Ugandan Adventures and the Perfect Hydro Site

Friday night saw my first "bodaboda" ride; Uganda is full of men with 125cc motorcycles, more than happy to be paid around 1000 shillings (25p) to shuttle you around. The name is a corruption of "border to border", as the bikes were originally used to ferry people crossing no man's land between borders. On Dan's advice, we made our driver demonstrate his brakes and headlight before setting off. The ride was surprisingly relaxing.

On Saturday, we returned to the promising site, only to be told by a local man that the river led to much bigger drops further downstream. We followed him off into fields and were dissapointed to see the river diminishing as we followed it. We logged a small drop on the GPS before continuing to the next, apparently bigger drop. This process was repeated about 5 times over the next 2 hours, with each drop being admittedly bigger than the last. As we walked through the countryside we gathered quite a crowd of curious and friendly locals. My neck and face were beginning to burn quite badly, so I stopped to top up the sun block. The locals laughed (in good nature) about my "weak muzungu skin". Eventually, the hills became steeper and the river faster flowing, and the sites we came across more and more promising. Twice, we had decided that a site was perfect before being led to an even better one. The final site had a drop of around 30m and a huge flow rate; we still need to crunch the numbers on the various measurement methods we used. The locals were somewhat bemused by Dan and I clambering around in the river. The only concern was usage: the local population was much lower than the river could potentially supply, given the huge costs of efficient transmission over distance. One man stated that there were 8000 households within 2km, which was clearly ridiculous. On the walk back to the car, we were low on water and what we had was very warm, so I decided to try out the Waterstraw, an instantaneous filtering device that claims to be capable of removing anything harmful down to chemical or viral contaminants. Our guide, Silva, and the locals were very concerned when I started drinking from the river, but on explanation and demonstration were very impressed, and wanted to know how much one cost. We also came across a mango tree, and some children trying to knock them down. We helped and took a mango each - they were safe to eat due to their (removed) skin, in much the same way as Bananas. It was the juiciest, most flavoursome piece of fruit I have ever tasted.

On returning to the hostel, I was glad to remember my solar shower: a thick black 20 litre plastic bag and tap arrangement, that I had left out in the sun before leaving. With a little thought to conservation, the bag supplied almost  3 warm showers, a rare luxury. We decided to go to a restaurant in Fort Portal called Piers (but pronounced "Pierre's") that specialized in Pizza, in an attempt to minimise typical African dining waiting times. We invited three film-makers also staying the hostel, making an educational film about the impact of human activities surrounding the Mpanga river on those living downstream. The film was to be entirely in Roturo (the local language) and shown along the length of the Mpanga river. After a lot of food, beer and good conversation, bodas took us back to the hostel.