You want a Real Safari Experience..?

Posted on by August 23, 2015
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We’ve had no wifi for 2 weeks so it’s been difficult to stay in touch. However, it’s been quite an eventful period all in all.

Pals Judith & Tamsin arrived in Livingstone after a 15-hour delay to their flight from the UK. They’ve come for a couple of weeks to tour with us a bit in Zambia & Zimbabwe.First thing on the agenda though was a couple of relaxing days at Maramba River Lodge, one of our favourite places in South Eastern Africa.
We went back to view Victoria Falls from the Zambia side with them. Last time we were here the water was so high it wasn’t possible to go near Knife Edge Bridge without the spray soaking to the skin and filling shoes to the brim. At this time of year the water levels in the Zambezi are lower. The Falls are no less beautiful without their full volume. In fact, without the huge plumes of spray it’s actually easier to see just how large the gorge and the falls are. 
 
After a picnic lunch around the Gorge Walk… 

 
…we went up to the top of the falls and walked out onto the Eastern Cataract.  

 Again, due to the lower water levels it’s possible at this time of year to get right up to the edge – if you’re brave enough. 

 
One way or the other, it’s rather pleasant just to sit with your feet cooling in The Zambezi without having to worry about crocodiles snacking on your toes. 

 
To end a relaxing but (due to the heat) tiring day there was just time for a quick Pimms at the top of The Falls at the David Livingstone hotel. Outrageous prices for drinks but a beautiful spot from which to view the spray bouncing back up from where the water stricken the bottom of the gorge (The Smoke That Thunders). 

 
The following day the four of us headed out for Kafue National Park. Although only 250km to Nanzhilla Plains camp, it was going to be a long day. The first 130km are on excellent tar and take only 2 hours. The following 80km to the Dundumwedzi Gate to Kafue takes around 2.5 hours and is pretty rough. We paid our $350 for 3-days entry for 4 people & 1 car and headed onto The Cordon Road for the final 50km since, surprisingly, the Plains Track in the park was still wet. 

Judith and Tamsin were hoping for a bit of what we’d seen and done on our travels so far. They came looking for the ‘Safari Experience’…

…We gave them the full ‘LAND ROVER‘ Safari Experience! 
 
About 30km into Kafue National Park, going through fairly deep, fine sand there was a loud bang from the rear axel and we sank. Summing up the situation, we had 3 issues to deal with: we were bogged down in deep sand that would need a lot of digging out; the rear axel (half-shaft) had snapped so we had no drive in normal gears; sunset would be in 4 hours and there was a strong chance we’d end up bush camping. 

Not good. A few choice words were uttered. At times like this, I find that 3-4 minutes of indiscriminate swearing is quite relaxing.
After 2 hours of digging the fine, deep sand (using a combination of spades, Tupperware boxes and sand ladders) we’d managed to move the car about 50 metres. 
Tamsin was on Lion Watch, Judith and Helene manned the Tupperware and collected branches for under the wheels, I worked the shovel and Sand Ladders. 
 
Only 200 meters to go to a more solid piece of ground. Oh joy.

At the entrance gate there had been only 3 people signed into the camp over the 5 days prior to us arriving. It was all getting a bit tense (the girls weren’t keen on the idea of bush camping with lion, leopard, hyena and wild dog around). Suddenly, out of the bush, salvation arrived. 
Jake turned up from the Elephant Research post at Hook Bridge. He just happened to be in this area and was heading for Hippo Camp about 80km away. After another hour of digging, we’d got a couple of channels dug into the sand and he’d winched the car through the bush onto a more solid patch of ground. 
 
Not only did Jake save our bacon, for a Toyota driver who’d just pulled a Land Rover out of trouble he was remarkably modest with the Land Rover jokes. We definitely owe them some beers up at the Research Centre and will deliver them when we go up next month. 

Although the half-shaft had snapped, we managed to get some drive out of the car with it in diff-lock and Jake insisted on following us back to Dundumwedzi Gate to make sure we got there. There was no way we could continue to our camp – the sand was thicker heading to Nanzhilla and that would have left us with 300 km to cover if we’d carried on. 
At the entrance gate, a team decision was made to try and limp the car back to Livingstone through the evening, rather than wild camp somewhere outside the park. On route, when we finally got a mobile signal some hours later I called Nick Selby at Foley’s Zambia who said he could look at the car as soon as we arrived.
Not a fun 250+ km back to Livingstone. We arrived back at Maramba around 10.30 pm after 11 hours driving and almost 3 hours digging. Exhausted, after a couple of stiff drinks at the bar, we checked into Maramba’s pre-erected dome tents and crashed out.
Nick got onto the car asap the following morning. we all got back onto a heavy day of sitting on our backsides watching the hippos… 
 
…and crocs from the bar of the lodge. 

