Boda-bodas (12 hours on a bus)

TL;DR: pretty crap travel day, but we made it to QENP from Kampala.


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That's right, 12 hours on a bus. And almost half that time it wasn't even going...
The day started well enough, got our phones and hotel reservations sorted and we made it to the bus station easily enough. Not knowing any better though, we got forced on a Bwera bus by some dirtbag conductor. Take that name, Bwera, and forever remember to hate it. From there, things spiraled down in a series of events I'd rather forget. Let's just say today is the day we saw the worst of Ugandans. All that because of public transport.

On the plus side, we had comfortable seats, which I'm incredibly thankful for considering we were sitting on them for 12 hours straight. We had brilliant views on the countryside, as it shifted from urbanization to landscapes of countryside filled with banana plantations and dirt roads lined with goats. Speaking of which, grilled goat on a stick is delicious, and vendors often jumped on the bus to sell us some, before dropping off several kilometers down the road. We took shifts sleeping, not quite sure what safety is like in Uganda yet. Turns out we would have been fine, safety is for the most part not a concern here!

It was 10pm and well into the night by the time we alighted in Katunguru, a village in the middle of Queen Elizabeth National Park. The sole advantage of our bus is that it dropped us off exactly where we needed to be, while pretty much every other bus would have dropped us off at a town an hour away. But it was nighttime, which we hadn't considered. Our initial plan was to hop straight on two bodas and head to the lodge we'd booked with. Instead though, Katunguru seemed to have been the ONE place where no bodas were waiting at the bus stop. Instead, we met a local called Jeffrey who offered a cheap ride to the lodge in his car. He turned out to be a guide as well, so we took his number and ended up calling him later that night to book him for a safari the next day. His services were a lot cheaper than those offered by the guides from our ridiculously upper class lodge. That turned out to be one of the best choices we made all trip. The lodge did not.

Not that it wasn't a nice place, it's just we unloaded pretty much half the week's budget there on two nights without realizing. So at the lodge, we had a late dinner with a couple Niles, before retreating to our romantic little twin bed hut in the middle of nature. Needless to say our planning had been quite haphazard. A bad day, which unfortunately had plenty of potential.

peace