Walking through Uganda

First of all, thank you so much for your support so far! I was really surprised to check my mails today (the first time after last entry) and find out that some of you already send me some donations. Thank you very much for the confidence and I will try my best to put this money at its best use. Today we already had the chance to use a small part of this money by taking a 15 year old street boy who seemed to have his wrist broken to the hospital. He got a shot against the pain today and we go back for an X-ray tomorrow morning, but more on this later!

But back to our journey! After our trip to the Murchison Falls, we actually decided that it is time for some serious walking. So out of the city of Fort Portal in Western Uganda, we went on a two day trekking tour close to the Rwenzori Mountains. The only point we didn't consider - that we would constantly have to walk uphill... (or at least that's how it seemed to us!). This is also the trip where we met Erisa who we mentioned in the last post already.

This is the wonderful hut we slept in with a nice view of the surrounding village (but of course first you had to earn this view by climbing up!). Erisa started this lodge one year ago in order to draw more tourists to the area and create more income for its people.

In the beginning, it was weird to have two guides (Erisa, the local guide and Steve, the real guide) taking care of the two of us, but it turned out to be great! Erisa is also a herbalist and thus could explain all the plants we saw on the way and their different uses in herbal medicine. Steve, who was of our age, participated in a one-year training to be an official tour guide and also knew all the answers to our many questions.

On the first day of our trek, we climbed up a mountain in order to see the border with DR Congo and here is how it looked like:

Yes, it started to rain again! Exactly in the moment we finally reached the top...

Anyways, after we climbed down a bit it stopped raining and the only proof it ever rained were our wet trousers.

In the evening, we enjoyed a great home cooked meal by Erisa's wife and after all the exhaustion went to bed at 7 pm :-)

Our walk on the second day led us through more villages and we could observe rural life a bit. We all know the statistics about how many people actually don't have access to clean water etc., but it was still shocking to see that virtually nobody had tap water at home. Everybody in the village (usually the women and children) has to get water from the nearest well (which might be many kilometers away) every day. So you constantly see people walking along the road with their water canisters on their heads (most of the 8 year old children here are definitely stronger than us!). Another big part of the day is spent by collecting fire wood (also women and children) or taking care of the goats or cows (children).

Given their tasks at home but even more so that the next school is usually far away, quite many children cannot attend primary school... Furthermore, the children tend to hang out alone for quite some parts of the day with the bigger siblings (5 years or older) taking care of the younger siblings while their parents work in the fields.

This is one of the huts we came across on our second day. No adult was in sight. The small boy on the right side of the house was an orphan. When his mother died, he and his siblings were spread to different families to share the burden. Now they receive enough food not to starve but rarely the care a child of this age needs (understandably, considering that the adopting families already have many children of their own and usually not enough means to take care of them). Apparently, the boy was 4 years old but looked no older than 2 to us...

Uganda has an unbelievable number of orphans, mainly due to the long years of (civil) war and lately also due to AIDS and of course a number of other diseases. This area we visited was occupied by rebels from DR Congo for 4 years until 2001. During this time, not only were many people killed, but the ones that survived could not take care of their fields and cattle and mainly had to start from scratch after the rebels left. Also shocking is the number of people we see here that suffer from easily preventable diseases like polio...

Later on during the walk, we met this cute grandpa that was very proud of his kittens :-) He was very keen on showing them to us and hopes that they will catch all the rats around his house.

DIY - toy! You just need somebody who is taller and stronger than yourself to actually push you. I have some nice videos of this and will upload them once back in Germany.

Strong children...

After the trekking, we went to a crater lake region (more than 30 crater lakes!) close to Fort Portal to relax for a few days and do some smaller hikes. But we were definitely happy to be out of the mountains and not walk uphill anymore:

This was our hut on the lovely campsite we stood for a few nights. Profits from this campsite supported an orphanage of 157 children, most of which lost their parents due to AIDS. Fortunately, "only" 11 of the children themselves are infected by HIV.

One of the many crater lakes (if somebody wants a picture of every single one - drop me a mail :-)).