 
Many thanks to Maramba manager Peter, who generously didn’t charge us for the dome tents once he’d heard our tale of woe. The least we could do was spend that saved money in the bar.

A great job also by Nick at Foley’s. And huge thanks to Jake from the research centre. The car is as good as new (I know, I know…it wasn’t even as good as new when it WAS new) and the only thing we have to show for our adventurous first few days is a bunch of photos of us all digging in the sand and Helene’s bush-scars following her narrow miss from a lion swipe (when Tamsin was obviously looking the other way). 
 

Turn on the Safari Tinnitus…

Posted on by August 8, 2015
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Lake Malawi is sometimes know as The Calendar Lake’. It’s huge: around 356 miles long and 52 miles wide. From up on the Nyika Plateau you can see across to the mountains of Tanzania and Mozambique. At the lake shore there are beautiful beaches – it’s like an inland sea.Kande Beach camp has a lovely setting on the lake shore and is a pretty good camp site.  

 
The staff are friendly, but the management are almost surly, certainly not particularly welcoming. I guess it’s more of a party camp than most of the others and it gets pretty lively with the overland tour-truck crowd. Par for the course is a hog-roast, lots of beer, and loud partying in the bar till well past midnight.  

 
Not really our sort of place, so we only stopped 1 night on our way down to the Malawi / Zambia border at Chipata.

Having stayed at Barefoot Safaris just west of Lilongwe (nice, clean, peaceful, hot showers etc: camping, $10 each) we were only a short hop from the border and looking forward to a stress-free day. 
That didn’t happen. The border itself is typically chaotic, nothing fancy, and generally friendly. 
 
There’s even a restaurant… 
 
Remarkably, it took us only 10 minutes on the Malawi side to get our passports & Carnet stamped for exit, and only 20 minutes on the Zambia side to get Visas ($80 each, 1 month, double entry), Carbon Tax for the car (150 Zambian Kwacha ie around $20) and Council Tax (ZK 50). 

That’s some sort of speed record in our experience. That’s where it all ground to a halt though. The officials from the Road Tax & Safety Authority (RTSA) loiter around the Customs buildings and insisted that we needed to pay Road Tax of $20. I hadn’t heard of that one before, but they were adamant. Unfortunately, all the power had just gone out (scheduled ‘Load-Shedding’ due to the lack of water and, therefore Hydro-electric distribution right across Zambia). This was around 11am and the power wasn’t due back on ’till 3pm – that’s Zambia time remember, so 3pm could easily become 5pm.
No way I wanted to hang around that long, so the manager at the RTSA office gave me a hand written note (to show to police at any roadblocks if we were stopped) allowing us to travel the 30km into Chapata, pick up supplies and return to the border at 3pm to process our road tax.
The road into Chapata turned out to be a dusty, rutted, temporary surface while the main road is rebuilt. The 30km took us almost 90 minutes and filled the car with dust & sand. I certainly wasn’t looking forward to driving back out there later in the day, and then back to town again (probably in the dark).

In Chapata we stumbled across the RTSA Head Office and pulled in to ask them if we could pay the tax there instead. The security guards said yes, no problem, except the power was also off till 3pm. We hung around 30 minutes, until a very helpful Official from RTSA came over to ask if he could help us. When we told him we were waiting to pay Road Tax he was surprised. “You don’t need it” he said “It’s for Zambian vehicles and Goods Vehicles, not visitors. You’ve paid your Carbon Tax, you don’t need anything else.” We explained the situation at the border, he phoned the regional manager to double-check, then told us “100% certain. You don’t need it.”
That’s a result. The hassle would have been worse than the $20 fee. However, one final twist: while we were camped at Mama Rula’s in Chapata, 5 other over landing couples came in late in the afternoon (we haven’t seen that many people in months!). They’d had the same Road Tax issue at the border and the power was still out. They’d each paid the border RTSA manager the $20 Road Tax and an extra $5 for him to deliver the certificates to them in Chapata later that evening.

