Having jumped a rather opportunistic lift on Archie’s Hilux double cab out of Uganda’s capital, Kampala, we afforded ourselves a rest day in Masaka, about 130km south-west of Kampala along the highway headed to Kigali – pronounced Chigali by locals and travellers trying to sound ‘in’ – which was the first destination that had some form of time constraint as Matt and Tom were to spend a month working at a small school there.
Unlike normal rest days, the purpose of this one wasn’t to give our legs a break, nor was it to rest my ailing arse which had taken a non-homoerotic pounding in the last two cycling days. Instead, this rest day was a break for the brain. After an outrageously ambitious weekend of jolling lank with our host, Archie (a good school friend of Tom’s), our brains were operating slower than a virus-infected DOS-running Apple Mac. Talking had become a strenuous, mind-numbing affair even the day after we had been struck down with an extreme case of the Sunday blues akin to the type you feel after a heavy Varsity weekend with a line-up of unfinished tuts waiting on your desk - except that we had no tuts. Ever.
Tom and Matt decided to spend their day figuring out a general plan (probably the first bit of planning done since deciding to set off on the trip) for their month-long volunteering stint in Kigali (Chigali) as well as get a taste of a day in the life of a coffee trader, Archie’s new profession since hanging up his boots on the London scene.
While Jim had been on the verge of setting off with his bike and fishing rod to Lake Vic for a ‘fush’ (it’s hard to make fun of a Natal accent when you’re stuck with an Eastern Cape one, but what the hell) on the day we got to Masaka, I had chosen to head off in that very direction the next day. As far as I was concerned; bikes be damned, I was jumping on whatever form of transportation would get me there the cheapest while inflicting minimal pain on my rear.
Due to the fact that we had little to no idea how far away Bukakata was (our destination selected by pinpointing the closest lakeside dot on Chen’s now utterly destroyed map), nor what the roads were like, Jim caved in to join me on my lazy journey to catch a first glimpse of Lake Vic proper in a bid to get some writing done.
Having insignificant information on distances was by now standard issue as we have found a serious stubbornness in all of Ethiopia, Kenya and now Uganda. Instead of conceding that the distance to the next town is completely unknown to the person in question, it makes more sense to them to pick a random number (often not even a nice, round multiple of five) and get your hopes up (or down) by assertively guaranteeing the distance they just thumb-sucked while casting you a glance of mixed exasperation and contempt for doubting their level of knowledge of their local area – which turns out to be sweet fu*k all.
Having jumped on a motorbike taxi (known as a boda-boda and by far the most visible form of transport in and around towns) we asked vaguely to be taken to Bukakata road, taking advantage of the obviousness of Ugandan road names. Once on the road we were surrounded by a few fixers, a couple more boda-bodas and the standard bunch of interested onlookers hoping to experience a couple of mzungus getting absolutely ripped off or supremely confused by chatter in a language they wouldn’t even be able to name let alone understand. After a few conversations to confirm what we thought might have been either lost in translation or a web of lies, we settled on the fact that there were no taxis (mutatus in Kenya, the Ugandan eluded us) to Bukakata and were left with the option of a car for 5000UGX (Ugandan Shillings, just over 300 to one rand) each or 15000 for a boda-boda. The sedan, which was no bigger than my first ever car (an Opel Astra with tinted windows that trapped heat in a fashion that would rival any sauna but with less naked old men) was the obvious option and seemed all but ready to go with a man in the front seat and a woman in the back with her two very little children perched on her lap.
It was a sure-fire sign of things to come when, despite the obvious space in the back seat, I was ushered into the front seat alongside the adult male already there. It goes without saying that it was a sign that I missed or subconsciously ignored with the innocent naivety of a sixteen-year-old girl being offered free math lessons by the nerdy kid in the grade who all-to-often ended up getting into deep conversations about her like-life while deflecting any on his own by saying: “there’s this girl I like but I just don’t know how to tell her…” It can’t be love-life, they’re sixteen! And if I hadn’t kissed a girl by then there is no way in hell that the people I’ve just made up for metaphorical purposes can be dropping ‘L’ bombs.
Having ignored my usher and joined Jim in the backseat while internally questioning the intentions of the chap in the front seat who was far too keen to shift over, we sat and waited for the driver to get cracking. As time snuck by, a new passenger was squeezed into the car by the usher, shifting everyone else around between seats to maximize the space inside the vehicle, everyone except for the two white boys in the backseat who were slowly being forced closer together as one after the other filed into the car.
All we could do was laugh as the usher optimized his load with the precision of a chemical engineer, piling two men and two women into the backseat alongside the two of us and the woman with her two kids alongside the chap in the front who was by now probably regretting calling shotgun. Just when we thought all sardine-related records had been smashed, a man sat in the drivers’ seat. This man was not the driver. The driver propped himself onto the man’s lap just as I would have done way back when my feet didn’t reach the pedals and I ‘drove’ sitting on my father’s lap peering through the gap below the top arch of the steering wheel.
Twelve people had somehow squashed into that car and I can only assume that it was the dwindling of demand that convinced the driver to set off, head half out of his window, without tying a family to the roof of the car.
Halfway into the trip on the bumpy dirt road, Jim and I noted the tremendous oversight of the driver in not fitting in at least three people into the boot. A mere matter of minutes passed before the usage of the boot, or lack thereof, became abundantly clear as we hurtled past some traffic officers hailing us down. The driver eventually pulled over, jumped off of the lap he was occupying, opened the boot and jogged off to the officers with a live chicken in hand. He handed over the chicken without so much of a word to the officer and sauntered back to the car with a cheeky grin – simple as that.
Seven men, three women, two small children and one chicken had left Masaka that morning with all but the chicken somehow arriving safely at the Bukakata port on the shores of the expansive Lake Victoria. Unless it was standard operating procedure for police cops to arrive back at the station to clock out with a day’s spoils of chickens (which is more probable than one might originally think), I doubt the chicken arrived at her final destination as safely as we did.
Having jumped the free ferry (because it was free), we spent our few set aside hours on one of the Sesse Islands of Lake Victoria without actually knowing it before heading back to Masaka in the late afternoon, more than happy to pay the premium for a motorbike. If there was one thing taken from our little Lake Victoria expedition, it was the knowledge that ‘capacity’ is a word that has no direct translation into any African language.
