Best Days of My Life

November 5, 2007

It’s been a while since a proper update. I just had the most amazing weekend. I had some of the worst lows and two of the best highs of my entire life. Things happened to me that I feel very privileged to have experienced since very few people get to do them in their lifetime. First, let’s catch up on events before this weekend.

The weekend after mid-terms was party weekend. On Thursday night we went to a club called Casablanca. My roommate and her best friend Michelle went out which was exciting cause it was the first time I’ve partied with Vanina. Casablanca is really amazing. Part of it has two bars and a DJ and people dancing. If you go through a doorway it takes you to a lounge part with low cushiony seats and hookas. There was also an outdoor part where there were fire pits and more hookas. I started off dancing with Vanina and Michelle, but was getting creeped on hardcore by Elias, one of the RAs at school, so I pretty much ran away and found Aaron, Owen, and a bunch of the American University students outside with a hooka and a fire pit. Owen was talking to a former child soldier from Liberia. They were talking politics and this dude was a little crazy. The rest of the night was really chill and I loved it. Got a ride home with Owen and the ambassador’s son by his driver. Benjamin (the driver) got confused and took us back to the ambassador’s house instead, then finally took us home to school. That place was a serious castle in the jungle.

On Sunday a few of us went to see a popular Kenyan artist at a place called Club Afrique. It was ok.

My Monday morning class was cancelled and during our Wednesday class our lecturer told us that he was going to Europe for a while so we wouldn’t have class until late November. I’m ok with that. This is exactly how Kenya is. During my Tuesday morning class I told my lecturer (he looks like a serious pirate with sneaky eyes, a huge beard, and a gold tooth) I was going to Uganda and would be missing one class and he kind of got parent-like and joked about Museveni inviting me personally and told me to be really careful. It was an interesting moment. Also, during that class I had a funny moment with this kid, Gerald. Now, I don’t talk in class much just cause that’s my style, but I made a comment about something in the news we were discussing. Gerald is this Nigerian kid who we just found out stabbed a guy earlier this year (and it was a big scandal as to who the stabber was) and he sits near me in class. Gerald is beautiful and smart, so it was kind of disappointing that he’s a stabber, but it sort of makes sense cause everyone here talks about how crazy Nigerians are. So, anyway, in class, after I talked, he passes me this little tiny folded note that said, “Never heard you talk in class b4. Sweet!!” I nearly lost it cause it was just soooo funny to get that from some notorious stabber. I’m pretty sure Gerald has a thing for me, but whatever. Mike thought it was pretty funny.

Ok, finally to my weekend. WEDNESDAY: Aaron, Mike, Rosa, Catherine, and I left on a USIU bus around 5:30 p.m. to get to our Akamba bus downtown. Stopped at Nakumatt for some supplies and Catherine bought a wig and candy cause it was Halloween and she really loves dressing up and eating candy. Got on our Akamba bus at 7:00 (when it was supposed to leave.) A little after 7 a guy comes on and says the bus would be leaving late (expected) because our convoy hadn’t arrived yet and we couldn’t leave without other buses or we could be hijacked (comforting!) Left around 9. The road to Uganda is horrible. Luckily I was able to sleep some.

THURSDAY: Around 6am we reached the Ugandan border. I was the first in line to get my exit stamp from Kenya. I hand the dude my passport and he checks out my Kenyan visa. He tells me to come around the glass and talk to him in the room. Confused, I do what he says. He asks me what I’m doing in Kenya. I tell him I’m an exchange student at USIU in Nairobi. He goes, “so can you read and write?” Uhhh yes… and he points to the place on my visa where it says “1 mth.” Crap. So we talk about it and he tells me that they gave that to me at the airport. I told him I was supposed to have 4 months in the country to study and that it was a mistake and I had no idea. I ask him what I’m supposed to do. He’s like, well you’ve been in Kenya illegally for over a month…what do you think I’m going to do? I’m starting to freak out now cause he keeps saying I’ve broken the law. Finally he’s like, Ok, well this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to arrest you, then you’ll go to court, and then you’ll be deported to the U.S. This is when I started crying. Funny thing is the first thought through my head was “fuckkk I’m going to fail all my classes and this is going to seriously ruin my life plan.” The second thing I thought was “fuckkk I’m going to a Kenyan jail, the last place I want to be.” Once I started crying he’s like, “are you scared?” and I told him I was, which he replied by saying well if you’re scared then I have every reason to think you’ve done something you shouldn’t have. I see Mike and Catherine and on the other side of the glass looking really confused cause they couldn’t hear what was going on but could see me crying. Finally they ask Aaron to come back there and talk to him about what’s going on. Aaron only had a 2 month visa and so he was in the country illegally for a few days. Finally the guy is like “well, lets ask this gentleman what he thinks we should do with you.” Aaron’s like, you should let us into Uganda and not deport her cause that would be stupid. So then the guys start joking around with us and were like yeah ok I guess we’ll let you go. You just have to get a new visa when you come back in. I was seriously freaked out. They were just messing with us to be assholes. They may have even wanted us to pay them off. I don’t know. All I know is they let us go and we got back on the bus and went to Uganda.

