The past two weeks in Uganda have been awesome!

For the past two weeks Lisa and I have been traveling across Uganda. This place is incredible! It is aptly dubbed "The Pearl of Africa". We have seen some beautiful country and had a lot of adventures. We'll try to summarize an exhausting and wonderful past two weeks. Lisa should be putting pictures up soon on Facebook, so stay posted. There's some good ones!

Midnight Ride across Lake Victoria

We left our friends Rich and Carli in Mwanza to take an all-night ferry ride across Lake Victoria. I didn't sleep most of the night even though the quarters were adequate. It was hot, noisy and every noise I heard I was sure was a burglar coming in! Nevertheless, it was an interesting way to travel.

Lake Bunyonyi

Our first stop was to beautiful and peaceful Lake Bunyoni. This place was surrounded by steep terraced hills. The place we stayed was right on the water. And, good news, they also had wood dugout canoes for rent. So, of course we tried our hand at this form of transport (still common amongst the local folks). Bummer, I left our passports in my shorts pocket! I was so worried about tipping over, we only canoed for about ½ an hour! What a sissy I am!

Climbing Mt. Sabyinyo- 3669 m tall

After the relaxation of Lake Bunyoni, we tried our extinct volcano climbing skills on Mt. Sabyinyo in southwest Uganda. This consisted of climbing up three peaks, on rickety (often broken) tree ladders, in the rain! We slogged through the mud in our sandals doing our best to keep up with our rifle packing guide. Every now and then the clouds would clear and you could see beautiful views of Rwanda and the Congo. Then, the rain would start again and the view would be reduced to about 10 feet or so. When we finally reached the summit, we were frozen and wet, but happy to be standing in three countries at once – Congo, Rwanda and Uganda. All in all, we hiked about 9 miles and did a 1200 meter ascent – sometimes straight up. To put it plainly, it kicked our butts! But, the views and personal challenge made it worthwhile.

Hiking in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest

This is easily the highlight of the trip for me. We hiked through Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. Its name is well deserved – you couldn't see more than 50 feet into the jungle because the foliage was so dense! You could pay $500 to track gorillas here (one of two places in the world…the other was where we did the hiking the day before). But, we decided that was too much money. We instead decided to hike through the forest and just see the jungle and whatever animals we could – about 12 miles. We hired a porter and began. The jungle was intense! We had a good path the whole way. However, I just can't describe how beautiful/wild/strange the plant life was surrounding us.

Bad Hotel Experience with a Twist

We stayed in some bad hotels on this trip – most tolerable enough for the price. But, the night before we left for Kampala, we stayed in a really bad hotel. We got overcharged for it, food was bad, really bad bathroom, etc… Then, the owner (and I swear the whole town) decided to have a party just outside our room most of the night. Needless to say, it wasn't a pleasant stay. The next morning, the owner had our breakfast prepared only for Lisa to discover the milk was sour. As we were sitting there (around 6 am after no sleep), the owner asked us to contribute to her political campaign! After all we had been through, we politely declined.

Modern Life in Kampala

From southwest Uganda we took a bus to Kampala, Uganda's capital city. We have been living in Monduli now for nearly 5 months. When we arrived in Kampala (1.5 million people) our eyes nearly popped out of our heads! It was very modern, clean and overall inviting! We had brewed coffee (not the instant I usually have to drink), went to a shopping mall (bought a cook book!), went to two movies, saw a museum and a cultural center. Let's just say that Lisa's not really a city/shopping person. But, give her five months of the relative sensory deprivation of Monduli, and she was all about it! We really enjoyed Kampala.

Rhino Sanctuary

From Kampala, we headed north. Along the way was the Ziwa Rhino Sanctuary. It was a bit of a let-down. They had reintroduced nine white rhinos to the area. We did get to walk up to them (apparently it's OK to do this with white rhinos – black rhinos and we would have been toast). After watching only three of the rhinos rest under the tree for about 20 minutes, we were pretty well set and ready to head back. I don't really know what I was expecting – maybe them to charge at us or something cool like that. Oh well, it was cool to see this species, which was nearly hunted to extinction, slowly making a come-back.

Murchison Falls

North of the rhino sanctuary was a very cool place – Murchison Falls. These falls are formed from the Nile rushing through a narrow gap in the rocks. We took a boat up the Nile past crocodiles, hippos, elephants, monkeys and wart hogs. At the base of the fall, we hiked about an hour to the top of the falls. The force of the water was cool. Plus, the trail was covered in a sort of mica rock which made it look like glitter. Besides being really hot and humid, it was a cool day. It was a humbling experience to stand next to something so powerful.

Rafting the Nile in Jinja

Our final adventure was white water rafting the Nile River in Jinja. We went down class five rapids. In case you don't know – which we really didn't – the biggest is class six! We went down a few class threes and fours – spooky stuff. Then, came one class five named Silverback. About ½ way through the rapid our raft tipped over and all six of us riding it fell out. We all went way under the water. I swallowed a lot of water and it took what seemed like forever to reach the surface. I was coughing and spitting out water when I finally came up. Ironically enough, Lisa, who is quite afraid of water, was way less panicked than I was! She told me later she was just thinking "well this sucks." We kicked and struggled our way to the safety raft and then finally back to our original raft. Overall we went down three class five rapids – one with a 15 foot drop! Gladly, we only tipped over the once (in Silverback). It was one of the scariest things I have ever done, even though I've been rafting several times before. What a great end to the trip!

Heading back to Monduli

Now, we are in Jinja just waiting to take a 16 hour bus ride back to Arusha and then back to Monduli. We are so thankful for these experiences and seeing some of God's wild creation. We'll have about a week to get ready and then teaching resumes.