine taking your guts, putting them in a blender, and then putting that blender into a centrifuge, and you might have some approximation of what riding on the Road to Hoima was like. It’s a dirt path that’s been carved down during the rainy season by the treads of heavy machines, which are the only vehicles that can travel the roads when it’s raining heavy. Holy shit. A rutted, bumpy disaster of a surface sprinkled generously with giant chunks of gravel, so the ride was both horribly rough AND terribly slippery. Rex drove the whole ten hours to the park, and at one point he had the van in a skid. I was in mid-sentence, facing Rex (I was in the front passenger seat), and I distinctly remember looking out the side window and seeing the other van, which we were following.

Silence in the car.

“What’s wrong?” Rex asked.
“Nothing,” I said, “Is it normal to throw up in your mouth?” I asked.
“Too close for comfort?” he asked.

Silence in the car.

Sun had set by the time we reached the entrance to the campsite. Here is one instance where Africa differs from North America: when you enter a campsite in North America, you presume that where you will be camping is close by. Not so in Uganda. It was a further two hours of driving (on a road that was slightly worse than the Road to Hoima) until we arrived at the campgrounds. An hour into this journey, some of the girls needed to pee. We pulled our van over. Moses also stopped. He got out of his car and ran back to us. We explained why we had stopped, and he shook his head.

“Be very careful. Make sure you stay in the headlights,” he said. None of the girls were thrilled to hear this. Someone asked him why. “Lions,” he replied. Enough said. I was thankful I have a bladder made of steel.

We finally arrived at the campsite, and began the shitty work of pitching tents. There is nothing more unpleasant after a ten hour, washboard-like road trip than arriving at your destination and not having a bed to lie down in.

I walked back to the car to grab my bag, and saw a shape moving in the darkness. I froze. I waited. Eventually, my eyes adjusted to the lanterns and moonlight enough to make out a large hippopotamus walking through the tents. Two of the other volunteers came walking up behind me, giggling and chatting.

Most people mistakenly think that hippos are just African water cows. They are not. They can run something like 50km/hr, and they kill more people every year than lions or snakes put together. They’re really, really dangerous and can be quite grumpy.

“DON’T MOVE.” I said. The girls froze. “There’s a hippopotamus over there.” They immediately started to gasp and ask, “What? Where?” and fanned out to look. They couldn’t see it, and eventually dismissed me as being out of my mind. A woman whom we didn’t know came up to us just then and exclaimed, “Wow! Did you guys see that hippo?” At least I was vindicated, but I still wasn’t crazy about hippos just wandering around our tents.

We got the tents set up and crashed for the night. I slept, but some others didn’t. Evidently, while I was passed out, wild boar had come nosing around the tents and kept some of the other volunteers awake. Thank God I was so exhausted.

The next day we had a game drive planned. This is another circumstance where Africa differs from North America. In North America you’d be given a laundry list of safety instructions, rules, and things you could not do before you were allowed anywhere near wild animals. In fact, you’d probably be kept behind a fence most of the time.

In Uganda, you paid 100,000USH, parked your vehicle on the ferry, crossed the Nile, and drove on your merry way. Since Rex had driven all day yesterday, it was my turn to pilot the car. It did turn some African heads, watching the two guys in our group stand aside while one of the women backed the truck onto the boat. Girls rock!

We drove through the game reserve in Murchison Park, and we saw everything: giraffes, elephants, wild boar, gazelles, even a lioness. The only hiccup was my ability to judge the boundaries of the vehicle. The road was quite rutted (it was more like a trail, really), and I couldn’t seem to avoid hitting the potholes. I’d see one, and move to straddle the tires over it. Instead, I’d wind up hitting it dead on. There was a particularly bad one that smashed the vehicle so violently it caused everyone in the rear to smack their heads on the roof of the car. Hard. I screeched to a stop and turned around to four pairs of eyes, rimmed with tears and staring at me accusingly. “Well,” I said, “Put your freakin’ seatbelts on, then!” Stupid British cars.

The rest of the trip was fantastic. The only thing left to do was drive the ten hours back to Jinja.

