The bus ride from Kampala to Kabale is about 8 hours long. For most of the way, the road is a fairly flat, dirt road. This dirt is a bright, coppery red color, like a natural bronzer. After travelling along it, I appeared to have a marvelous tan, but I would shower, and the water would run brown, and then I would return to my normal color afterwards. My backpack was completely coated in this dust, so I had to wash it when I returned to Arusha.
Anyhow, Kabale is a small town near Lake Bunyonyi, the deepest lake in Africa, and I think in the world as well. At Kabale, we met Jon's friend Bruno. Bruno knows a lot about gorilla tracking, and when to school for tourism. I will go into more detail about gorilla tacking later. After taking a water taxi, we arrived at our hostel, Boona Amagare. This is a very environmentally friendly place, but in all seriousness, I think environmentally friendly is often a nice way to disguise being cheap. It is run by an American, and uses only solar energy...which would be super cool if there was electricity at night, which there isn't. There is no electricity at night, and no plumbing. They give their toilets the fancy name of, "compost toilet" instead of just calling it a porta-potty. It was disgusting. There are no hot showers, but for extra money, they will boil 10 liters of water and you can use that. However, we had a very nice view of the lake, and their restaurant was really good. They have a lot of crayfish, so I had crayfish avocado (an avocado with friend onion, garlic, and crayfish in it), and crayfish curry.
The next morning, we went canoeing with Bruno and his friend Ipuff. Bruno assured me that the lake was safe to swim in, no crocodiles or hippos, only "small friendly animals", like otters. It is rare to see an otter, but we did see one. There is a sign by our hotel that asks us not to bleed in the water since it attracts otters, who bother the fish...I would think it is preferable to have otters, but perhaps they cause all sorts of trouble. We rowed to some of the islands.
About the Lake--it is a large lake, with a bunch of mountains rising in between it. I guess they are islands, technically, but they loom so largely, they really are mountains. One small island however, is called punishment island. Women who got pregant out of wedlock were taken here to die. Apparently most Ugandans cannot swim. Demarcus told us this, because he yelled at a school teacher at the Nile because he send children in wooden boats, close to the rapids, with no life jackets. Many children have drowned before because the waves will just knock the wooden boat over. Anyhow, the pregnant women would die on the island, unless a poor man who could not afford to pay the bride money rowed to the island to get her and make him his wife. So, free wives for poor men from Punishment Island.
On another island, we walked around, and saw some plants with bright, red, thin petals. Bruno said that people used to think that fire came from this plant, since the flower looks like a flame. We met Marvelous Grace there, she is an orphan who is being raised by people who own the hotel on that island.
In that area, there are also the Batwa Pygmies. I never got to see them, but Bruno says they aare very small people.
In the early morning, the lake is very still, and there is a mist that hovers over the water. It is very pretty, and hard to capture on camera. The water in the lake is quite cold, but after having grown up swimming in the Atlantic, no water is really cold for me.
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