Living here is really quite a lesson in patience; things move at a strikingly different pace, especially when it comes to transportation. People are content to wait for much much longer than even the most patient American. A few transportation stories:
- While trying to get to Masaka from Kiwangala the other day, I waited almost three hours for the taxi to fill with passengers (they will not leave without at least 5-6 people). It never did, so I had to pay double the price just to get the driver to take me.
- Last week I was crammed into a Toyota Camry with nine adults, two small children and a trunk overflowing with manure (which my backpack was squished on top of and still smells). Although, my Peace Corps friend JP told me his record for number of people in a taxi car is 14. I hope I never have to experience that.
- The ultimate transportation story, however, results from our disastrous trip home from the Ssese Islands this past weekend…
On our way to the islands we opted to negotiate each leg of the journey separately, which included two taxi rides, a ferry ride to the islands, and a long motorbike (boda boda) to the beach resorts. When we arrived at the ferry port we discovered that the guid
ebook was about two hours off on the departure time of the ferry. Rather than wait around for two hours, I decided to talk a fisherman into taking us across the lake in his small fishing boat for 20,000 shillings. Then we had to negotiate the price of the boda ride, which turned out to be six times more expensive than anyone had expected. I hoped that on the way home we could find a direct taxi.
We finally arrived at our lodging for the weekend (one of the other interns had picked it at random from his guidebook), and were in for quite a treat. It was a bizarre little camp run by a crazy, hippie German couple. They came to Uganda with a backpack in 1993 and have never left. Despite the wild owners, the camp was cheap, equipped with running water and the food was surprisingly good.
Funny story about the food though-- at lunch one intern ordered a toasted sandwich with cheese, veggies and sauce. He was expecting a grilled cheese type sandwich with tomato/other veggies and some sort of sauce. What he received was a pile of French fries sandwiched between two pieces of ant-covered bread squirted with ketchup. (Evidently, french fries count as “veggies.) What made the story hilarious though was when another intern tried to order a cheeseburger and was served the exact same thing! She took it back and pointed to the sandwich saying “This has neither cheese nor meat; therefore it cannot be a cheeseburger.” The kitchen still claimed that what she was given was, in fact, a cheeseburger. I, luckily, avoided the food drama by ordering a simple banana pancake.
The camp was right on the beach, and although it was very beautiful, relaxing and full of entertaining monkeys running around.
The trip home was what became a comedy of transportation errors. First mistake—we asked the crazy German hippie woman to arrange a taxi back to the ferry. She claimed she knew someone who could take us all the way back to Masaka for half the price of what we paid getting there. Of course we readily agreed. The next morning the taxi driver picked us up at 9:45……and we did not arrive home until over NINE hours later!! Between waiting fours hours for a ferry, the ferry driver’s inability to dock the boat, endless waiting at military check points and a series of shady taxi drivers—I think we all have never been so ready to get home.
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