Nile Crocodile

This weekend 12 of us from the MSID program went to Jinja, Uganda to do some Grade 5 whitewater rafting on the Nile. It was quite a weekend to say the very least.
We were to cross the Kenya- Uganda border at a town called Busia. My little village of Ukwala is actually far closer to Busia than Kisumu is, so we agreed that I would just meet everybody else in Busia and we would cross the border and continue on to Jinja together from there. A few people even came from Nairobi and the Mt Kenya area; they had to take an overnight bus from Nairobi to Kisumu on Thursday night. For once I actually had the shortest journey of the group: it’s only an hour from Ukwala to Busia.
Thursday night Lucy shared with me the anxiety she was feeling because they might not feed me in Uganda, or worse, they might not serve tea. I told her I was pretty sure that Ugandans do eat, and if it happened that they don’t, I am a very proficient scavenger. Not completely convinced, Lucy had me eat extra dinner and take extra tea so I could survive the weekend.
On Friday, I was pleased to discover that my friend Albert, a lab technician at Matibabu, happened to have business in Busia that afternoon anyway, so he said he’d escort me into town and make sure I met up with my friends. Albert and I left the clinic around noon, took motorbikes to the town of Sega, about a fifteen minute ride. We could have gone through Ugunja, the other city not too far from Ukwala that I mentioned in my last post, but Albert wanted me to see another bit of the area surrounding Ukwala.
I should mention that I’ve learned a lot about hiring motorbikes since my trip to Kakamega last weekend. For instance, Lucy told me that you have to negotiate both the price and speed of the ride before you hop on. She said most drivers like to speed so they can complete more trips in a given day, and they assume young people like to drive fast anyway. I do not like to drive fast because I enjoy my health and safety more than the two minutes saved by speeding. Oh, and this week at the clinic we had a patient come in from a head- on motorbike collision. I helped dress the wounds and give stitches on the guys’ face and the experience was gruesome enough to make me take extra caution around the motorbikes. Also, Albert told me how much he pays for a ride to a variety of common destinations, so now I can tell if I’m being overcharged.
So, after Sega, Albert and I got on a matatu for the remaining half hour journey to Busia. Busia is a busy town that is half on the Kenyan side of the border and half on the Ugandan. Since my friends weren’t going to arrive for a few hours, we got lunch and walked around town for a while. The University of Indiana doing some HIV research in that area and has a lab stationed in Busia. Albert wanted to take me for a tour of the lab, which he assured me was the fanciest and most technical I’d every see. Well, I’ll admit that I’ve had the privilege of working in nicer labs than the one in Busia, but it quite a bit better equipped than Matibabu’s lab. The lab director was very friendly and told me to come back anytime I wanted to visit. Albert was absolutely amazed with the lab’s use of computerized patient records and the concept of assigning a unique identifying number to each patient: Matibabu records all lab tests in a ruled notebook. After we finished touring the lab, it started to rain pretty heavily, so Albert and I took refuge in a cyber café until the storm passed. When the rain let up we were walking back to the main road and a matatu full of a dozen mzungus flew past us. My mzungus!! I walked down to where their matatu had dropped them off, we bought our visas and crossed the border without any remarkable difficulty; finally, we were in Uganda.
My first impression of Uganda was that it’s very pink. The major cellular provider there is called Zain, a company that selected shockingly bright fuchsia for it’s logo color. There were buildings painted bright pink lining the streets of the Uganda side of Busia. Also, almost all of the bicycle drivers were wearing short-sleeved button up pink shirts (in a lot of towns you can hire a bike to drive you around just as you can hire a motorbike, but the bikes are usually for trips within, not between, towns). We couldn’t really figure out why all the bicyclists would have decided to identify themselves with pink shirts. The leading hypothesis was that some nonprofit organization had lot of extra pink bowling shirts to get rid of, so they packed them up and shipped them to eastern Uganda.
We found a matatu to take all 12 of us to the campsite of the Nile River Explorers, the company we booked our rafting trip with. During the drive we got to see some of Uganda. Everything was very green and lush, and the roads were far better than the ones in Kenya. Also, we noticed that a lot fewer people have gates and fences surrounding their homes. In Kenya, even in the rural areas, it’s common to see a metal or cement fence completely surrounding a property. There’s usually broken shards of glass embedded in the cement on the top surface of such a wall to prevent potential thieves from jumping over the wall. There were also a lot more of the quintessential mud huts with thatched grass roofs than in Kenya, at least in the parts of Kenya that are right along the major highway. These mud huts came complete with small naked children running around and screaming hello to the mzungus while women wrapped in lengths of cloth with traditional African prints cooked over fires in front of the homes. We could see gorgeous rolling hills and mountains during the whole trip.
