The Great African Bus
Ride: Part I
I thought the bus rides on the World Race were bad but they
were nothing compared to what we had to go through to get to Northern Uganda
from Nairobi, Kenya.
Sunday afternoon we got to the bus station around 4, an hour
before our bus was to leave, to add our passport numbers to our bus
ticket. We got there and we were told
that they didn’t need our passport numbers anymore, so we moved all of our
luggage down the street a little and piled it all up against a wall so we could
keep watch over all our bags. Around 5 a
bus pulled up and I went to the office to see if it was our bus and if we could
start loading. I asked and they said our
bus was in the shop getting fixed and wouldn’t be here for two more hours. So we sat on the sidewalk surrounding our
bags making the time pass as quickly as possible. The occasional drunk man walked by and would
strike up conversation, shouting “Obama” once we told them we were Americans,
telling us that Democrats make peace and Republicans make war in Africa, and
singing “Haunka Matata” while we waited for our bus to arrive. 7pm finally came and so did another bus. Again I went up and asked if it was our bus
and they said “no” and that “it would be here in a few minutes” aka two more hours. Finally at 9pm our bus showed up. We loaded up and we were off. Once on the bus we passed around our peanut
butter sandwiches and sleeping pills to hopefully knock us out for the night
drive until we reached the Ugandan border.
After about two hours I was shot up from my chair in mid-sleep as we
reached some insanely bumpy and pot-hole filled dirt roads. As we drove through the Rift Valley the
temperature dropped and we were all throwing on all the clothes we could find
to keep us warm through the night as we bumped in and out of our chairs for the
next ten hours.
We got to the border the next morning around 7am. The bus stopped outside of the Kenyan
immigration office and the bus driver told us we all had to get out and wait
for another bus to arrive because the bus didn’t have the right permits to
enter South Sudan (the end of the line for our bus). We got out of the bus and figured a new bus
would be arriving within the hour, but nothing ever goes as planned in
Africa. We went through Kenyan
immigration and crossed the bridge into Uganda.
We got in line at Ugandan immigration, filled out our immigration forms,
and paid for our visas then waited and waited for the bus to show up. After two hours sitting outside of the
Ugandan immigration office I looked up and noticed everyone from our bus
walking the opposite way back to Kenya.
So Adam and I got up and ran to see why everyone was leaving. Before leaving Nairobi I made some friends
with some men on our bus from South Sudan and they told us to go with them back
to Kenya to see what was taking the bus so long. We got back to the Kenyan side of the border and
our bus was still in the same stop and we were told the same story that our bus
was coming and it was only thirty minutes away.
Adam and I decided it would be best to wait with the bus while everyone
else from the team stayed on the Ugandan side so we could keep them updated on
what was going on. So for a few hours
Adam and I sat in the shade under the bed of a semi-truck just waiting for our
new bus to show up, thinking that our day couldn’t get any worse, only to be
continually proven wrong…
