April 3, 2025 to April 7, 2025
Day 183-187: Mbale City – Iganga
The one day stop in Mbale blew out significantly. We had planned to just take a day off, but Cath’s stomach had other ideas. We ended up spending 4 days waiting for her to recover. Cath was completely over lying in bed, and the recovery was dragging on, so went to get some antibiotics (which were easily obtained over the counter at a local pharmacy). Almost immediately the stomach pains cleared – in the end without needing to take the antibiotics.
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Mbale City is not the best place to get stuck. The central market is kind of interesting – but there’s only so many bananas we need. There are a few restaurants, although remarkably few given the number of people on the streets. There’s an alley with chapati sellers at all hours. We probably wouldn’t choose to spend all that much time here.
We did have a plan to make a wide arc to the north of Uganda, going right around the capital, Kampala, after hearing how busy it is. This would have taken us near, but not close enough to see, Murchison Falls, a waterfall on the Nile. But we have lost a bit of time, so are now on a shorter route through the south of Uganda. And going directly through Kampala.
Cath was feeling much better Sunday morning, so we packed our things and had an easy day. Well, we should have had an easy day. We ended up going 110km to the next big town on the road to Kampala. There are lots of people in Uganda. Of course, the roadside will be more populated than further away from the road, but there are plenty of people everywhere you look. And very tropical – its part way into the wet season, so the grass and everything else is extremely green. The locals seemed somewhat friendlier now that we were a little away from the more touristy area around Sipi Falls. Kids now shouted ‘Habari, Habari” (Hello) and waved more than “Mzungu” (white skin / foreigner). Its always a bit of fun to pass the odd straight faced, serious kid who is either too nervous to smile, too ‘cool’ or just trying to be serious, to then see them break out into a wide grin as you smile at them as you pass.
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Iganga is a ramshackle town a few kilometres from the junction of the main road to Kenya (i.e. lots of trucks) and the road we took from Mbale. Again, nothing much to see here, so we had to spend 2 nights in another noisy, cheap hotel. The reason this time: Stephen couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. This sickness only lasted a few hours and it’s a shame we couldn’t have coordinated the unwellness to minimise the time we had to spend in these roadside towns. It goes without saying that Stephen suffered at least 5 times as much as Cath (man-flu, etc).
Nothing much to say about Iganga. Cath had her first Rolex – an omelette wrapped in a chapati. We couldn’t find a decent coffee – maybe there’s a massive communication barrier here, but we seem to get a small sachet of powdered instant coffee with a cup of milky (or sometimes black) tea when ordering a white coffee. For countries known for coffee production (especially Uganda and Kenya) the locals don’t seem to know what coffee is about. Maybe it’ll get better in the big smoke.
Today's ride: 110 km (68 miles)
Total: 9,179 km (5,700 miles)
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