Five a.m. boda-boda ride to the bus station – black sky, no stars (city smog), and no traffic until we’re at the bus station where early morning chaos had already broken between truck drivers, bus drivers, boda-boda drivers, taxi drivers and ticket-sellers. I sit in the bus next to a man half-asleep, head nodding occasionally in slumber, the bus driver bumping my hand fist-to-fist in greeting and a few “Hey, mzungu!” before falling asleep on the grey window pane. The first hour of the ride is bumpy and uncomfortable, but by sunrise we hit smooth cement all the way to Fort Portal. A brief stop for breakfast and my seat neighbor spends a few minutes leaning on my lap while buying chapatti wrapped in blue and red lined school paper and mango juice in a water bottle.
The way into Fort Portal brings a different Uganda – similar to the greenery that became so familiar in Gulu, but which Kampala has none of. We’re surrounded by the perpetually blue shadows of the Rwenzori mountains, the highest mountain chain in Africa; green trees and fields, mais, banana and matoke plantations; hillsides sliced into small square plots of tea leave plantations, dotted across are men pulling burlap sacks full of tea leaves, sweating in hot sunshine under dark wide brimmed hats. On the outer edges of the field, the tea leaves are dry and crisp brown under the sunshine.
The bus parks in the taxi park – typical to every town in Uganda, a concentration of white and blue minivans, private taxis, buses and waiting boda-bodas – and I grab a driver and head up the hill into town. I’m a bit disoriented, and get dropped off in front of what I presume to be the center of Fort Portal. A quick breakfast of chapatti and scrambled eggs at the Rwenzori Traveler Inn and a quick read of the New Vision paper. Scandal over police brutality towards government ministers.
I walk up the hillside and down some of the orange dirt roads branching off the main tarmac ‘highway’. Fort Portal is one of the friendliest towns I’ve visited: the young guys biking around wave friendly hellos, the children scream “Mzungu, how are you, I am fine!” from a mile away, the women tending to washing or selling vegetables on the road side wave and the young teenagers dragging jerry cans of water smile and say a polite good morning. I buy a tomato from an elderly lady wrapped in flower-printed clothes who’s shredding a head of cabbage on a blanket in the shade. A toddler dawdles behind her, and two children, sister carrying a tiny sister with angry eyebrows, emerge from their small house when I walk down the rocky driveway. I buy a tomato and she goes inside to grab me a cup of water to wash it.
I walk back to the tarmac road and farther up the tarmac hill, I find some old stone steps leading up a grassy green hillside with flat trees on an angle and sit under one of them. The breeze is sweet and warm and I can see the Parliament buildings, or, as the two boys sitting behind me say, the “seat of the Toro Kingdom.” Fort Portal is the center of what is known as the Toro Kingdom, an ethnic region of Uganda.
After a quick sleep in the shade, I walk back into town. Some boda-boda drivers offer me a desert of cassava, bean and banana cakes and a ride to Lake Nkuruba. I continue through town, the usual disorganized buildings and small shops. I buy a piece of cloth for a wrap-skirt from a young woman with a kind smile who organizes a boda-boda ride for me to the Rwenzori View Guesthouse. About a 10 minute ride out of town, we pass a pastel white and turquoise candy-like mosque with small green half moon crescents and leave the dusty city behind to rejoin endless green fields. The Guesthouse is off a red dirt road and settled amongst rolling green hills dotted with brown and white cows, goats, dogs and matoke plantations. My little banda has a view of its own miniature jungle and the owner has a small German Shepherd puppy who follows me around the whole afternoon.
Around 5 pm I take a quick walk out of the guesthouse to the surrounding fields. After snapping a few shots upon request of construction workers building a new Minister’s mansion up on the hillside, I head into the bushes and wander through the matoke plantations. Baby goats stumble around with bits of rotting string around their necks. Back at the banda, I drink a glass of red wine and read a strange crime novel as the sun sets over the Rwenzoris and the air turns pinkish in the cool evening. S. joins me as dusk settles in and we eat dinner in the guesthouse. The set-up is awkward: a large round wooden dinner table with all the guests gathered around. To our right sit a newly wed couple, an older guy with a patchy beard and a young girl with wide blue eyes. Both from Texas. Dinner is delicious and the first solid food I’ve eaten in a week (discounting the airplane): leek and carrot soup, sweet tilapia, potatoes and mushroom casserole, green salad with soft avocadoes and warm chocolate tarte for dessert.
