Gotta get outta here

After losing my job in Uganda I felt like it was time to move on. But I also was looking to escape so I chose nearby Kenya, as a place I've yet to really explore.

I was escaping from the mosquitos of the living room of my old Kampala house where I no longer had a room and tried sleeping on the couch...From the racist lady who charged me the same price for a fish as the local customer next to me who also got unsolicited sweet potato when I got nothing despite having asked for some sides...From the thief who took my favourite Equal Exchange hoodie...From the feeling of being stuck after 4 days in Gulu trying to sell my furniture to the same interested and broke potential customers (this describes 90% of the people there)...and from the peanut guy.

So I am a bit embarrassed about this but here goes: I've developed a pet peeve here of people sitting behind or in front of me on a bus reaching over my shoulder without asking to control my window. Almost always it's someone closing my window when I want it open. I think also when the temperature reaches 60 or below here people start feeling freezing, especially with the nice cool breeze that comes through while baking in the sun. Coming back from Gulu when this happened this week I just decided I had enough. So I turned to the huge Ugandan guy sitting behind me and asked him why he couldn't just ask me before invading my personal space and closing my window which I was busy throwing peanut shells through. But there was no conversation to be had, he just laughed at me, which of course just further infuriated me. So I took the peanut shells and threw them at him and asked him how he liked it. Well apparently not very much as things escalated quickly me and a scene developed with half the bus' attention now on us. He threatened to hit me and I yelled back that he should and it would be great to get him kicked off the bus. Eventually things settled down but we were both on edge for the rest of the 4-5 hour bus ride remaining.  

So hopefully I won't see peanut man again, the bosses of my company, or really any other undesirables while in Kenya. First stop the hustling, bustling city of Nairobi, a meer 14 hour bus ride. I'm not that interested in Nairobi, or "Nairobberie" as many refer to it so I'll probably just pass through after getting some rest. Then the plan is to do another 8-10 hours on a bus to reach Mombasa on the coast, stay tuned.

Teaching frisbee to 3 year old Bradley, son of couch surfing host Eric in Nairobi Kenyans

My Gulu friend James and me testing out my new Assus tablet‘s backwards facing camera

Back to UG

I'm back in Uganda now after a trying but interesting five days stuck in Rome. With my work just finished I took off to explore the beautiful and mountainous Western Uganda. I'll be posting hopefully somewhat regularly about my journey's as I plan to make my way around East Africa.

I started with Western Uganda because I had't been there and had been meaning to check it out when a nice opportunity came along to join two Canadian friends I had met from frisbee. People seem surprised sometimes to see these two nationalities traveling together which kind of surprised me. It's not like Canada and the U.S. don't like each other, it's just that everyone likes Canadians more.

I know there is something to traveling alone but I really prefer to enjoy experiences with others and I often push myself more when traveling with others...Such to the point that one day last week I found myself with these two Canucks in the middle of a jungle stranded in the rain. We had purposefully stranded ourselves in the naive hope that we would find chimps and avoid paying the $150 (tourism in Africa is really $$) chimp treccking fee. We had't planned for rain, especially only 5 minutes in, and after hiding under a tree for 10-15 min. and realizing it did very little to protect us as the rain only got harder and harder we started hitchhiking. By the time we got picked up we were soaked and shivering

Chimps - 1
Humans - 0

This is where we smartly decided to get off the matatu

One of the dozens of amazingly beautiful crater lakes of Western Uganda 

Duncan the Canadian with a Warthog at our campsite that we were told was "habituated to humans"

Queen Elizabeth national park boat cruise with the buffalo

Euro Trip: Yesterday in Lisbon, today in Rome, and tomorrow in…

Stuck. I won’t go into the boring details of why but I was supposed to be back in Uganda already and instead have spent hours in hell arguing with Priceline (NEVER USE THESE PEOPLE) in Rome (and don’t joke with this “when in Rome” with me right now!). Now normally being in Rome might be interesting as it’s a world famous city but I unfortunately just lost my job (which I also will not going into here) and the timing is not great. I suppose it’s better than being stuck in the poorly timed city of Cairo, which is where I was supposed to be stuck, if I had stayed with the original horrible change of flight plan.

I never meant for this blog to be a pure travel blog although it seems it has sort of turned into that (Travel blogs are the worse, so annoying and assumingly self-important!) and now it’s too late to turn back. Before Rome I was on vacation with Maya in Portugal which was amazing. It’s a beautiful country with great Mediterranean beaches, mountains, city night life in Lisbon and Porto, and a good amount of culture. Canyoning might be the thing I need to get into after trying it there (amazing). We toured the whole country almost in one week, although didn’t see anything obviously with too much depth. Unlike Rome, people are friendlier to foreigners and don’t mind that you don’t speak their language. Plus it’s cheap compared to the rest of Europe.

Rome, in contrast, is incredibly expensive. Today I bought a milk shake that was 7 euros ($9.50). But it makes sense, like Paris, it’s a top global travel destination. Literally people are here from everywhere and it’s crazy how many languages are being spoken all around you constantly. Additionally, roses are sold all around you constantly (although it’s only the guys who buy for their ladies and sadly I’ve been alone when I’ve been in both Rome and Paris).  

“It was some castle, or was it a palace?”

A guy at a hostel told me this when describing an amazing site he say today. Also like Paris, you can’t walk in Rome without tripping over a statue or monument almost every block. I’ve lost track of the fountains, monuments, statues, castles, palaces, forts, walls, churches, and other famous and ancient things I’m supposed to be in awe of but none of which I know anything about. Most Americans who visit Europe remark how old everything is but Rome takes that to a new level. Certain attractions have blown my mind with their immense scale. So much of the city draws people interested in Ancient Rome (or the Vatican) and its crazy how integrated that side of things is with modern Rome. The coliseum, over 2000 years old, is also a subway stop that hundreds of thousands of the 3.5 million + citizens pass every day, probably with very little notice.

In Portugal we went to Sintra, just outside of Lisbon, which is sort of like a Disneyworld of attractions and museums, much like Balboa park in San Diego. They put it all in one place and it’s overwhelming. Similar to how I’m feeling with Rome, Sintra or this sort of thing is sensory overload. It’s too much information, and lot of the information you do get is about things and people you probably don’t care that much about or maybe have never heard of.  Palaces and churches can be nice, or we think they can be nice, but actually we think that because that’s what we are supposed to think and we can check it off some list of things to see. But it all sounds better in theory than practice actually.

All of this is to say that travel is exhausting and as I embark on a potential few months of unemployed travel I’ll need to get a strategy to make sure it stays fun and meaningful. Any tips?