time off in Jinja and Kampala, but I think we are both still a good
few kilos off our normal weight. Despite the availability of pizzas
and cake here and there (if you looked hard), we couldn't entirely
avoid having the more traditional dishes of matoke (mashed up
plantains - a bit like mashed potatoes), rice and beans.
All in all, however, our time off was great. We did some really cool
rafting in Jinja (I don't think any of us were expecting rapids like
that) and a great 3 day trip to Murchison falls national park, which
involved a game drive, a boat cruise to the base of the falls and a
walk up to the top of the falls. The Murchison falls are something
else! The entire Victoria Nile (which must be over 100m wide at some
points before the falls) gets rammed through a 7m wide gap in the
rocks - the power is truly awesome.
I won't go into too much detail about our time up to and including our
stay at Jinja/Kampala as James has a blog all typed out and ready to
go on his flash disk - but thanks to the intermittent and
unpredictable nature of Internet here (there was a power cut at the
time I think) it never got out. We will try and get that up a bit
later today if all goes well. On that topic however - we have tried
uploading photos in Kampala and failed (could just about get them off
the camera), and won't have time tonight before the internet cafe
closes, so we are still not sure when we'll get chance again! We will
do it ASAP though, we promise!
What I can say though, is that the 3 days from Jinja to where we are
now (Fort Portal) were not quite as easy as we were hoping. Well, we
didn't quite expect it to be easy, but we thought that after our chill
out session we would be feeling a bit stronger once we got back on the
bikes. This wasn't the case - I think it may be to do with the never
ending hills in this part of Uganda, which seem to get bigger and
bigger as you approach the Rwenzori mountains, as well as our tight
schedule we have set to try and make up some time (130+km days).
We have passed through some small patches of spectacular, dense
tropical rainforest though which has been great. In fact today we
cycled through part of the Kabile national park, which (according to
Lonely Planet) has the highest concentration of primates in Africa,
including Chimpanzees. Unfortunately we didn't see any cheeky chimps
swinging from the vines, but we did see at least two different species
of monkey, one of which I think was the black and white tailed Colobus
monkey. Oh and we also saw a bird which looked very much like a black
parrot!
We also bumped into a South African guy on his motorbike who works at
a Cobalt Mine about 70km South of Fort Portal - who said we should
pull in for a braai (bbq) and a swim and could even stay in the mine's
guest house for the night. It doesn't quite fit with our schedule (we
should do more then 70km tomorrow) but we may take him up on the braai
and swim!
Right, time to eat - we might be lucky and find somewhere serving
pumpkin, sweet potato, matoke and g-nut (peanut) sauce (yes, it tastes
just like peanut butter!).
Keep checking for the next blog!
Mark
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