Journey to the Mountains of the Moon - 1994 (10)

Ruwenzori Circuit, John Matte Hut to Bujuku Hut, July 20th
This stretch of the trail took us through the Lower and Upper Bigo Bogs before traversing the northern edge of Lake Bujuku to arrive at Bujuku Hut. The scenery was brilliant with some truly amazing vegetation in the bog areas. The park authorities try to get everyone to stick to the trail and generally people do try to do this. In the boggy areas, however, it is difficult to see where the trail should be and most people try to keep dry feet- at least until they inevitably miss a tussock and end up in the bog anyway. Traversing the bogs is a very tiring process. Our tendency initially, like everyone else, was to try to keep our boots dry by leaping from tussock to tussock. Denisi, our guide was good at helping us to find the best paths but inevitably we started to miss the odd landing and got wet anyway. The water and mud would often reach to mid-thigh level and though gaiters helped to keep most of the mud out of our boots to some extent, the water seeped in anyway and we had to resign ouselves to wet feet for the rest of the day.

We had left John Matte Hut at around 9:10am and arrived at Bujuku Hut ahead of the Dutch party at around 4pm. Along the way we met up with the two British guys again as they were on their way back down to spend the night at John Matte Hut again. Just at the time we met up with them, which would have been mid-afternoon, the clouds lifted and we got a rare glimpse of the high peaks. Sightings are rare as they are frequently shrouded in cloud so we felt quite priviledged. The photo at left shows Bert admiring the sights near Lake Bujuku with giant Lobelia and giant Groundsel in the background.

Using our trekking poles to leap from tussock to tussock through the bog helped quite a lot and Pierre and Till did even better with two poles apiece. However, by the end of the day not only were our legs tired but so too were our arms and shoulders.

Giant Lobelias in Bigo Bog

On arrival at the very poor Bujuku Hut, at nearly 4000 metres ASL, Denisi and our Zairean porter set up a charcoal brazier to warm us up and help to dry our clothes. The Dutch party straggled in at around 6pm and we turned in for the night at 8pm. Part of the lower sleeping platform was broken, putting it on a bit of a lean which made sleeping uncomfortable for those unlucky enough to end up on it. It is very cold at this altitude and I was glad of having polar fleece overpants and jacket to wear. A lot of the Dutch party were in tents around the hut so they may have been even colder than we were.

Dominic and Bert outside Bujuku Hut

Journey to the Mountains of the Moon - 1994 (9)

July 19th
After a good night's sleep, a breakfast of fresh pineapple and tea fuelled us for the day’s start at 8:45am. The first part of our track was slightly uphill and then descended steeply to cross confluence of the raging Bujuku and Mubuku rivers via the Kurt Shafer suspension bridge. The bridge was donated by Kurt Shafer (I think he was a US Ambassador to Uganda) as the previous low-level bridges kept getting washed away by floods. After crossing the river it was steeply up, up, up over roots and rocks. This was very hard going and we reached a very welcome rest stop after about three hours. After a brief rest and snack we carried on over undulating terrain of mostly slippery boulders for another two hours through the forest.

We emerged from the forest near a fast-running stream so I stopped to fill my water bottle. As I bent down over the stream I slipped and plunged headfirst into the water which was fortunately not deep. Denisi grabbed my belt and hauled me back upright but I had lost my watch in the stream when the wristband popped. After scrabbling around I managed to find it and it was still running quite happily. The bracelet was easily repaired and then we were off again. Oh what an adventurous life!

The trail led alongside the river to the unused Nyamuleju Hut and then through boggy areas to the newer John Matte Hut. This was about 7.5 hours total for the day and very tiring. At breakfast time I had thought I would fold but managed to make it through the day. On the final stretch to John Matte Hut we passed the whole of the Dutch party and caught up with Till and Pierre who had passed us after the first 2.5 hours. Two British guys arrived at John Matte Hut having come all the way up from Nyakalengija in one day. We thought it pure madness as they had no porters and told us that they might not go much further.

Dinner was a very welcome good cooked meal of Thai soup followed by Rice-a-Risso and mixed vegetables (Dehydrated potato and some sweet potato). Left is a shot of the porters hut at John Matte Hut camp, with the porters preparing thier evening meal. Below right is John Matte Hut with Till, myself and Dominic 'relaxing' at the end of a gruelling day.

Journey to the Mountains of the Moon - 1994 (8)

July 17th and 18th. After our day+ of bus travel we awoke after a good sleep to a very misty morning. Partly what woke us was the Maribou Storks on the corrugated iron roof which sounded like half a battalion of infantry marching around. After breakfast we changed some more money at Us950 to US$1. There did not appear to be any currency control as we were frequently accosted by people on the street wanting to change money. However, we had heard of other people being caught up in illegal dealings so we do all of our currency exchanges through the banking system. We may not have got the most favourable rate but we felt it was better to be safe. With some local currency in pocket we headed for the market and bought a large bunch of bananas for Us400.

