Mount Elgon and Sipi
So after doing nothing the next day except for walking to a waterfall which was really a rapid…we headed to Mbale because we were contemplating doing Mt Elgon. We stayed at this place called the Mt Elgon View Hotel who said that since it was Sunday that the UWA (Uganda Wildlife Assoc) wasn’t open until the next day. So we hung out and got woken up by a bus that was apparently going to honk for 2 hours waiting for people to fill it up. Because in E Africa they sometimes don’t leave until they’re full. Okay, most of the time. Except for the first bus in the morning.
The next morning we went to the UWA and decided it was going to be too much of a pain. I mean we’d have to rent all the stuff to camp and decide what to cook while on there – but we couldn’t understand what we should bring to cook since we didn’t have a stove and we’d have to be cooking over an open fire and…we just hadn’t thought this through enough. So we decided to pay for a special hire taxi to Sipi Falls because at almost noon we were assured probably a 3 hour wait for a matatu to fill up to Sipi. And it was semi-reasonable. So we arranged it through our hotel and we ended up staying at a place called the Crow’s Nest.
We arranged with a guide to take us to the 3 falls of Sipi but he misunderstood and took us just to 1. Which ended up being okay because we just wandered around the town instead. We wanted to get to the Elgon National park and do a hike since we weren’t able to do the big hike we wanted – but to get there the next day we would either have to walk it (2 hours one-way) or pray it didn’t rain since Moses at Crow’s nest had arranged for transport if it didn’t. Luckily it didn’t rain much. I’m not really understanding the whole why the roads suck totally to national parks. I mean, they really suck around here. There is really no way it could happen if it rained.
Anyway, we were lucky and this guy in this truck took us up to the park. With a bunch of people in the back of the truck. He was very entertaining. John asked him why so many kids ran around naked here (it seems like we’ve seen more naked kids here in Uganda than in the rest of Africa). He said that some people would always be naked if they could – even as adults. So after an unbelievably rough journey we got to the park and paid our $30 USD a piece to get in and got our guide, Alex and his gun. We never saw any big animals, but I guess it must be necessary for safety purposes – we hiked to Tutum Caves and the most amazing waterfall. If we felt the need to take a REALLY UNBELIEVABLY COLD SHOWER, this would be the place. Great water pressure. Only bad thing about the hike was that it POURED on the way back. I was like, oh great, that means we’re walking back to town. But luckily enough it only poured inside the park. So our ride came and picked us up after helping move some bricks and dropping off bamboo on the way down and dropping off various park employees. Oh and he tried to buy a chicken because “he liked the color”. I know NOTHING about picking out chickens, so I’m not sure what color he was looking at because it just looked like any old chicken to me.
Anyway, the next day we headed back to Kampala because we had booked a 3-day Murchison Falls trip via the Kampala Backpackers and it was leaving in a couple of days. But we had to go via Jinja because John forgot his headlamp at the backpackers there and they had found it.
Tags: RTW Trip, Uganda
JohnCin
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