Picture Me Walkin'

As I think I mentioned, we went back to Veronica's village the other day. Since I no longer have a camera of my own (thanks Kenya), here are a few pictures my roommate Joel took. His blog is The White Nile, and its on the Our Peeps list on the far right. Give his blog a look, it's pretty hilarious. Not a lot to say, I think the pictures speak for themselves in this instance.

I’m at that point where I have to accept that I will be really, actually be leaving soon. That means, among other things, tying to fit in a bunch of traveling into a quickly dwindling amount of time. Something about satisfying unlimited desires in a world of limited means. Fort Portal is a scenic little town in Western Uganda, conveniently located within striking distance of a huge national forest populated by chimps (expensive), another full of gorillas (seriously expensive), a swamp full of birds (birds? Eh. Plus don’t swamps smell bad?) and some crater lakes (wait a tick, we have one of those in Oregon). (Can you make out the Nancy Drew Jersey?) (One of those scenic lakes) Seriously though, you could spend weeks there. With only a few days, we opted for the lakes. As cool as seeing chimps and gorillas would have been, I can’t complain. We camped on a hill overlooking one of these bizarre crater lakers, hiked around, swam in a waterfall and saw one of the more incredible nighttime ...

As we have mentioned, the roads in Northern Uganda weren't the best. I've been lazy lately and haven't posted this, so here goes. I was going to make a little poetry reference, but like I said I'm lazy. I think you all can piece together on your own where I would have gone with this. I came to a fork in the road. Obviously there is a good choice and a bad choice here. One is a road, the other is not. Roads are for driving, driving is for roads. This should be a no- brainer . Of course of course of course there should be no question in anybody's mind which we ended up on. This is pretty much par for the course, just a small hitch in an otherwise fully functional road. Hopefully by the next time we travel up there, the new road will be finished. That would shave off a good couple hours from our journey from Mbale to Lira. Oh, and a little math for your minds: 1 km = .6 Miles Mbale to Lira =250km x .6 =150 miles Mbale to Lira = 6 hours by bus 250km/ 6 ...

We're back in Mbale after a nice weekend in the southern parts of this nice little country called Uganda. We spent a few days in the Ssese Islands, in the district of Kalangala. Quick geography lesson, Uganda is landlocked, so the island is in the middle of a lake. Considering the island hosts a population of well in excess of 30,000, and you can't see it from the mainland, that's a pretty big lake. The second biggest in the world, some will tell you. It was nice, relaxing and quiet. We took a ferry out there, which around here is a little terrifying. About half of the Africans we talk to say they wouldn't be caught dead on a boat, which I can understand. We were told that "yes, there are pirates. But they're not like those Somalis on tanker ships you here about, so don't worry." To recap: the two of us set out to take a boat that even the locals think is way sketchy out to an island in the middle of a lake populated with pirates in the middle of Afric...

So we're back in action after a long weekend of relaxification and fun. Sorry for the huge downtime in posting, but I think it will be worth it because we actually have something interesting to talk about now. For everyone who sent me angry emails for not keeping up on the posting, it's nice to hear that y'all are staying interested. We decided it was time for a little vacation and went to the mountains on the border with Kenya. We cruised up to Sipi Falls, on mt. Elgon, with our friend we've been staying with in Lira. When we got there, we met up with some French girls and some Rastas named Brown, Roots and Dennis (don't let the decidedly un-irie name throw you, homie can hang ). It was my first time ever really hanging out with forreallife rastas, it was everything you'd expect it to be. We basically spent the entire weekend listening to reggae and laying around in hammocks. It's a hard life, it really is. (burn it down) (breakfast at speed zero) The plac...