Our usual fan club... Wherever we go, children just come running and follow and observe us for quite some time. They practice their few words of English with us and the bravest ones even dare to touch our white skin.

Good thing: the youngest kids can't escape yet!

Okay, one more crater lake...

Visitors at our campsite

Apparently as many lazy days are not good for us: Natalie got food poisoned on the last day... Given the fact that chimpanzees are easily infected by human diseases, we decided not to track them in Kibale NP but rather go back to Fort Portal to have Natalie tested for malaria (80 cents, negative).

We learnt from our mistakes and quickly signed up for the next walking safari, this time in the south of Uganda. We intended to walk from Buhoma through Bwindi National Park all the way to Kisoro within two days.

But getting to Buhoma was the first challenge! Apparently there is no public transport to this village, particularly not on Sundays, the day we had to travel... So we walked around Kabale (where we were stuck) for a while and let people know of our problem and after a while a pickup-driver going to Buhoma found us. We waited for some more time to find more passengers and in the end we were 4 people in the front and more than 30 (!!!) standing at the back of the pickup. The road was in really bad shape (or better no shape at all!) and every time there was a slope the people in the back had to get out and walk up the hill. As if this wouldn't be enough, our driver happily zipped his banana whiskey and after he finished about 75 ml of it he even more happily opened a beer... It took us about a day to drive these 118 km...

On the first day we walked through Bwindi Impenetrable Forest NP (pure jungle!) and the two of us were accompanied by five (!) guards. Our real guide, one porter, the required guide for anybody entering the National Park and two machine-gunned soldiers. Quite a hassle, considering that we would prefer to just walk by ourselves...

We had to cross dangerous rivers...

... fight wild animals ...

... and climb a really steep and high mountain (unfortunately we were too exhausted to take a picture from the top).

Overnight we stood at the village of Nkuringo, where the local youth group performed some really impressive dances for us (movies on this later on). The youth group is led by our guide Asgario and consists of orphans and non-orphans to make the orphans feel like "normal" children which in fact they are. Asgario plays soccer with them, teaches them how to do handicrafts and most importantly they learn songs and dances which they often perform at surrounding villages.

After an early night (don't get the impression we are too boring, but after walking for hours, darkness at 7 pm and no electricity, exciting activities like reading, doing handicrafts or playing cards are usually not an option), we walked about 20 km (trying to spot the Virunga Volcanoes) to Lake Mutanda which we crossed by canoe.


Sorghum - either used to make flour or beer.

The fan club is getting bigger...

Lake Mutanda! If anybody manages to see 9 volcanoes behind it, I pay you a drink.

Finally no more walking!

But then, as on every trekking tour I embark to: a huge thunderstorm came across and we actually had to leave the canoe (and walk a bit more than planned) since there was lightening and the waves got huge.

As soon as we left the boat, it seemed like there has never been a thunderstorm before and we walked to Kisoro in perfect sunshine :-)

Kisoro was our last stop in Uganda and it was from there that we crossed the border to Rwanda on July 24th. Uganda is an impressive country and diverse country. Although its recent history of (civil) wars (some fights are still going on in the north of the country until today), the people are cheerful, open and welcoming. However, it is quite challenging to deal with the personal tragedies on a daily basis. Nearly everybody we met has lost at least one close family member at early age due to the wars or other, in Western Europe uncommon, reasons. I have never been in a country with as many orphans, but it was good to see the energy of local people to actually tackle all the challenges Uganda still has today. The only reason that actually makes us happy to leave this beautiful country is the food - beans, sweet potatoes and matoke make you grow very fat in a very short period of time! Uganda is an amazing country and hopefully more tourists will come and discover its treasures in the coming years and thus support its people.

More news from our time in Rwanda follow soon!

P.S. Women in Uganda constantly thought we are man because we wore trousers instead of skirts :-(

Your help is needed!!!

First of all: everything is fine and we are still enjoying our trip a lot! So don't worry about the lack of updates, but we go weeks without any internet access... At the moment, we are in Gisenyi in Rwanda and the internet is too slow to upload any pictures - so I will try again tomorrow and then write about what happened during the last weeks.

