As previously posted, I have, indeed, been on a small road trip. It sort of snuck up on me, and suddenly the day had come to leave, without too much anticipation. Oh well, I guess you don’t need TOO much anticipation for a 5 hour bus ride !
Bright and early on Thursday morning, Grace and I arrived at the bus depot. We boarded the bus, said good morning to our friend who was already sitting on the bus, and looked around for the seats that had been assigned to us. Imagine our surprise when we realized that our seats were the very front seats – the ones right next to the driver, basically in the front window of the bus! We had this huge window in front of us, and lots of space to stretch out our legs. It would have been perfect except for quite a sizable puddle in a trench right where our feet would have most comfortably sat… But next to the driver, we had the best view of the road! As we were sitting in the bus station waiting to leave, I was starting to wonder about that – quite often, I just don’t want to be able to see the road, the oncoming traffic and the near misses. Sometimes it’s better to be squashed in the back where I can be completely oblivious to such like things J But as it turned out, this trip was just fine!
Our driver was a very good, very safe driver, and I didn’t feel at all scared by his driving. I was a bit nervous going over some of the bridges that were, well, rather dodgy. Several of the little bridges over the little creeks were made from beams covered with metal sheets. And it was pretty obvious where quite a few truck tires had already gone straight down through the metal sheets. You could see the stream beds below through the gaping holes! But the driver was very careful and slowed right down before heading onto the bridges, and I was completely amazed every time he got the wheels just on the right spot on those bridges. Since I can’t even pilot my little Honda over a cattle gate, I was duly impressed with this bus driver.
We also saw a lot of demining action happening. There were a few places where the land had been cleared of all the vegetation (and let me tell you, there was a lot of vegetation), and there were only red and white tipped posts sticking out from the ground marking where it was safe and where the mines were. The group that was demining was using a big contraption called a Mine Wolf to get find the mines. Once I get back to civilization where there’s a high speed Internet, I’m going to Google the Mine Wolf and see what that thing is!
Needless to say, I was pretty happy we didn’t stop for any pee breaks along the road – it would really suck to get blown up by a mine while stopping for a “convenience” break here!
We made it to Yei in good time – only 5 ½ hours to cover about 160 km. That’s not bad at all around here. Once in Yei, we just followed our Sudanese buddy to this compound. We set off walking – I had no idea how far it was, and just assumed that since our friend started off walking, it was within walking distance! But once we were walking, he started to try flagging down cars… a few passed by and didn’t stop for us. The third car, a Ministry of Agriculture car, finally stopped and we all jumped in! They drove us right to the ACROSS compound where we were booked to stay. That was a real blessing, since it did turn out to be quite a long ways – probably 3 or 4 kilometres.
We did arrive after lunch, and since our Sudanese friend had to go to pick up some material from the UN compound in town, we all jumped in a truck from ACROSS and the driver took us to a local place for lunch. Wow, ugali and beef stew never tasted so good! It was nice soft meat, sweet ugali… yum yum. And no bread to be seen J Once we went to pay, our Sudanese friend pulled out his money – but they wouldn’t accept it, since it was OLD money (the kind that we still use in our city). The bill came to about $4, so I stepped in with my new money and paid… but I got change back in Uganda shillings. Strange system.
Once we got back to our compound, we went to say hello to some of the folks who live here – and ended up having a very nice tea time with them. These people here are definitely different from folks in J where we live. They’re GREAT – totally just free to be who they are – funny clothes, not really caring about some of the things that the expat community in Juba are concerned about. They don’t get RnR, they pay rent for their houses, they pay mileage on the trucks they drive, and they don’t eat all imported food. It’s really refreshing to be with people who are more like us!
In fact, when I went into the dining room the other night, one of the Aussies on the compound here was wearing an almost identical blue tie-dyed mumu J Really, these are my sort of people! I like people who can wear tie-dyed mumus without shame.
These people are pretty hard core here. There is no running water on the compound; the Aussie couple, until just a week ago, were sharing the squatty potty (outhouse) with 30 other people on the compound. No one has “real” showers – it’s all just bucket baths, and this is the way the expats live here. They do have a generator during the day, and solar batteries for the evening, so they have a good system for electricity… but the running water and toilets would be difficult for me to live with long term. I sure do appreciate the running water that we have in our house back “home’!
I'll save the rest of the story for later...
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