Leaving Kampala along the Jinga Road was quite depressing. The villages on the outskirts of the city are squalid, made worse by the rain the night before. People are scratching a living selling what ever they can from shops made from roughsawn timber planks. They have no running water and no electricity. In the back of the shops they have constructed cages for ducks, or hens, and pens for goats or sheep, and everywhere there is mud and waste so the place stinks. Some people have hair salons while others sell some kind of food cooked on a charcoal fire.
As we neared Jinga we saw the usual terraced fields of maize, bananas, beans and potatoes. We passed a lot of tea plantations with their hill tops covered in mist. We also saw a large pulp and paper factory.as well as a big sugarcane processing factory, and several newish factories with Chinese names.
The rafting company has a backpackers in Jinga and a camp beside the Nile River so we went there where we got a safari tent. It was no where near as nice as the one we had at Lake Bunyonyi. I had to get the cleaner to come and show her how to clean the tent before we could settle in. Lots of Gappers and young backpackers come here and they don't care if their accommodation is clean or not so they set the standard very low.
From the town we walked to the Source of the Nile where we saw this cormorant with a huge Nile perch in its mouth that it was trying to eat. The place was teeming with birds.
There was a monument commemorating the CHOGEM in 2007 and saw NZ listed as being there and probably attended by Helen Clark. John thinks this would have been when she climbed Mount Kilimanjaro.
There was also a bust of Mahatma Gandhi, erected by the local brewery, as his ashes were dipped into the Nile here. There were several Indian families gathered at the spot having their photos taken.
34 years ago I went from Alexandria, Egypt following the Blue Nile to where it met the White Nile in Sudan and now I have been to the source. The river runs for 6400 kilometres and it takes the water about 3 months to get from the source to the Mediterranean Sea.
Jinga is known for its adrenaline sports and there are rafters and kayakers on the water everyday. Some of the young people we have met from Scotland, England, Sweden, and Norway have rented accommodation in the village and some have spent 7 weeks playing on the water and getting thrills on the grade 5 Bujagali Falls. The camp offers mountain biking and horse riding activities as well. On the weekend several people working for the NGOs come to enjoy the place.
We have met lots of people here, including a group of 5 Kiwis on a overland truck tour. We watched NZ play in the rugby sevens and enjoyed supporting our sportsmen with them.
Met some very young lads from Ireland and England who had been kayaking for several weeks in the river. They shared a dorm room and all 7 in the room had come down with malaria. Most of them were pretty pale skinned and a side affect of the doxycycline drug for malaria causes your skin to be sensitive to the sun so you can burn easily. They all stopped taking their medication as they were in the sun often and it also caused indigestion, especially if it is not taken with sufficient food or water. Of course they blamed the mosquito nets in their room as not working. It's a shame they hadn't been offered a different drug that didn't cause sensitivity to the sun rather than put them selves at risk.
We struck up a conversation with an American lady working in Arusha, Tanzania for the International Criminal Court, on cases for the Rwanda genocide. She worked with Dorothy whom we had met in Zanzibar and was also working for the ICC. She couldn't believe we knew someone in the office near her.
One of the rafting guides spotted our NZ flag on a bottle cooler and asked us where we were from. When we told him we were from Papamoa, he told us his uncle Kerry lived there. He was most surprised that we knew his uncle but then he was gobsmacked when John told him he knew his dad, Tony, and we had 3 days before got an email from his grandparents Lex and Rae. Grant had been river guiding in Scotland and Japan. We sent Lex and Rae this photo to see if they could recognize Grant. Lex and Rae are a well travelled couple and we enjoy getting together and chatting about our travels as they back packed into their 80s.
Jinga has some beautiful buildings that were constructed by the English speaking Catholic Christians, from Goa, India who came to work as traders in the early 1900s। The Indians valued education and in 1968, the Jinga Secondary School had one white student, half a dozen black students and 500 Asians। In 1972 all Indians were expelled by Idi Amin.
The Ugandan government has plans to construct another dam on the river and this will affect the river activities of some of the businesses here and we have heard different views on what will happen then. The electricity produced, they hope, will be enough for the country and some to sell to the neighbouring countries.
