The highlight was Sipi Falls. There’s a huge sprawling extinct volcano on the Uganda-Kenya border called Mt. Elgon, which is mostly a national park. The crater rim is at about 4300m. The park fee is $90/day and you have to be guided. There are week-long treks. Sipi is just outside the park boundary, at about 1800m, overlooking the vast savannah with lakes on the horizon to the west that we could identify in Google Maps. It’s on the windward side of the mountain where moisture precipitates as the air gets pushed upwards by the terrain so the vegetation is lush. We had our usual accommodation discussion of quality vs price and settled toward the high end at $100 (with dinner and breakfast) to stay in the Sipi River Lodge (the night before in Mbale was $20), on a property that straddles the river (a creek in our terms) and a lush wildness of banana and coffee cultivation that includes the middle of three impressively tall waterfalls. We were told it drops 85m but it looked less to me.
After lunch we headed up a path to the falls on our own. But not for long … a young man caught up with us. I tried to pay him to go away but he took that as a down payment for his guiding services and wouldn’t leave us. Peter. We went to bottom of the falls and then clambered up to the top where a bunch of little and not so little boys were watching cattle or hanging out. One of them had a baby iguana which we took a picture of, incurring more payment obligations. Unfortunately we hadn’t any small bills left; I had to throw a fit to keep Pepa from handing over a 10,000 shilling note ($4, and this is a $1/day country). She promised we’d give him something tomorrow.
At about 6 we drove to a hilltop that looked like it would be a great place to watch the sun go down over western Uganda. Getting out of the car we got mobbed by kids calling out “how are you?” and “give me money” and shortly after, a large young man strode up seriously wanting 2k shillings each to let us pass. We had the small bill problem still so I gave him 20K and had to hang around while he canvassed the neighborhood for change. He said no one else would ask us for money. 100m later an older man demanded payment; one of the kids explained that he is the real guardian of the place and that the other people had “deceived” us. So we gave him 5K too.
We hung out on the hilltop for a while playing with the kids, admiring the view east back to the falls and west out toward the Democratic Republic of Congo, until we could see that the sunset would not be spectacular. Dinner was pretty good. We slept in a round hut with a thatched roof, with the sound of the creek running by.
Next morning at 9 we were to meet our guide of the day before, but the proprietor of the lodge interrogated us and then scolded us for making the deal with the trespassing, underage, unauthorized Peter. He wanted us to lead him to the offending boy and became so tiresome that I had to tell him to leave us out of his issues. We went with an authorized guide instead, Patrick, and rather than walk up to the top falls we drove to a point nearby and scrambled up through a network of muddy tracks through more cultivated lands.
A supposed benefit of a having a guide is that the tolls are pre-paid so you don’t have to keep digging for change, but somehow I did anyway distribute all of the small contingency bills I’d brought, to someone who guarded the car, the iguana boy (how did he know where we’d be?) and a woman who gave Pepa an opportunity to dig her garden.
Patrick was interesting and explained lots of cultural stuff to us (local FGM practice, what questions are impolite (once on friendly terms, none, really), was there really a 105 year old woman living near the sunset place, how you grow coffee, … ). After seeing the upper falls, we drove to a place in a schoolyard overlooking the lowest, tallest (105m) falls which we had to approach from downwind of a very smelly overworked latrine. Patrick left us there to go to some Widows’ Association to get a bag of coffee for us.
After lunch we drove back to our modest lodging of two nights previously in Mbale, to await a communication from an NGO I’m supervising with projects in the area. The idea was the project manager would take me to verify completion of some activities they’d contracted to do. Next day we drove to two sites; one a 10km ditch on the plain to drain an area perennially waterlogged by runoff from Mt. Elgon and the other a gorgeous Shangri La valley deep in the folds of Mt. Elgon where they’d dug trenches aligned with the contours on the steep hillsides, among the coffee bushes. The idea is that the trenches conserve rain runoff, and they put manure in them to leach nutrients to the coffee bushes. Sounds reasonable.
We had planned to be finished by 2pm so that we wouldn’t on the road at night back to Kampala, but there was always one more thing to see, one more meeting to have, one more ceremony to make, so we didn’t get back to Mbale until 6. We decided to press on to sleep in our own bed rather than do a third night in the Hotel Palm in Mbale. Mistake … it was a nightmare we are fortunate to have survived, without exaggeration. I will not drive here at night again.