Photos

I posted this one mostly because I like the story that goes with it. I had spent a few days in the Ssese Islands in Lake Victoria. While I had arrived by matatu (public transport), I wanted to return to Entebbe on the lake. I had seen a brochure with a very shiny-looking cabincruiser-type motorboat, which, to me, looked like a nice place to spend a few hours.

So, one of the guys where I was staying arranged to have a boda-boda man (motorcycle taxi) come in the morning to take me to the "ferry." To make a long story short, the boda-boda guy didn't show and some other people agreed to drive me to the boat landing in a nearby village. After digging their van out of the quick sand and piling in the family of nine into the vehicle to come along for the ride, now very late, we drove to a small fishing village on the other side of the island. As we arrived, there was no shiny motorboat, but we could see this boat about 20-30 feet from shore. The father of the family started honking like crazy and the boat came back, but these boats can't come all the way to shore, so a teenage boy had to carry me (bride-over-the-threshold-style) and my backpack out to the boat.

You can see that one end of the boat was quite crowded, so I sat at the other end. There were only two other guys (also tourists) down there, so I spread out, hoping to get a little suntan.

Turns out that none of the Ugandans sat in the front because once we got away from shore, the water gets a little rough and the front gets pretty wet. I ended up down in the bottom of the boat along with a couple of chickens, arriving in Entebbe four hours later, very wet and very sunburnt.

I pulled the brochure out later that evening and realized that I had failed to read the caption under the picture of the shiny boat: "You can hire this boat to take you to Entebbe." Nonetheless, a fun ride and beautiful clear day.