It took longer than expected to get to the campsite because there was some confusion about its exact location. The guide that we’d booked the trip with called a few times to ask where we were, but that’s a really difficult question to answer when you’re in unfamiliar terrain in the dark. We finally arrived, starving and exhausted. We threw our bags into the dorm- style bunkhouses and headed over to the restaurant for a quick dinner and a look at the Nile before bed. We all agreed that this was one of the most “touristy” places we’d stayed at: almost all of the guests hanging around in the restaurant were American or European, and the restaurant served dishes sure to please a Western palate rather than traditional East African foods, but we couldn’t help but appreciate how awesome everything was. We were situated on an overlook just above the river, in the middle of the jungle. We all retired to bed pretty early since we had to get up early the next morning for an adventure- packed day.
In the morning, we were loaded onto a big open- sided truck to transport us to the source of the White Nile, where we would begin our day. As we waited for our driver to show up, we all signed away our lives on their accident waiver. “This is probably not covered by your travel insurance” one guide warned us. We met a few other Americans that were volunteering at a nearby clinic, so we chatted with them during the ride. We arrived at the Nile River Explorers home base, were served a nice breakfast of fruits, boiled eggs, and chapattis, and then were given some basic introductory and safety tips, then we suited up in lifejackets and helmets. We had to get back on the truck to drive a little farther to the start point, and finally, after two and a half months (or maybe 19 years) of waiting, I was ready to raft the Nile.
I was placed in a raft with a few other MSID kids and this nice Egyptian guy we met at camp that morning. Our guide, a South African named Kirk, got us in the water and told us a little bit about what to expect from our 30 km trip down the river. He said we’d go over four Grade 5 rapids and a lot of Grades 4 and 3 (the highest grade in whitewater rafting is 6, but most guides don’t even attempt those rapids) and we practiced flipping the raft and crawling back in so we’d be ready for when the currents flipped us. Then, we were off.
I have to say that this day probably ranks in the top five of my life. It’s difficult to explain how exciting rafting on the Nile is, but I’ll do my best. On the first big rapid, my group flipped. I was stuck under water for what felt like a really long time, but the company had about two safety kayakers per raft, so they spread out to pull the seven of us out of the water and get us back to our raft. There was one rapid, called Bujagali Falls, that Kirk warned us we were absolutely not supposed to flip over in. The area was shallow and rocky, and he assured us we wouldn’t like it if we had to swim it outside the boat. Luckily, he was a great guide, so we were able to paddle to steer ourselves clear of the danger zone and flop down the falls with successfully. During the stretches of calm water after a big rapid, we were able to jump out of the boats and swim around for a while. Oh, except in the areas where the big crocs hang out. In those places, they suggested that we stay close to the boat if we wanted to swim. We all decided to just stay put in the raft during those stretches. We didn’t’ see any hippos or crocodiles, the two most dangerous animals in the Nile, but we saw a lot of birds. We were served a lunch of fruit and biscuits from the lead safety boat while we floated down one of the calmer stretches.
The last rapid, the grand finale of the day, was called “The Bad Place”. By this point Kirk had ditched us to go work the video camera in one of the kayaks, so another kayaker named Bernard took over our raft. Bernard admitted that he hadn’t guided a raft since August and that he wasn’t sure our paddling was strong enough to avoid the Bad Place. This rapid was not too bad if you stay out of the surging wave in the middle, but doing so requires a pretty strong crew. Well, we approach the Bad Place hoping for the best, and in a way that’s what we got. Bernard was right, we were not strong enough to avoid the Bad Place. Instead, we got sucked right it. We were trapped in a strong wave for a LONG time- the boat didn’t flip but it was stuck, it couldn’t move forward or backward. Instead, it shook us all around, so bodies and parts of the raft were flying everywhere. At one point I looked up and saw some Ugandan kids on a cliff above the river pointing and laughing at us. Finally people started to fall off of the boat; Bernard pushed anybody that didn’t fall. We were sucked down very deep for a very long time, but the rescue kayakers collected us all when we finally surfaced. As we moved onto dry land, members of other rafts came up and told us they were “very scared” for us. Our other friends from MSID, who had been in a different raft, said they got really nervous when they tried to count to make sure we all came back up. The good news is, the video crew decided that was the best wipeout of the day and we made the highlights reel in the movie they produced and showed back at camp that night. I bought the DVD, so you can all see it when I get back.
After the rafting was over, we went back to camp for a barbeque and celebration. It had been a very good, but very exhausting day, so most of us were in bed reasonably early again. Today we just packed up and traveled back home. I’m tired but it was fantastic to see Lucy again. She missed me and has to fill me in on the Storm Over Paradise episode I missed on Friday night, so I better get going.