After strolling around the town awhile we located the Ruwenzori Mountaineering Service (RMS) office and obtained some information about deals and protocols. Because accommodation on the circuit is limited the number of groups departing is strictly controlled. One of the downsides of this type of trek is that there is generally little opportunity to slip in a rest day – you have to keep moving.

Pierre and Till arrived as planned around midday and after they got settled in we all went back to RMS to arrange a trip. The trip was arranged to start on the following day at 8am and would cost us US$370 for 8 days. This didn’t, of course, include food so after lunch we set off to purchase some necessary supplies. We bought pasta, biscuits, bread, soups, potatoes, cabbage, tomatoes, sweet potato, pineapples, tea, bananas which we thought would keep us all going on the trek.

The next morning. our 8am pickup to start the walk didn’t arrive until 9:10am and that after Pierre and Dominic went to find out what was going on. It is very hard for us 'westerners' to get used to African time. In South Africa I believe they often use a relative urgency specification system. 'Now' means 'sometime soon', and 'now now' means pretty much immediately.

Eventually we departed on the back of a utility to Nyakalengija where we were to meet up with our guide and porters. The whole selection process is somewhat of a cattle auction and one relies ont the guide - in our case Denesi - to do the selecting and rejecting. It wasn’t possible for us to determine how equitable the process is and it is quite possible that there are some degrees of favouritism involved. We had to rely on Denisi to pick men who will carry their loads for the whole trip without problems. Because we had 109 kilogrammes between the four of us we had to have an additional porter above what we had already paid for at an additional US$50.

Porter Selection at Nyakalengija.

Eventually everything got sorted out and at about 11:30am we started off on the first day’s trek. This was initially past shambas (small farms) before reaching the elephant-grass covered lower slopes. The porters set a cracking pace and initially we made the mistake of trying to keep up with them. They did slow down on the steeper sections but then sped up as soon as they could. Jerome, one of the older porters seemed happy to be going much slower than the rest and was much closer to my pace.

The pace and effort began to take their toll after three hours and we found that we had to drink frequently and also stop for many rests. After the elephant grass we entered the forest where at least there were trees to use for leverage and to have the occasional rest against. Four and three-quarter hours after leaving Nyakalengija we arrived at our destination for the day – Nyabitaba Hut. I’m sure that I arrived much lighter than I started out due to sweating heavily for almost the whole distance. Again we are already higher than Mt Kosciusko at around 2600 metres ASL. There are marvellous views over the forested hills on the other side of the Mubuku River valley and we can also see the Portal Peaks slightly to the west of north. These are about five kilometres away by crow flight and stand over 4300 metres high.

Nyabatiba Hut - The author sitting midway
along the verandah, Pierre and Till to the left.

A large organised Dutch group also arrived and set up camp nearby. The was apparently a regular trip for the guys running it and they were very self-sufficient. After dinner they decided to have a sing-a-long around the camp fire giving a rousing rendition of the old Max Bygraves song ‘Tulips from Amsterdam’. This rather surprised us as we had the idea that real Dutch people would shudder at that particular song.

While preparing our evening meal we discovered that bananas don’t travel well at all. We had put them into a plastic garbage bag in one of the porter’s loads. When we reached in to get a banana we got a handful of mush mixed up with banana skins. While it didn’t look good it was edible and nutritious so didn’t go entirely to waste. The hut was dry and we had a good sound sleep after a taxing day. Tomorrow we will go slower for sure.

Journey to the Mountains of the Moon - 1994 (7)

After the unpleasant illness of the previous day, I woke up feeling much better and felt well enough to tackle a light breakfast and, later, a light lunch. I decided that I would be OK to travel on Friday so we headed back down into the city to the Akamba Bus Company to re-book. The booking agent apologised, unnecessarily, for not being able to give us a refund which, he explained, we could have got if we had notified them before our scheduled departure. However, he gave us new tickets for half price (Ks450 each) which was much appreciated.

On Friday we decided to do some more sightseeing to fill in the time before our long bus trip that night. We booked a four and a half hour guided trip through the Nairobi Game Park and were amply rewarded with sightings of many animals including Grant’s and Thompson’s Gazelle, Impala, Eland, Wildebeest, Hartebeest, Buffalo, Rhinoceros, Crocodiles, Tortoise, Baboons, Hyrax, Zebra, Giraffe. There were also many bird species to be seen and they included Ostrich, Maribou Stork, Vulture, Weaver Birds, Blacksmith Bird and Pigeons. We didn’t get to see any of the big cats but this was unsurprising as the grass was very tall – we could barely see the rhinos until we got fairly close.

