Arrived.
After a seven hour bus ride and an eleven hour sleep, Sarah and I have arrived in Gulu Town in northern Uganda.
We hopped on our bus at 11:30 AM and due to unfinished tiles being loaded to the bottom of the bus for transport, we didn’t leave until around 1:30 PM. While on the bus, merchant upon merchant lept on and tried to sell us newspapers, chicken, watches, wallets, purses, loaves of bread and various soft drinks. It was novel at first since this would never happen in Canada but after a couple of hours of salespeoples’ asses in your face (this was an already cramped coach bus to begin with) I kind of reached a breaking point. Oh well. You get used to it.
Along the way, it was incredible to see the countless villages that we passed. Sometimes when the bus stopped to pick up more passengers or to slowly creep through a village due to security or ridiculously high speed bumps more merchants showed up with goat kabobs (delicious), water (chlorinated), roasted baby plantains (oddly savoury) which made for admittedly, an amazing dinner on the road. The cool part about all of this was that no one left or entered the bus for these transactions. You just bought it directly out of the bus windows. Now that’s service.
Here’s a list of animals and nature that we saw:
- Goats
- Cattle
- A single agile cat
- Chickens (including those attached to the back seat of bikes)
- Baboons
- A vervet monkey
- The most menacing river that Sarah and I have ever seen.
Upon arriving in Gulu, we were met by Jacob. One of the best parts of Sarah working in Korea for a year are the well-travelled friends that she has made. Her friend Gavin (still in Korea) volunteered in Gulu a couple of years ago and gave us a couple of names/phone numbers. That’s where Jacob comes into play. He met us at the bus station, took us to our apartment, which he made arrangements for and then took us to a rooftop bar for a couple of games of pool and some enlivening Ugandan beer. Exhaustion took over and Sarah and I headed back to our apartment for a second night under a mosquito net which makes going to sleep surprisingly cozy.
Pictures are going to be uploaded soon once we eat our breakfast at Coffee Hut (it seems to be Gulu’s ex-pat hangout).
