Kampala, 16 Feb 2007: A week of non-climbing adventures...
by Lianna
It
was time to head to Uganda, but before saying a final farewell to Kenya, we
stopped for three days in the Mt Elgon National Park, right on the border
with Uganda and home to Kenya's second highest peak - Koiteboss.
But when we arrived, we met a guide who told us that dangerous 
bandits
armes with spears were roaming the park, and that they had recently murdered
an American tourist, making it impossible to camp inside the park boundaries.
We were more than a little cynical, given that the death of an American tourist
would be pretty well documented, and every source I'd used had given the region
an all-clear. I'm sure he was just out to sell us more expensive guiding and
jeeps but, sadly, by the time we had sought a second opinion which confirmed
our cynical suspicions, we'd run out of time to climb Koiteboss.
Bummer.
Change plans.
After checking out a really great looking crag that we'd seen from the road, only to discover it was made of more mud and jungle than rock, we decided cragging wasn't to be part of our new plan, and instead we contented ourselves with seeing the amazing caves that Mt Elgon is most famous for - giant salty caves to which hundreds of elephants travel each year in order to lick the salt off the walls. Inside, once you've got over the shock of being rammed by bats that fly repeatedly, panicked and blind, straight into you (suddenly I was very grateful for those rabies jabs!), you can wander around and see tusk marks covering every inch of wall and ceiling - pretty impressive!
It's mandatory in the NP to have armed guards, supposedly to protect you from cross-border terrorists and insurgents (who do sometimes make their presence known in this part of the world - hence us at least seeking a second opinion on the spear-bandits) and from the dangerous animals that roam the park, the threat of which we didn't take very seriously until we came across a herd of particularly aggressive water buffalo on our way down. Giving them a very wide berth, creeping through the undergrowth to avoid being seen by them, I was quite happy to be hiding behind two local men carrying enormous, if ancient and certainly not straight-firing, guns!!!
Time
to hit the road to Uganda, but not before a few escapades cycling around on
clay roads in the pouring rain carrying 15kg gas bottles and falling all over
the place, camping up in some random truck yard somewhere and having a few
beers with the locals, and enjoying an early "Good Morning Vietnam"
wake-up call, a soundtrack that Henry normally really likes, though it impressed
him a little less at 6am that morning (when else would you play it, for goodness
sake?!) 
Crossing the border, differences were immediately apparent: houses were more basic, distended bellies and bare feet more common and luxuries less so, but the air of squalor that is so prevalent in Kenya was gone. The houses,though small and made of mud, grass and sticks, were tidy and well-swept, fences delimited villages and houses, and were neat and well-maintained, people seemed to like the idea of a centralised place to dump rubbish, rather than leaving it strewn all over the place. We wre impressed, and through this tidy and very green landscape we made our way to Jinja.
Jinja, at the source of the Nile, is a bit of an adrenaline-junkies paradise. On the itinerary for every backpacker and over-lander, it's a busy place but deserves to be.
We spent a day on (well, mostly in) the river, rafting down (well, swimming through) the rapids, before making our way back to the campsite, showering in the cubicles that don't have a back wall but instead look right down onto the rapids, and enjoying an enormous bbq.
Then
all the boys put dresses on (pink, green sequined, flowery, beautiful!) and
we all spent the night climbing the rafters and traversing the tables in the
bar. A conversation I overheard:
person 1: Who are all these people?
person 2: Well, the climbers are over there with the skirts on and their tops
off, the paddlers are over there with their pants down, and everyone else
is just normal....
So it was a very hungover group that turned up in Kampala, where it was time
to pick new people up and drop old friends off. As John Denver sang that he
was "Leaving on a Jet Plane" and we had to say goodbye to Vicky
and Lucy, the tears did flow. 
After Kampala, we'd planned to go to the Rwenzoris to climb some big mountains, but an almighty bureaucratic cock-up saw us scrap those plans to everyones disappointment. But with an attitude of 'you win some you lose some', we tried to find some rock to climb.
I have a copy of a the most recent edition of a guidebook to rock climbing in Uganda, but even that is 43 years old. Faded, stained, and no doubt entirely inaccurate, we used it anyway (gotta work with what you've got!). We hired two scooters and sent a few people off through the outskirts of Kampala and the surrounding hills to check out the two crags nearest Kampala in the guidebook, and to see what else they could find. And what they found was one small grubby outcrop surrounded by houses, and one stunning pinnacle that would provide amazing climbing if it wasn't on sacred consecrated ground!
So to the third crag from Kampala we went. And we hit the jackpot!!!