After returning from our trip to the Game Park we checked out of the Fairview and went down to Lagos Road to catch our bus from Kampala. I’d heard about the chaos typically attending bus departures in Italy and what we experienced would not, it seems, have been out of place there. Nevertheless it all resolved and we departed for Kampala at 7:15pm. We discovered that two young Germans, Pierre and Till, who were on board the bus were also planning to do the Ruwenzori circuit so I suggested that we join forces giving us a party of four. I had the idea that the larger party would make guide and porter negotiations a bit easier and probably save all of us a bit of money. The only hitch from their point of view, discovered after we were well on the way, was that they had left the batteries for their camcorder charging in a friend’s room back in Nairobi. By the time we left Naivasha they had managed to contact the friend and arranged to meet up with him in Kampala the following day with the errant batteries.

The bus trip was generally neither more nor less of an experience than any other such long distance journey with the exception that the seat padding was almost non-existent. To stave off the numb-bum effect I pulled the dense foam stiffener from the inside of my day-pack and doubled that between my posterior and the seat. It provided some relief but about four times as thick would have been better. Dominic had no additional padding so was suffering far worse than I.

At the Kenya-Uganda border post of Busia we had a two hour delay while the various customs officials inspected all of the cargo in great detail. However, we had no problem with personal clearances. All of this around 2am.

Upon getting underway from Busia we had been travelling for perhaps an hour and a half before being stopped again for another check – this time by a militia group. We all had to get off the bus and were instructed to leave all belongings behind but we took our day-packs with us. All of the personal gear left on board was searched and the odd bottle of beer was ‘confiscated’ before finally we were allowed back on the bus to continue our journey. Eventually, we arrived in Kampala at 11am after 16 hours of travel – 14 of them bum-numbing.

The journey from Busia to Kampala gave us a view of the Eastern Uganda countryside which proved quite different to the drier conditions we had experienced in Kenya. Seen from the bus it seemed to be very lush and green with lots of trees. Tea plantations were frequent and the towns and villages we passed through were in better condition than their Kenyan counterparts. Uganda went through a lot of turmoil after independence in 1962. Its first president, Milton Obote was ousted by Idi Amin in 1971 and then returned from exile for a second period in 1979 after Amin was ousted by Tanzanian forces. Obote’s second term was marked by repression and eventually he was ousted for the second time by his own military chiefs in a coup in 1985. After a period of unrest the (guerrilla) National Resistance Army of the current President Museveni took control. However, Uganda seemed to have weathered through and maintained its right to Winston Churchill’s appellation ‘Pearl of Africa’.

On arrival in Kampala Dominic and my priority was to locate a bus departing for Kasese in Western Uganda. Kasese is the jumping off point for the Ruwenzori trek and we wanted to get there as soon as possible so that we could get a trip organised. Pierre and Till were to wait in Kampala for their friend and follow on to Kasese the following day. Fortunately, in common with many other African cities, Kampala buses tend to congregate in a central area close to the city centre, markets, etc so we didn’t anticipate a long search and so it proved to be. Pierre and Till stayed with us until we located the general area from which buses departed for Kasese. We located a bus departing almost straight away costing us Us7000 each plus Us3000 for luggage. With the exchange rate at around Us (Uganda Shillings) 950 to 1000 for US$1 it was a very reasonable deal. The people all seemed to be very friendly and with much less of the pushiness of the Kenyans.

The bus was crowded and we would have to endure some more bum-numbing but at least we had a seat. During the six-hour trip we saw a strong and vibrant countryside with cultivated crops of coffee, tea, sugar cane and bananas. The early part of the trip was through relatively lush areas but later on, as we started across the western plains it became much drier. At one village some of the guys on the bus bought a big hand of about 15 bananas for Us200 – approximately 20c US.

Further on we saw many Impala and Bufffalo, along with baboons and a larger gazelle in the distance – possibly Eland. One of our fellow passengers was very eager to point out all of the animals to us. It is remarkable that the animal numbers have grown so much as a large percentage were killed off during the Tanzanian invasion when the soldiers would just gun them down indiscriminately – not even using them for food.

On arrival in Kasese we were absolutely filthy and sweaty and tired after about 23 hours travelling. We got a double room at the SAAD Hotel for Us15000 a night but no running water despite all the plumbing being in place. We had to make do with a 40 litre jerry can but it was better than no water at all. While waiting here for Pierre and Til, who should arrive the following day, we would search out the Ruwenzori Mountain Society to find out what was happening.

There were lots of Maribou storks around the hotel and the streets of the town. These are primarily carrion eaters so we guessed it was their job to keep the town clean up to a point. Dinner was of very tough chicken which we thought might actually be ‘leg of Maribou Stork’. The hotel is Muslim owned and therefore dry but that was no problem to us. It also meant that there was no bar noise to interfere with our rest. After dinner we walked around the town to see if we could find the RMS but without any luck.