Anyways, I am writing to you because of a different matter: Natalie and I constantly ran into amazing people in Uganda, and now in Rwanda, too. They are motivated and highly engaged individuals that do amazing things for their communities.

One example is Erisa who we met on a two day trekking trip through the Rwenzori Mountains in Western Uganda. Only in his village there are more than 800 orphans (mainly due to the war until seven years ago and AIDS) and the population in general is very poor without any real access to markets, knowledge or wealth in general. Erisa initiated educational projects for the orphans and high school drop-outs, he educates the adults on income-generating activities (e.g. new crops, handicrafts) and opened a campsite in the village in order to draw a few tourists into the region. At the moment, he (with the help of some parents) is constructing a primary school in the village since many primary students currently don't visit any school regularly, given its distance of more than 6 km by foot (one way!)... I took some pics of the school and will upload them tomorrow. The building is standing right now, but one wall, furniture and other finishing touches are still missing. The community has a teacher, so that would be no problem.


This is Erisa on one of our walks through the area

This is the new school building which will have two rooms to host the primary students of the village

As you can see, the wall separating the two rooms, the topping of the walls, furniture and blackboards are still missing...

Apart from people like Erisa, who has many great ideas and implemented projects already (and only lacks the funding), we very often meet people in need. Just during the last days we became friends with a small street-boy, who is an orphan, too. We hang out with him several times over the last days and he never asked for any money, a pen etc. (unlike some children who just seem to do that for fun here or to annoy the tourists...). So today we bought him a pair of shoes (he didn't have any - and remember that we have winter here at the moment), some trousers and a sweater for about 5 EUR.

Together with our little friend in his new outfit. We draw quite a lot of attention on the market (with sometimes more than 200 people standing around us and observing...), so that explains why he looks a bit insecure.

Other times, we met people working on our campsite trying to make the money for another term of secondary school (20 EUR per semester) and it is a nearly unachievable amount of money for them...

It is so easy to help here! Even small amounts of money (5 EUR) can make a difference. So if you want to support one child or a community, please let me know and I will send you my bank account details. I will make sure that your money gets directly to a few of the many people in need here. If you have any preferences, you can also let me know whether you want to support an individual or a project like the school.

I am not an NGO and I can't provide you with any legal proof for a tax refund, but if you want to support a child / project here directly and make sure the money actually reaches this individual, please let me know. I will do my best to identify trustworthy people and make sure your donation reaches its cause.

Thanks a lot in advance and hopefully tomorrow you will hear and see more about our trip!

P.S. Here are my bank details (if you transfer any money, please also send me an email to let me know about the amount, so I can use it immediately): Anne-Marie Schumann, Account number 2542694, Deutsche Bank, BLZ 86070024, IBAN DE04860700240254269400, BIC/SWIFT-Code DEUTDEDBLEG

Natalie and Anne are finally in Africa!

Oh my gosh.... You can't even guess how long it took me to upload these pictures... And that's although we are still in Kampala, the capital of Uganda! The internet conection is not very reliable and if it is there, it is slow. Anyways, that shouldn't be a surprise in a city where power cuts for more than 12 hours are kind of normal. I am not complaining at all, I just want you to know why I might not be updating the blog as frequently and with as many pictures like I did in Asia :-) Anyways, let's see how far I get - otherwise you will just have to stare at the pics and guess what might be on them.

But let's get started: Natalie and I are finally in Africa!!! We have been in Uganda for nearly a week now and so far it is completely different (very different!) from any other country / region I have been to before.

One thing is that we really stick out on the street. That might sound quite obvious, but physically I was sticking out in Asia, too, but I never really felt like it. Sometimes, we walk around Kampala for half a day (we use to walk everywhere since there are not really many tourist sights, so walking around town and experiencing is one of our activities here - one day our "activity of the day" was to walk to an Ethiopian restaurant for 3 hours, eat there and then walk back to the hostel) and don't meet any other "white" person! But don't be mistaken and think that there are hardly any foreigners in Uganda. The country is kind of a Mekka for 18 to 20 year old Brits and US-Americans who arrive in groups of 20 people or more and then do some "volunteering" in schools or orphanages. The volunteering business is quite a big industry here, but at least to me it is kind of irritating since I don't really get what skills or special knowledge these teenagers have that Ugandans would lack... (except the one of getting drunk every evening). I am pretty sure they do know how to play with children etc. But I guess it makes us (people from the "West") feel good if we feel like we are "helping" these poor Africans... So it is really that Ugandans are providing a service for us, but I better stop being negative here, otherwise nobody will ever read my blog again :-)

A second thing we noticed so far is that we are actually not crazy for the food!!! That is a great, because we didn't believe a place like this existed for us!