Top Tip: read through the entry regulations carefully before paying up (or avoiding payment). Either we’ve messed up, or overlanders are paying Road Tax unnecessarily.
I don’t know. Either it’s some sort of border scam (that we’ve avoided) or we’re supposed to have it and will be liable for fines at any road block.
We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. In the meantime after a hellish 300km, 8-hour drive on temporary roads from South Luangwa, we stayed overnight at Bridge Camp on the Luangwa River. It’s a lovely spot… 
 
…and spent a lazy afternoon watching the kids fishing (with mosquito nets). 

 
Owners Will & Lindsay haven’t changed. They’re very friendly but still bicker with each other like a vicious Fawlty Towers. They’re also still trying to sell the camp to everyone who comes to the bar, although the price has come down now to $550k.

With a deadline to meet in Livingstone, we had no time to hang about. We stayed at Pioneer camp (nice, good bar, friendly people, pool and good restaurant) in Lusaka while we carried out a quick search for new BFGoodrich All-Terrain tyres (rare as rocking-horse dodo) and then an overnighter at The Moorings camp (no idea why it’s called that, there no water around for a hundred kilometres) before we arrived back at Maramba River Lodge, about 4km upriver from Victoria Falls outside Livingstone.
It’s nice to be back. It’s nice not to be moving. It’s nice to once again be in an area with wildlife around (I’d forgotten how much I’d missed it over the last 9 months).
View from The Penthouse yesterday morning: 
 
These girls just wandered up to the camp perimeter and started pulling the small trees apart to get to some juicy leaves. There’s plenty of ‘evidence’ of them having walked through the tents recently but this time they thankfully weren’t so intent on coming through.  

 
Other visitors are certainly entertaining, but when they come through the camp in a large group you need eyes in the back of your head to make sure they don’t leave with half your kit…  

 
The only downside to Maramba River Lodge is that it’s on the flight path for the microlights that do scenic trips over Victoria Falls (starting at 7am sharp!) but otherwise it’s so nice to just chill, watching the crocs, hippos, vervet monkeys and elephants around the camp and when it’s really quiet, going to sleep listening to the thunder of The Falls only 4km away. That’s Safari Tinitus.

Bleeding Land Rover…

Posted on by August 3, 2015
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I couldn’t get over how good the road was down through the centre of Tanzania. On our original entry, from Mbeya to Dar Es Salam it was appalling. Maybe I’d have to take back all my curses at Tanzanian roads & drivers?
We knew there would be little camping until we got back to southern Tanzania but there are a few motels / hotels to chose from on this route. We made it to Singida on the first day – the power steering was still squirting juice every time the steering was turned and the radiator water still looks pretty greasy, but the drive was otherwise uneventful. We took a room at Aqua Vitae Resort – not sure what makes it a ‘resort’ but it certainly has a pretty unusual look… 
 Clean, air conditioned rooms with good showers: $25 for 2 with breakfast. The next morning, another 7-hour ‘blast’ down to Dodoma. It doesn’t seem to matter how good the road is, between vicious speed humps in villages and police roadblocks we find it impossible to average more than 50kph. 
The landscape was much more interesting than we’d been lead to believe. Huge plains littered with hundreds of Baobab trees – they’re ancient (even as small as these, they’re likely to be 2-3 hundred years old)… 
 Boabab are surreal trees, rarely in leaf. With the Rift Valley in the background they look like someone has dug up each tree and replanted it upside down, with it’s root system in the air.  

 I was surprised at how much our altitude had reduced over the previous few days. We’re down to 550m now and it’s noticeably warmer. There’s no sign of water in any of the rivers. Most sandy river beds are full of people looking for drinking water by digging 2-4 meter deep holes to get to the water table. 
  We stayed overnight in Dodoma at VETA (Vocational Education Training Association) a motor engineering, hospitality and carpentry training charity with 400 pupils. They also run a small lodge with a nice bar / restaurant and good rooms for $18 (2 people, including breakfast). 

