Uganda onwards

From Entebbe we had collected our parcel from Nick at paddy o’ganda’s Irish bar, recovered from the severe hangover, me not Milly because Milly never has a hangover, 🙄 no really she is immune to alcohol after effects.

We drove north to and crossed the equator (again, last time was Kenya but that was on a back road and had no markings so no need to stop and look at a gps showing 0.0000001 deg South.

The Ugandan main road version was full on tourist trap, we had pizza, watched the big German tour buses gorge out tourists into the shops and then Milly went shopping for tat.

We looked at the water swirling pots, and spotted the trick…. What is it ?.. Come to the Uganda equator to find out if it’s real or not, or just use your intelligence. or google, what I will say is yes the water swirls diverent directions either side of the bright yellow line 😜

we stayed at the leopard’s camp on the edge of another expensive game park, a bit scruffy in need of a good tidy up but OK for a night,

We then decided to have a short drive and stay on the overland campsite on lake Bunyoni,

As usual it is a dirt track up to most tourist places out here , but what we were not expecting was lots of small quarries at the side of the tracks, they were hand quarrying the stone and breaking it into gravel, about 25mm in size ,there where piled lots of very neat small stones beside the roads.

Now normally these would have machines to break the rock face and grinding machines to create the gravel but all these quarries were operated by hand and by children!

5 or 6 years old, the only adults were women who watched over them.

after only 2km emerge 5 star hotels for tourists, Africa’s reality right there for us to see.

Anyway, us not staying at a luxury Lodge wouldn’t help matters, we need to put money into the economy so the rich Ugandans can have nice gravel on those driveways.

The overland campsite is amazing there were 3 big busses camped up, a South African, Swedish pink bus (as seen at Jungle Junction in Nairobi)

The camp area, was perfect, and we camped next to the water with some Germans in a rented Toyota 100 with RTT and some Swiss in a new Bimobil 4×4 sprinter.

the lake is beautiful, like lake Windermere on steroids but with sun and no riff raff, except us.

We had steaks in the restaurant and beer and wondered how the child laborers would feel about us being amazed it was only costing half the UK price or about one years income for them, but then the beer kicked in and we wandered back to Dogger along a path beside the lake that wouldn’t look out of place at Chatsworth house.

The next day was Border crossing day, the terrain changed as we headed north to the volcano national park areas, very hilly with incredible farmers making crops on extreme sloping ground.

Ugandan Rwanda border was painless and I wish I could have taken a photo of the female guard who was so small and short that she dragged the mussle of her AK47 on the tarmac wherever she walked.

We did wonder if we should have paid the $700 each to trek to the gorillas, in Uganda or now have to pay $1000 dollars in Rwanda,. 😐