The Great African Bus Ride: Part II

The Great African Bus
Ride: Part II

…A new bus finally arrived and we were told by the driver
that we would swap out the luggage once we got to the Ugandan side of the border
and we just needed to get on the bus and we would drive across the bridge and
into Uganda.  We got on the bus but it
wouldn’t start.  We sat there for another
hour until the bus driver finally got it to start. 
We drove down the road about 100 yards and it broke down in the middle
of the bridge blocking both sections of traffic on the border.  So there we were, sitting on a broken down bus
in the middle of a bridge between Kenya and Uganda blocking both sides of the
road.  Finally armed guards from Kenya
came over and told the driver we had to push the bus off the bridge and to the
side of the road.  It was pushed out of
the way and everyone from our bus descended on it, grabbed all of their
luggage from the bus, and headed up the hill to load the new bus.  Adam and I started to get worried that our
new bus would leave without us and we were stuck at the bottom of the hill with
luggage for 11 people while all the girls from our team we were still waiting
outside the Ugandan immigration office. 
We tried to think of ways to get our luggage to the top of the hill
while the bus was still sitting their broken down.  We tried to hire some people with carts to
wheel it all to the top but when we tried to find them they were nowhere to be
found.  I called Sara and had her check
with the new bus and to make sure it wouldn’t leave us. 

Finally the old bus was fixed and made it up the hill to
where the new bus was waiting.  We unloaded all of our luggage from the old bus and the bus driver told us that the compartments under the new bus were full and we had to fill the back seats with our bags.  We loaded up our bags and got on the bus only
to find that there were only 6 empty seats on the bus for 11 of us.  Some of our friends from South Sudan then
made the people on the bus get up and move so there would be room for us because
they wanted to make sure their “visitors” were comfortable- something that
would never happen in America.  Seven
hours after arriving at the border we were finally off and heading to northern
Uganda. 

Once we left the border area we called our contact and he told us we were only about 4
hours away.  PTL.  We immediately started driving on bumpy dirt
roads that were much worse than on the Kenyan side.  I think as soon as I sat down I was sound
asleep.  I was exhausted from all the chaos
and stress of the day.  A few hours later
I woke up to one of my South Sudanese friends staring at me, and telling us that we were going to all get dinner and the bus company was
going to pay for it after all the chaos they caused.  I looked out the window and thought we had
finally made it to Lira…wrong.  We ate
dinner then got back onto the bus for what we thought would just be for an hour
to two more…wrong again.  Again Sara and
I immediately went to sleep while everyone on our team jealously watched us
sleep as they bumped around in their chairs for the next few hours.  As we slept, bags from above our seats bumped
out from their compartment and slammed into Adam’s head, and he has a nice
bruise over his eye to prove it.  A few hours later our
contact called and woke us up saying that we should have been there by
now.  Sara and I were both worried that
we had slept through our stop so I got up to ask someone on the bus where we
were and they replied “South Sudan“.  CRAP!  I
went back and told Sara and we both figured that couldn’t be right.  The team heard us talking and said they were
going to call the embassy to take them back to America if we were really in
South Sudan.  I asked the bus driver and
he said we were about two hours south of Lira. 
We finally hit an actual paved road and then two hours later we
arrived in Lira.  We unloaded our bags
from the back seat of the bus, said goodbye to all of our South Sudanese
friends who had taken us under their wing the past 30+ hours to make sure we
were safe, and then said hello to our contacts in Lira.