Despite driving through the middle of nowhere for 700km, we still had to endure 8 stops by the Tanzania Police. Unfortunately (for them) in their brilliant white uniforms they stand out from quite a distance away, so we managed to avoid being fined for speeding. It still doesn’t stop them from waving the car down, checking papers and asking for some ‘lunch money’ though. 
Most speed traps in Tanzania use radar guns. Their favourite trick is to stand behind a bush at the exit of a village, beside the sign showing that the 50kph limit has finished. Given that there’s nothing else on the road and the signs can be up to 2km outside the settlement area, it’s pretty inevitable that by the time you approach their trap your speed will be above 50kph. 
Even the two times we were speeding (52 and 56kph) I said I didn’t have the money to pay until we found an ATM (major towns only). The statutory fine here is 30,000 Tanzanian Shillings (about $15). I gave the first guy $3 and told him I didn’t need a receipt. At the second speed trap I showed the officer I had only $1 in my pocket and told him I would pay in Iringa when I get there and get more money. He eventually let us go – I said he could have the $1 but he said “That would be a bribe” and didn’t take it. I think he meant that it wouldn’t be enough of a bribe!
As we passed through Iringa, for the first time we are back on a route that we had taken over 18 months ago our way north – the Mbeya / Dar Es Salam highway. 
Suddenly I remembered what I hate about Tanzanian roads. The truck and bus drivers are maniacs – although the roads are narrow, vehicles are often three abreast as they try to overtake each other. Dirt / marram roads prevail. But there are a bunch of tar highways – they’re worse! The highways are littered with people on foot and on pushbikes and the substandard tar road surface is rutted like a bobsleigh run from the pounding of the double-articulated trucks that hammer up and down these main roads.   

 Car axel widths are much smaller than the trucks. Any attempt to drive over 50kph puts all four wheels into a wobble and is like steering a small boat across the wake of a supertanker. It certainly gets the heart pumping. 

Throw in the corrugations; miscellaneous dogs, goats, cattle, chickens and people darting across the road; and hours of prehistoric vehicles overtaking us (swaying across the ruts) as we approach hill crests or blind bends – my fingers ached from gripping the steering wheel and my eyeballs ached from trying to watch 5 things at the same time for 6 hours. 
I was pretty glad to get to The Old Farmhouse Camp for a cold beer and one of Nicki’s legendary evening meals. Not cheap at $75 for 2 including camping, but worth it as a belated birthday dinner for Helene.  
 It’s much colder here at night. Beautifully sunny during the day but at 1,750m altitude by midnight we needed our sleeping bags for the first time in 18months. No light pollution though so wonderful star gazing and views of The Milky Way. 

To round off our stay in Tanzania we headed to Mbeya for a visit to the Mbalizi Workshop to get the car checked over after the poor job that was done in Mwanza. 
The 250km took over 6 hours – including another 6 roadblocks / speed traps and our first puncture in Africa. More of a blowout really as we hit one pothole too many (sometimes you just can’t swerve round them when there’s a lunatic truck or bus coming the other way and another one overtaking you at the same time). These BFGoodrich All Terrain tyres have been really excellent. Almost 70,000km so far and they’ve had a hell of a life. 
We dropped into the MVTC to make sure they had a slot to look at the car the following day…  

 …and then camped 10km up in the hills on the helipad (next to the volleyball & tennis court, beside the squash court!) at the Utengule Coffee Plantation. Really nice people, a good bar and – as might be expected – excellent coffee.  

 Bright and early the next morning we were back at the Mbalizi Vocational Training Centre workshop (MVTC). We’d had work done there going north 18 months ago and were really impressed with the whole setup.

While foreman Christopher did a quick inspection, Helene made us all a nice cup of Earl Grey tea. I think that was a first for Christopher. We had a biscuit with ours – he declined the biscuit and ate a dried fish with his Earl Grey.   

 As we had pulled into the workshop the previous day, our power steering failed completely. Chris & his finance director had given us a quote to replace the entire Power Steering gearbox (supposedly fixed by Schumann’s in Mwanza), flush out the whole water system (not done properly by Schumann’s) and refill all coolants & oils.  

This morning Chris said he’d managed to get an original Land Rover part (brand new) cheaper than he anticipated and therefore reduced his quote by 20% to TS 2.5million ($1,000). That was made up of about $940 parts / fluids and $60 labour. 
MVTC have around 100 in-house apprentices studying motor mechanics or carpentry on a 3-year course. Around 30% of them are girls. They’re there full time, boarding at the workshop and spending mornings in uniform, studying in classrooms above the work-ramps. After lunch they change into overalls and get stuck in with learning the practical side.   

