After three nights in Jinja we crossed back into Kenya, spending a night in Eldoret before getting to Lake Naivasha. While there we biked through the nearby Hell’s Gate National Park which turned out to be a lot harder and hotter than we expected, with less wildlife than we saw during our visits to Maasai Mara and Lake Nakuru. I did get a pretty cool shot of three zebra butts.
No promises, but this is probably the last animal shot for a while
From there we headed back to where the overland trip started three weeks earlier: Nairobi. We camped for two more nights (20 total), said our goodbyes to the friends we’d made (who still had many more weeks ahead) and helped to welcome the assortment of new souls who’d be filling up all those empty seats on the truck—including our own.
On the evening of June 4th, we flew to France by way of Doha, Qatar and Milan, Italy, arriving in Nice the following morning.
We spent a night at an overland campground in Turbo, Kenya, outside of Eldoret. The next morning we crossed the border into Uganda (and later the Nile) as we made our way to Kampala, the capital. We spent two nights at a backpackers there, just relaxing, and then continued on to Kabale.
Crossing the White Nile near its source at Lake Victoria
As we crossed the border into Rwanda on May 22, I found the countryside so jaw-droppingly beautiful that I couldn’t help myself from snapping a few photos of this “Land of 1000 Hills” (le Pays des mille collines) from the truck (something I’d hesitated to do until now). The hillsides weren’t exactly “terraced” but every usable surface had been cultivated with great precision, as if the land had been stitched together out of patchwork. The bottoms of the valleys were coated with row upon row of low-lying tea bushes, as far as the eye could see. The small houses and villages on the way were immaculately maintained. There was little to no trash along the road. It was a drive I didn’t want to end.
Since then, we’ve crossed the equator only twice on our adventure, both times in the air. Once on the way north from Bali to the Philippines, and most recently flying from Mumbai to Nairobi, which is just south of the equator. I’m pretty sure both times we were fast asleep.
Land is another matter. As we were crossing the equator on our way north from Lake Nakuru on May 18th (the first of 4 crossings on our overland trip, and the only time it wasn’t raining), we stopped for a cool photo op.
Stephanie and Justin standing on the equator in Kenya
Booking passage on a container ship should have entailed 28 days without internet. But on a whim I looked into satellite phones and discovered that I could rent a “satellite modem” to access the internet anywhere in the world (except the poles). While using it to blog aboard the Cap Cleveland, someone I didn’t know stumbled upon my dispatches and posted a series of links to MetaFilter. As it happens, the MetaFilter post got picked up and “syndicated” by a regional portal of the New York Times. An online communications specialist in Auckland, New Zealand, who monitors such things, stumbled upon the link and followed it to my blog. When she discovered I was going to be landing in Auckland in a few weeks, she left a comment offering to host us for dinner. I reached out to her before we landed and made plans to meet up. (Sound familiar?) When we finally got together, we met her housemate, who told us about her travels earlier in the year: a months long “overland” trip across Africa using a UK-based company called Oasis.
It’s astounding in retrospect how these trivial, circuitous events can combine to alter the course of our lives.
“An overland trip across Africa.” Our curiosity was piqued. At that point we’d only been in New Zealand a week. We didn’t have a clue what we planned to do there, let alone after. When we started looking at Oasis’ website a few weeks later, we were seduced. We’d just begun the spontaneous, go-where-the-spirit-takes-us part of our trip, and we were already finding ourselves challenged by the constant decision-making. The promise of a voyage where everything is figured out for us, and miraculously at a price within our budget, was tantalizing. We wanted to visit Africa as part of this adventure, if possible, and the concept of budget overland travel (which we’d never heard of) sounded like a great way to cover ground in a region that was less backpacker-friendly than, say, Southeast Asia.
On the other hand, we were wary of having commitments in the future weighing on our present decision-making. We wanted our itinerary to be open to the people we meet and the things we learn along the way (even at the cost of having to make all our decisions on the spot). So we put off the overland idea until such time as we found ourselves closer to Africa, assuming that both we and our budget lasted that long.
That time turned out to be February, as we were rounding Southeast Asia and thinking about our onward travel plans. Looking again at the available overland trips, we scaled back our ambitions from a 3 month expedition across Africa (several months of independent travel made us wary of being in close contact with others) to a 3 week jaunt from Kenya to Rwanda and back called Gorillas & Gameparks—which we augmented with the incomparable Maasai Mara safari.
Map of the Gorillas & Gameparks route
Part II
What is this overland travel of which you speak? First, a photo.
I wanted to write about our time in Mumbai to finish off my series of posts on India, and I started writing something, but it was such a downer (and lacking photos…) that I just couldn’t bring myself to publish it after my last India post. Instead I’ll just paraphrase Dooce by saying:
It Sucked and Then We Cried: How We Had Bedbugs, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Sandwich
I also wanted to write a little bit about the challenge of answering the question “How was India?”, but it turns out Stephanie beat me to the punch, and her post is much better than what I was trying to cobble together. Go check it out: So, how was India?
