It is Saturday morning as we write this – our last day ahead of us as we will be leaving for the airport this evening. We have been awoken by heavy thunder storms and probably Robert the Rooster too. We have conceded, as a charitable act, to allow Robert to continue to breathe Ugandan air and bless all future visitors!
This is an unusual blog update as we are both drafting it and publishing it (we hope) on the day following what it is reporting. Anyway here goes… {Note – as the power went out this morning this is the first chance to post this.}
Devotions (Phil 3:1, 2, 12-14, & 4:4-7) followed breakfast and then George arrived with Michael (of course) to transport us to Jinja for our day out. This pair have been with us throughout our time here, ferrying us everywhere we have needed to go. I have driven in many countries but would not stand a chance here in Kampala. Michael has driven George in conditions and circumstances that we could never have dreamt of and has done so brilliantly and safely. They merit their picture on the blog – see Michael, George and me.
The journey to Jinja took about two and a half hours with the first hour crawling in the slow moving traffic across Kampala from the north-west side to exit the east of the city. The first of the following four pictures shows some poor housing on Kampala east side and other three show some of the variety of road users we encountered on the road journey.

Once at Jinja we changed mode of transport and boarded two boats (boys in one and girls in the other!) for a one hour cruise on the Nile (about 8km from its source between the second and third dams) taking in the wildlife including monkeys, monitor lizard, otters and a variety of birds.

Back into George for a short (in distance) 10km drive which took about 45 minutes to Kingfisher safari resort to pick up our second boat trip. We were accompanied by Dora, Shavan and Brian from Smile – Brian led the day and he can be seen in the picture.
This was above the first dam and therefore on the shores of Lake Victoria. All in one vessel this time, we cruised gently to where the Lake meets the River Nile (the source of the Nile) where water gently springs up from mother earth. We disembarked to wade in the waters to the marked point for photos and then waded through a small gift shop (yes! It was sited IN the shallows). Then we returned to the boat and cruised a short distance around the lake back to shore.

Back to Kampala. The return journey was worse than the
outbound one and took over three hours with the traffic conditions for the last 20km being horrendous – I mean horrendous – compounded by being after dark. We drove straight to the centre of Kampala to meet up with Alex, his wife and a number of the Smile Team at the Chicken Royale restaurant where a team of twenty of us ate a meal together.
Leaving the restaurant into a busy street with music blaring out, the team were joined by an eccentric local in some impromptu dancing. Once more we piled into George to return to the Smile house, stopping briefly at KBC to capture a group photo of the whole party. Back at midnight, sort out seats for the flight and then to bed.