 It really is a great setup. Chris has worked at MVTC for 29 years – since he finished his own apprenticeship here. Everyone is enthusiastic. Chris and his senior mechanics spend hours with the kids showing them how things should be done. What a totally different experience to Schumann’s Garage in Mwanza. 

At one point the old, bleeding, Land Rover power-steering gearbox was discarded on the bench like a surplus body part after a transplant.   

 After a closer look it’s hard to believe that the previous workshop in Mwanza could have believed they had fixed it – I wonder if they actually did anything?

Replacing the power steering and removing all water hoses & and water bottles to clean & flush everything took 3 hours longer than anticipated. MVTC did everything cleanly, safely, thoroughly, right first time and stuck to their original labour estimate (after discounting the parts 20% from the original quote – that I had actually previously accepted). 
Great job. Much appreciated. Can’t recommend MVTC in Mbeya highly enough. 
That was almost a week ago. Since then old ‘Trigger’s Broom’ has been running pretty sweetly. We’re a bit short of time now as we have to meet pals Judith & Tamsin in Livingstone, Zambia in one week. 
Not much time therefore to linger in Malawi. Fortunately the border was a breeze (no visa fees for Brits!) and the roads are quiet (the country is so poor that hardly anyone has a vehicle). It’s a beautiful drive down the lake Malawi shore.
Nevertheless, we did manage to find time to spend a couple of days at Chitimba camp, owned by Dutch couple Ed & Carmen. A great place to chill after a pretty expensive, stressful and tiring month or so.  

View from The Penthouse:
  

Land Rover Dealers…never again!

Posted on by July 25, 2015
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We’ve been pretty much stranded at Mwanza Yacht Club. The view may look like an expensive, shabby-chic area of the South of France… 
 
…but when you look closely, these guys aren’t paying $2m+ for some trendy old hillside cottage…  

 Had it not been for the few other travellers who turned up over the last 3 weeks, we’d have gone stir-crazy with the car stuck in Schumann’s (the official Land Rover & Ford workshop) conveniently only a mile or so up the road from camp.
Most of the people we’ve met have come out of Serengeti and needed car repairs (as we did on the way north over a year ago). Those must surely be amongst the worst maintained tracks in the most expensive park in Africa. 
A year ago in Serengeti our chassis collapsed and our brakes had sheared. This time, over the three weeks we were in Mwanza, Wayne (a South African lawyer) has needed new shocks, Hendrich & Caroline (German Doctor & Swedish music teacher) needed wheel hubs and bushes, Steven & Caroline (a German journalist & part organiser) had busted leaf springs, Naas & Zon (S African travellers) had their immobiliser rattle to destruction and strand them in the centre of Serengeti.
The only guys who’ve bucked the trend are Rob & Gail (Aussies currently living in S Africa). Rob is pretty switched on with mechanics and, being a Toyota driver has taken every opportunity to rub salt into the wounds inflicted on us Land Rover martyrs. Still, since we’re in our ground-tent and (typical of an Aussie) he pitched in the only shade in the camp, we had no option other than to invade Rob & Gail’s privacy and steal their bacon & egg sandwiches for a couple of days.  

 When it comes to catering though, all of us overlanders have been put to shame. Brit backpackers Fay & James arrived at Mwanza with a little ‘festival’ tent they bought for peanuts in Uganda a month ago. Over a 3-day period Fay fed us all with chocolate crispy cakes, a fresh pineapple crumble and a lemon-drizzle birthday cake for Helene! 
Outstanding work. 
 Almost as valuable, Wayne introduced us to Tanzanian Konyagi (called Waragi in Uganda): a slightly weak, marginally lemon-scented, but very palatable locally brewed gin. Combined with a bit of tonic, ice & a slice, you can’t go far wrong for $10 a litre.
So our days have been spent chatting (not something we’ve had the chance to do recently with so few overlanders around), popping into a local bar for a plate of mixed fresh fruits for lunch (mango, banana, pineapple, guava, watermelon, cucumber & avocado) at $1 a plate… 
 …and watching the wildlife hanging around the camp. In addition to the dozens of kingfishers, there are hundreds of Yellow Billed Kites that swoop through the camp at dawn and dusk. As numerous as we get Starlings at home.  