A problem. One of the girls in our group had come down with malaria. Malaria is never something to make light of, but it is particularly bad when you are eight hours away from a hospital. We decided to drive straight to Kampala (Uganda’s capital) so that she could see a real doctor immediately. Rex drove.

I didn’t appreciate it then, but I certainly do now…how she managed eight hours, with full-blown malaria, in one of those trucks is entirely beyond me. It was all I could do to tolerate twenty minutes in a car on a freshly paved road. God bless that volunteer.

So now we come to the “filthy” part of the story. It never rained once over the weekend. Great, right? Well…not so much. No rain meant one thing: dust.

Since our vehicle was always following Moses,’ we gradually began to realize that our car was filling up with dirt. Fine, gritty, red African soil. Moses was kicking it up and we were driving straight through the cloud. At one point during the weekend, when I was driving, Moses pulled over. I stopped, too. He walked over to our car and informed us to roll up the windows right away. We were flying through a swarm of tse tse flies. We rolled up the windows and instantly became boiling hot.

“Blimey!” said the other male volunteer, John. (He’s British, and yes, he said that). “Does this air conditioning work?” We were on a windy, rutty road and I was having enough trouble trying to keep up with Moses.

“I don’t know,” I said, “Fiddle with these buttons here,” I gestured to the dash. I was looking out the windshield when John hit the magic button. Suddenly, a violent cloud of read dirt exploded out of every vent in the front of the car. I yelled, “Shit!” and stomped on the brakes, since I could no longer see. John started to gag and tried to flip the switch off through the haze. Everyone in the back seat assumed we’d just hit something and started to scream. Once the dust settled (literally), I looked around. All of us had red faces with white rings around our eyes and mouths.

"I think we’re just going to have to suffer the heat for awhile,” I said. The car erupted into semi-hysterical laughter. I think they were just glad we hadn’t hit anything.

Anyway, back to the malaria. We drove for eight hours to the hospital. Once there, the doctor admitted our sick volunteer. Rex stayed with her, which meant I’d have to drive the two hours back to Jinja. On the main highway. The main African highway. After dark. Fuck me.

I can honestly say I will never, ever do that again. I’ve driven through blizzards, through driving rain, through Los Angeles, on prairie backroads after dark, you name it. Nothing came as close to being as stressful as that trip back to Jinja.

There are no streetlights, so it’s pitch black. Pedestrians line the roads everywhere, and are constantly darting in and out of traffic. No one stays in their lane; it’s accepted practice to drive in the centre of the road wherever possible. There is also a system to using your blinkers in Uganda that is decidedly un-Canadian. You use your blinker to signal that the other vehicle is allowed to pass you – not to signal that you are passing. Also, oncoming traffic flash their highbeams at you just as they pass, temporarily blinding you each time. Sometimes traffic is three cars wide on a one-lane road. Nowhere is it safe to stop. Oh, and this all happens at highway speed.

About a half hour away from Jinja I heard a soft thunk. It took a second to register, and what finally clued me in was the silence in the car. “Did we just hit somebody?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Jess, “But don’t worry – it wasn’t very hard and it was TOTALLY his fault.” I’m not sure that assigning blame in Ugandan car accidents works quite the same as it does in Canadian ones, so we kept on driving and I crossed my fingers.

When we finally got back to the hostel, we were the filthiest, motliest bunch of road warriors you’d ever seen. Those in the first vehicle were tired, a bit scruffy and in need of a shower.

Then there were the people in Van B. Ho-lee-shiiit. All of us looked like we had been sprayed with an airbrush machine full of terra cotta ink. Dirt was everywhere; under our nails, in the folds of our eyelids, over every inch of our clothes. It covered the entire inside of the car, filled up all the vents and completely obscured the tents, the luggage and the bags of food. It was so bad that none of us could run our fingers through our hair. The girls in Van A were aghast; they had no idea that following behind them had caused such filth.

However, such an awesome weekend was worth the layers of dirt. And, for the rest of my life, no matter what goes wrong I will always be able to say, “Well, at least it isn’t the filthy mess that Uganda was.”