Lastly, preferences here are definitely very different. Most of the commercials on the street are about gaining weight and hips quickly! I am pretty sure at home these companies would go out of business within a few days :-)

Since I am running out of time and we have to catch an early bus to Fort Portal tomorrow morning, let's start with the pictures. The first ones are from one of our walks through Kampala:
Even in the capital many of the streets are not paved. Since the earth here is red, you will have a different skin color after walking around town for only a few minutes.

Traffic in Kampala is quite bad, but it still has some rural touches. You quite frequently meet cows, goats or chicken in the streets.

This is the taxi car park, where all the minibuses that take people around town leave from.

Our second day in Kampala was actually quite frustrating since we found out that we could not just get on a local bus and visit the national parks by ourselves. Local transport usually doesn't reach them and without your own car, it is very often impossible to get there. We first wanted to visit the Murchison Falls, which are amazing waterfalls of the river Nile surounded by quite a lot of wildlife. After finding out that we couldn't go there on ourselves, we asked some travel agents how much they would charge and already thought that we would have to leave Uganda after a few days because of severe money shortage! We are talking about hundreds of US Dollars for a three-day trip!!! So we finally sat down and did some research (yeah, you should really do bits of that before leaving for the trip...). Fortunately, we found out that one can actually visit some of the very interesting National Parks with puplic transport and we also found a cheaper operator for our trip to the Murchison Falls that included some chimpanzee tracking, a boat ride on the Nile towards the falls and a game drive.

These are some schoolchildren in their beautiful school uniforms on our way to the Murchison Falls. One notices that many of them have to walk quite a long way to get to school everyday.

The above picture was taken at 6 am the next morning and we were excited to leave for our first game drive! My jeans look so dirty because the chimpanzee tracking the previous day involved quite some "off-the-track" running through the jungle.

A beautiful sunrise over the Nile on our way to the game drive.

Giraffes!!! Okay, I won't comment on all the other animals since I am sure you know them all from the zoo, TV or even real life :-)

Anybody knows what this animal is called?

I have never been on a safari before, so you can imagine how impressed I was!!! We saw so many big animals from very close. I was quite shocked when our guide asked me what the biggest animal in Germany is and I found out that it is most likely a cow or a horse! But they don't even live in the wild... But then I could mention that we once had a bear called Bruno - very impressive :-)

In the evening we went on the boat trip on the Nile towards the Murchison Falls:

You cannot believe how many hippos we saw!!! We were so impressed by the first one and then we saw hundreds more. During the day they hang out in the Nile because their skin is very sensitive and they would get blisters from the sun. At night they used to visit our camping ground in search for some food (of course we finished all of it, so the poor hippos had to look somewhere else).

There is a crocodile on this pic! It is not certain whether you see any on the trip but we managed to see like seven individual ones outside the water and then a group of at least 15 swimming together in the water!

More hippos and wharthogs in the background.

Another crocodile

Finally a picture of the two of us! Anne and Natalie - unknown species from Germany...

The two of us in front of the Murchison Falls. They don't look very impressive on this picture, but that is how far the boat got.

On the third day we went on top of the Murchison Falls and let me tell you, they are pretty impressive! Especially the power the water gets when it rushes down the water fall.

That's it for now! We are back in Kampala, but as mentioned before, we will leave to Western Uganda tomorrow.

I am sorry if this entry is not very skillfully written or as interesting as the Southeast Asia ones, but time pressure and the constant threat of no more internet doesn't help... Enjoy the pics for now and I will try to write a bit more about the people and their life here the next time!