Making waves

Just about recovered from our hangovers we decided to leave the cosy compound and nile view of the backpackers and head into Jinja town for a look around. We needed some exercise after our hog roasts and boozey nights so we chose to walk the 8km or so into town, much to the bemusement of all the taxi drivers. As we were walking we could hear drums and as we got closer saw some people wearing ash and feathers and waving branches in the air. We thought maybe it was a wedding so Dave breached the crowd to ask what was happening. It turns out some young boys were about to havetheir ritual circumsision and the man dancing in feathers was going to perform the operation. The boy and the boy's mothers were the ones in ash and they were touring the village to raise some pennies to pay the "doctor". Two young men described their memories of their own circumsicion which is performed standing up, without anaesthetic...in public. Poor boy. Someone told me that there were supposed to be two boys but one had run away...i wish him godspeed.

The next music we heard on our journey was a version of "My heart will go on" (the titanic song), like a very loud mobile phone tone, played from a the front of a motorcycle on the back of which was an ice box. We had stumbled across the African version of the icecream man! I guess they abandoned greensleves after independence.

We made it to Jinja which is a very nice town - wide, tree lined avenues with indian influenced architecture and a few futuristic looking hindu temples on the skyline. We just pottered about and then decided to try and cut across the waterfront, through what looked like the grounds of a hotel but was actually the sailing club (which bizarrely featured a 8ft stone tyrannasaurus rex). We were just tip toeing past the end of the gardens when we heard a shout behind us...rumbled by a security guard. The guard was a young man who refused to accept our story that we were merely trying to take a short cut and with some affectated moralistic pride he told us we were trespassing and he'd have to hold us in detention until his boss returned...unless we wanted to negotiate. We feigned ignorance about what that might mean and over the next two hours, while we sat on a rock watching and enjoying the sunset over the lake and the hundreds of bats circling above us, tried to get him to call the police, wait for the boss, become his friend, use logic about the legality of detaining us without an arrest, and in the end after we'd waited long enough to show we werent going to pay a bribe we apologised once more so he gave us a lecture about how we should have just apologised earlier and magnanimously decided to let us go. After that he was overtly nice to us, even giving me a hug when dave's back was turned and asking to be my friend, he made sure we were safe in a taxi and promised to visit us the next day for some drinks. A very strange evening.

Just before we went to bed we toyed with the idea of using our half price re-run voucher for the rafting because it was so much fun the first time. With the voucher you got a free nights accommodation, breakfast and evening meal, two free drinks *and* a free transfer to Kampala so really it was silly not to! So we went again on my birthday this time. This time we were paired with a romanian orthodox religious lawyer and holy relic expert and his Tanzanian companion who he was sponsoring through college after meeting him on a previous trip. A seriously nice and holy man who amused us with jokes and stories on the way. Neither of them could swim but they were both up for the hard lines through the rapids, not realising that you are very likely to end up in the water - So we spent most of the training kilometres trying to convince them to get into the water and trusting their life jackets. By the end though they were jumping in at any opportunity and having a whale of a time. I really enjoyed helping these two to get over their fears and watching them at the end with new confidence.

After the rafting we headed straight back to Kampala to meet up with Jonquil and Seb who we'd made friends with over Christmas. They were cycling around lake Victoria and had left a few days before to cycle to Kampala to meet us at the national theatre for a night of spoken word and hip hop i'd wanted to go to. Our transfer was stuck in traffic so we were nearly two hours late but thank heavens (despite thinking we'd stood them up) they'd gone in so we managed to meet them, still bedraggled from the rafting but happy to see them. After the poetry thing (which degenerated into shouty gangster hip hop just as the orthodox christian rejoined us, of course) we went to a few bars, chatted lots, drank lots till our cash ran out. We even found a shisha bar and made easy friends with some ugandans at the end of the night. On the way back we stopped at the "Obama chapati stall" and watched the staff throwing chapati dough back and forth between each other and amused them with our muzungu ways with not a word of english spoken but much chuckling. A great end to a great night out.

When we got back to our hotel there was a man tied up on the floor of the ground floor restaurant, snoring. Apparently he'd been caught trying to break in so they were waiting to decide what to do with him. *shrug*, what can you say to that eh? There's always something intriguing going on. Tomorrow we fly to Ethiopia. I wonder if it'll have the quirks of Uganda. Can't wait to find out.