Saturday, September 09, 2006

Well...I am still in Uganda

Since the last blog update several things happened, one of which being that I changed again my flight out of Uganda to the DRC. It's a long story but it involved several visits to the Congolese embassy in Kampala, among other things.

Saturday morning is here. I am now in Entebbe, the town on the shores of Lake Victoria near which the international aiport is. With most of my last minute shopping for the several months in the Congolese rainforest done, I am now virtually set for take off. I think I still need to buy a bottle or two of shampoo, though. Tonight should be a sleepless night. My checkin time is at 3 am and I am quite sure that I won't be able to go to sleep at all before then (for fear of not hearing the alarm clock if I nod off and also for trying to finish watching as many of the DVDs that I have before I go to the place of no power grids).

Have one day left here in Uganda and probably a large part of it I will spend making a mental check-list of things that could still go wrong and trying to figure out how best to try and avoid or manage them, if they do happen. Like, what do I do if the taxi driver I will need to come and take me to the airport at around 2.30 am doesn't actually wake up on time and I am stuck in the middle of the night in one of the more distant from the airport parts of Entebbe, which from what I saw last night is quite deserted from 10 pm onwards? Provided I manage to get to the airport, there still might be things that could severely test my patience - like someone trying to actually charge me the appropriate amount of money for the mountain of excess luggage I will be bringing with me. Or someone noticing that may be my Ugandan visa has expired (although, there definitely is no expirity date written on it, honest). Or security getting paranoid about all the weirdly shaped items I have in my bags? And that's just the airport here in Uganda. The one in Kinshasa, and the things that could go in an unwanted direction there, I don't even want to think about now.

But provided somehow the end of the world doesnt happen at either airport, things will start getting exciting, in a nice way. And by that, I mean getting closer to seeing bonobos in the wild again, just over 3 years since last time.

Oh, and I do love flying. Especially when at take off and landing everything goes funny inside you like you're actually free-falling!

OK, I've obviously had too much coffee this morning because this is not making much sense now....I better go and take a walk or something.

Alex