Early Starts and Late Nights

21/04/2012
Talk about early mornings... Today was a 4.20am start so that we could get out of Kampala before the traffic got heavy. Apparently leaving half an hour later results in two hours stuck in traffic.

As you can imagine, the truck was pretty quiet for the first couple hours of driving, with most people trying to get some more sleep before we pulled up at the equator for breakfast. It rained and rained an rained all day, so we had lovely photos taken of us straddling the equator, decked out in our rain gear.

To keep ourselves entertained on the long drive day, the five of us on the beach after breakfast played the Alphabet Game, where you have to go around in a circle and come up with a word beginning with each letter of the alphabet for a given theme. It started off quite tamely (countries of the world), but after a few rounds descended into crudeness. I'll let you use your imaginations for the themes we came up with.



Even though it was a long drive day, the scenery out the truck windows was beautiful. Our destination for the night was Kabale in Southwestern Uganda, and we drove through spectacular terraced mountains, green with this seasons crops.

At our campsite in Kabale, we crossed paths with a trans- African Trails truck. They started their trip in October last year and will be on the road until July this year. What a bunch of misery-guts they are! The personalities on that truck were just toxic, and all of them were absolutely hating their trip. It really made me appreciate the group we have on our Oasis trip. It's definitely true that the people you travel with can make or break a trip, and I've lucked out with these guys. The African Trails group just couldn't get along whatsoever. At the bar we went to for drinks after dinner, they spent the last hour of the night arguing over who had to pay the last 4000 shillings on the bar tab (that's less than $2!!). Anyway, thank god I'm not on that truck!

The night ended just before 2am, even though we have another early start tomorrow.