All of us had fallen asleep and were woken up by some guy just repeating “Jinja. Jinja. Jinja” over and over again. (JInja was our stop.) So we hurried off the bus. The bus dropped off us in the most random place. It was pretty much on the side of the road. Almost immediately we were bombarded by about 20 boda-bodas (motorbike taxis.) They were all up in our shit and we were having a hard time figuring out what to do cause this trip was pretty impromptu and we really hadn’t discussed where we were staying or how we were getting there. Since I did the most research about stuff in my Lonely Planet books I suggested we go to this hostel in town that had a sister hostel near the water falls on the Nile. I also read that a ride to somewhere should be about 500 Ugandan shillings (like 30 cents) and the boda-boda guys were quoting us 6000. Aaron went and found a matatu who said he’d take us to town for 500 shillings. We pile into the bus and tell him we wanted to go to Nile River Explorer Backpackers hostel instead. He says its far away and he knows where it is but itll cost us each 4000 shillings. We’re stupid so we said ok. Not only did he not know where it was, and we stopped at two other places first to ask for directions, but it was actually really close. Stupid stupid stupid!!! Oh well, it still was only a few dollars and we just wanted to get out of there.

We get to the hostel. It was probably 10:00 a.m. There were a million people running around in life vests and helmets and there were two trucks with rafts on them leaving to go rafting. It was madness. Went inside. A few of the people working there were white and super nice. They told us to go have some free tea and figure out what we wanted to do. (We weren’t sure where we wanted to stay and what we wanted to do while we were in Jinja.) Some guy, Nash, came over and started talking to us. He worked there. He told us all these things we could do and we decided to go to mountain biking through the rain forest the next day. We checked in and got a dorm room to ourselves cause it wasn’t busy. We ate lunch at the hostel. Really good food. Uganda is amazing. It’s so beautiful. Uganda is more what I was expecting Africa to be like. Kenya is just savannah and kind of boring. Uganda has huge beautiful trees and is more like the jungle. It’s also very hot in Uganda, unlike Kenya. The people in Uganda are also way nicer and it’s a lot safer. People don’t try and rip you off (as much) and are generally friendlier. I love Uganda and want to go back.

SO, after lunch we walked through town, saw a bit of Lake Victoria, and then walked to the source of the Nile. Verrryy cool. Mike, Aaron, and I all stripped down and went swimming in the Nile. Near the entrance a sign said there was swimming, so we asked a guy when we got there if it was safe to go in the water. He said, yes it was safe and we could go swimming after we had learned to swim. Not a lot of people here can swim. And we were like, yeah, we can swim and went in even though it seemed like no one wanted us to do it. Then we walked back home. Aaron, Mike, and I went to an Italian/Indian restaurant and ate really good food. Got really lost trying to find it but a bike taxi driver walked us there. Unlike in Kenya where he would have wanted something for that, the guy was just trying to help us out. Went home and crashed in our hot hot hot hot dorm room.

FRIDAY: Nash told us to be ready to go at 9:00 a.m. so we all woke up early and got ready to go mountain biking. Since we’re on Africa time we didn’t leave until after 11:00. The place where we were staying was the hub of the Nile River Explorers Rafting, so after 9 there were like 30 new people walking around waiting for their rafters breakfast before they were shipped off to the Nile. During breakfast they put on a DVD of past rafting and we watched that for a bit. Finally at 11:00 we got our bikes and helmets and jumped in a van with all the bikes piled on top and left for the forest. There were 5 other people with us who had gone rafting the day before. They were all on 10 week safaris through East Africa. There were 2 from the UK, 2 from New Zealand and 1 from Australia. Nice people. Drove about 45 minutes away to the rain forest. We first rode on a road through some rural villages. Lots of “MZUNGO HOW ARE YOU?!” by the little kids. Some of them chased us for a while. Cute. After like 20 minutes of riding we got the forest path we were going through. It was about 2 feet wide, there were lots of roots and logs on the path, it was very hilly, and everything was wet. After maybe 2 minutes into the forest I wiped out completed and banged up my knee pretty bad. But, I was generally OK and we kept going. In total we went 30 kilometers and took a break for lunch by a waterfall. It was sooo hot out. I’ve never had such a good workout in my life. It was basically a 5 ½ hour intense workout. It was kind of scary too cause I felt like I could die at any time. I fell off my bike a lot, but after that first fall I learned to jump off the bike as I was falling and was generally ok after those falls. Regardless my legs are seriously bruised and cut up from the whole day. On the second part of the ride we crossed a stream which was cool. We would periodically stop to break and once we were breaking and waiting for riders at the back, Catherine and I had a million ants crawling on our legs and biting us. It was horrible! I had them in my socks and in my shorts and it hurts like hell. A little while later I had a HUGE red ant biting my ankle. It wouldn’t let go!! It hurt and burned sooo bad. I tried smacking it to kill it, but that didn’t work. I tried pulling it out but it had two huge pinchers digging into my skin and I had no idea what to do. I was seriously screaming the whole time cause it hurt so much. Finally it let go and we moved on. Owie. Finished up the ride, went home, showered cause we were dirtier than I’ve ever been in my life, and went to sleep.