I wake up for a sunrise run. Over the pale green and blue hillsides, two children carry bright yellow jerry cans, small shadows in a pink and yellow sky. Early chores that children in Canada would not dream of doing. In the morning we gather for an equally good breakfast – scrambled eggs, toast, butter and cheese, hot coffee with warm milk, mushrooms and tomatoes, sausages – and then head to Lake Nkuruba. An older couple working in Kampala offer us a ride in their 4×4 up to the carter lake – they’re spending a day in retreat and we’re going to sleep and swim for the next 48 hours. The conversation is interesting and S. points out that the older generation of ex-pats working in Uganda often have complaints: the British owner of the guesthouse complained about the lack of punishment for corruption and the state of the Church. This couple criticized the educational system for not being forward-thinking and engaging enough (which we largely agreed with their opinion – S. and our drivers say that the schooling system is largely based on memorization not application). The older woman did say at one point something along the lines of, “what is our position to be talking about this and trying to generate ‘change’?” To which I think most of us will stay quiet, without answer.
We arrive safely after rushing down potholed roads and through more tea plantations. Anastine, the manager of the Lake Nkruba Nature Reserve and Community Campsite, is wonderful. Always smiling and friendly, her little cheerful toddler rushing around slapping any moving insect on the ground or always found trailing behind a young girl sweeping the floors. The campsite is an interesting set-up: it’s owned by the Catholic Church but run by the community who are given shares of the profits. This means guests get fresh milk, vegetables, eggs, meats and fruits every day: in return, we contribute to the harvest salary.
We’re staying in the ‘Lakeside’ banda which is located about 100 m down a hill from the main campsite and right on the edge of Lake Nkuruba. Crystal clear deep green water, the thick tangle of jungle flora, the chattering, fighting and bickering of a dozen colobus monkeys in the trees – quite entertaining to watch until the baby fell 10 m from the sky and caught itself by a tiny hand before hitting the ground. We must of swam a dozen times in the warm water: the lake shore usually empty of people except a few fishermen sitting on their heels waiting for a catch, one early morning fisherman squatting on a sugar-cane raft pulling in fishing nets and a few young boys filling jerry cans for shower water.
The evening we arrive we went for a four-hour hike around Lake Nkuruba to a place called “Top of the World.” Patrick, our guide, answers a million of my questions with patience. We walk through banana and matoke plantations (though they look rough, the leaves are wide and soft and might cover 3/4 of my height, Svea would have marveled at these), past y
ellow flowered acacias and bright red African fire flame trees. Bushes of purple and blue flowers, and through corn fields, past other grassy crater lakes, and through small villages of two or three houses.
Eventually we climb a steep hillside up through another small settlement where a young boy shows us half a dozen puppies sleeping in a dirt hole. Then we hike directly up from their small houses, a steep hillside dotted with goats, to find a view of the Rwenzoris, the Queen Elizabeth National Park, crater lakes; the sound of children’s chatter and African music from radios; a warm breeze and bits of ashes floating from a slash and burn fire.
On the way home we walk through a bigger town where S. buys a sturdy sugar cane stalk. A deep red and yellow sunset – the most beautiful are African – as we near the campsite. A quick swim in cool water, clouds reflected in little ripples and the setting sun slowly sending a dark shade over the lake. Around eight we stumble in the dark up to the main campsite where Anastine is cooking spicy chicken curry, rice, sweet guacamole, warm chapattis and vegetable stew for us, the only guests. Her kitchen: a stout black cast-iron stove with a wood fire underneath and a lantern hanging from the roof casting a dark shadow, a bubbling pot of chicken curry and a toddler half asleep on a chair in the corner.
The evenings in Africa are never silent: at dusk there’s the chant of birds who sing loud and clear and talk to each other through loud echoes, there’s the orchestra-like song of the insects with strange clicking and clanging noises completely unfamiliar, the throaty yell of the bullfrog and, at three a.m., shouts from across the lake shores. When I wake up there’s a young man in a green and pink training jacket standing with a gun near our door – the guard – and the lake has fallen silent again only to be replaced by the noisy colobus.
In the morning, an early morning nude swim and a delicious breakfast, big slices of toast with butter, scrambled eggs, chocolate pancakes and fresh papaya and pineapple, hot Arabic coffee with fresh local milk. I spot a black and white colobus with a thick hairy white beard and tale and a white mowhawk, spiky on its back.