SATURDAY: Our plan had been to go to Jinja for Thursday and Friday, then go to Kampala on Saturday, then come home Sunday morning. We never intended on going rafting. Buttt, after seeing the videos and talking to all the rafters, we decided we couldn’t pass up rafting the Nile. It’s not often you get that opportunity. So, we decided to splurge and be kings of the Nile. So, we woke up sore and tired from our bike ride, ate our rafters breakfast, then jumped in the trucks to the put-in point on the Nile. There were 5 of us, so we grouped with 2 other girls. These girls wanted to be hardcore and had heard that Paulo was the best guide, so we jumped into his raft. No one in our group had really rafted much before, but these girls wanted to do the hardest parts. Most of us were like, uhhh take us the easy way. But Paulo wouldn’t listen and pushed us hard. I’m so glad he did. There were about 4 rafts total, and we were the “hardcore” raft. Paulo is on the Ugandan raft team and is their best rafter. He travels the world to do competitions. He seriously is the King of the Nile and I love him. Anyway, we set off and at the first rapid (class 1) he just told us to jump out and swim it so we could feel what it was like. Between each rapid Paulo would teach us the different commands and would prep us for the upcoming rapids. I was pretty scared in the beginning, but after a class 2 rapid, I was like this is easy lets do something crazier. After the class 2 we did a class 4. What a fucking incredible feeling. I love rafting. After the class 4 we did a class 5. In the US, if you wanna do class 5 rapids, you need to have formal training or something. But here we were, on our first day of rafting, doing class 5 rapids. We did like 5 class 5s total. We did an 8 foot waterfall. It was amazing. We only fell out once, on a class 5. Before we did it, Paulo was like, ‘you do not want to fall out on this once cause it would be a bad swim to take cause of how long the rapids last.’ Of course we flipped the raft immediately when we hit the rapids. I was under water for quite a while and I was little freaked out cause the raft was on top of me, but I was the first to pop up and Paulo helped me back in. Everyone else was scattered. We also had a bunch of kayakers with us who would go rescue people if they fell out. So eventually people were collected and returned to the raft and our paddles found. Later we went over a class 2 rapid and Paulo made us all stand up on the side of the boat and balance ourselves as we went over. None of us fell in cause we’re all champs. We also went over a class 4 rapid successfully, then he made us turn around and go through it a second time (cause were hardcore.) The second time a kayaker went through it first, and then we went, but he was trapped underwater for a while, then our raft when over him. He was pretty fucked up when he finally came up. That was a really scary moment. The last rapid we did was class 5 (and class 6 in some places!) and we did it like pros. The name of the rapid was “The Bad Place.” Hahahaha Sooo anyway we climbed out and got into the back of the truck with all the kayakers and rode back to the hostel on the waterfall and ate our free dinner. Then we got on a matatu to Kampala.

SUNDAY: We slept in at our hostel, ate breakfast, then decided to try and catch a bus back home cause it was raining and we realized there wasn’t much in Kampala we wanted to do. Got in a matutu and they told us it would cost 700 Ugandan shillings to take us to the buses. After they dropped others off we had to reneogiate cause we were apparently going farther than they thought. So we agreed on 1000. I had the map out the whole time and the driver had no idea where he was going. Finally WE directed them to the place and as we got out and were trying to pay they were like whoah whoah whoah its 15000 shillings each. Which was bullshit. So Mike and I were left in the bus and he was trying to drive away saying he was going to take us to the police. But I just busted through the door, we paid them the 1000 and we left. Assholes. So, we went to the place on the map where Lonely Planet said the bus place was. Well, Lonely Planet was wrong so we had to walk another 30 min in the rain to the actual bus station. The 1:00 bus was full, so we had to trek across town to a different bus to catch one at 3:00. Some really nice guy exchanged some money for us then walked us to the bus station. He lived in Sudan. What a king. Got on our bus at 3 and drove the bumpy way home. Crossed the border ok. Got to Nairobi, took a taxi home, then crashed at like 7am. What a fucking weekend.

Oh yeah, we went into some caves while in Uganda. It was Mike’s idea. I don’t know why he wanted to do it so badly. I think he said his mom told him it would be cool or something.