 At sunrise and sunset they seem to like to bathe in the shallow water at the Lake Victoria shore. They’re pretty wary of anyone encroaching on their turf…  

 …and they approach the water tentatively at first… 

 …but once they decide they want a bath, they get stuck right in…  

 They’re not quite so elegant when they’re wet, or when they decide it’s time to leave and their feathers are soaked.  

 So, that’s how our last 3 weeks have been passed. Well, that and wandering up to Schumann’s workshop to see what progress has been made (typically none), phoning them to get updates (typically without reply) and getting grumpy with the time that it’s all been taking (their original estimate was 6-9 days).

It’s been a painful process. The owner, Mr Patel, is a pleasant enough chap (he’s been in business here since 1969) and his Forman works hard, but it’s not good enough. 

Especially for the official Land Rover dealer. 

Over the last 2 years in Africa (amongst many other things) we’ve had bush repairs carried out by mechanics using kitchen knives & hammers, welding done in pitch black conditions with electrical welders stealing power from street lights, an axel replaced at the roadside by a mechanic who arrived with it on a motorbike taxi and a chassis replaced while the car body hung from a shed roof. 
We had been warned previously to stay away from official dealers, but in this case, there was no one closer. This is the first time we’ve used anyone officially associated with Land Rover in Africa. And it will be the last. 
After 14 days of chasing Schumann’s (the last 5 of which we were promised the car at 10am the following day) it was finally delivered back to us. They’d done a 30km test drive and proudly announced that the car was ‘as sweet as a nut’. 
I hopped in to go for a final drive with them. We stopped at their workshop 1.5km away for them to pick up a couple of tools ‘just in case’ and as I waited for them I noticed some oil dripping under the car. Not much, just a few drips. 
‘Is that right?‘ I said. ‘That’s the clutch housing. Why is there oil coming out of that?‘ What do I know – my lack of mechanical skills are legendary.
Anyway, I told them I wanted it checked before we drove any further. We backed the car into the workshop over the inspection pit. They removed the drain plug on the clutch housing. Six litres of oil (6 LITRES!) flooded out of the clutch. Checking the engine dipstick we found it totally dry! Some test drive they must have had.
As they had reassembled the engine / clutch they had either forgotten or damaged the O-Ring seal and all the engine oil flooded into the clutch. I’m glad they hadn’t gone more than 30km.
The car was back in the garage. No apology, but they promised I’d have it back the following evening. They were almost right. They delivered it back at 7.30pm 2 days later, after yet another test drive (day 16).
The next morning, Rob gave me a hand to give it a check over. Opening the radiator expansion tank filler, we found (once again) that it was full of oil/water ice-cream (the same problem I had when I delivered it to them over 2 weeks earlier). 
Two hours later they picked the car up again. Three days later, very pleased with themselves, they once again returned the car. They said the radiator cleaning (after the complete engine ‘rebuild’) hadn’t previously been good enough so, as a gesture of good faith, they’d removed the old radiator and replaced it with a second-hand one they had.
Again, the next morning (it was pitch black the previous night) Rob and I checked it over. The radiator was leaking water from both the fins and from the nipple where the water system entered the oil intercooler. Also, all the bake / indicator lights seemed to operate like some sort of random Christmas Tree display, the steering wheel was on crooked (they had previously replaced the steering arm) and the seat covers (as well as every surface in the front of the car) were covered in oil.
Back again to the workshop.
Four days later I was summoned to the workshop to inspect the car, and pay my bill: I guess they were concerned that, being a little grumpy by this point, I might be reluctant to pay up and they weren’t going to let it out of the shop till I’d handed over the cash (almost $2,500). I reminded them that my initial arrangement with Mr Patel was that I’d make a bank transfer and, being a Friday evening, this would not be possible until the following Monday morning. 
After a cordial but fairly succinct discussion, I left with the car and a bill reduced by around $800 (they’d initially wanted to charge me for all 22 day’s labour and the crappy old radiators they’d installed).
We left Mwanza 24 hours later, after I’d spoken to my bank and arranged to make 2 transfers of US$ into Schumanns’ Tanzanian account. 

Unfortunately, the account numbers they sent me by text message and email were wrong by one digit and the payments bounced (another cost to me of $30 for each payment and about $100 in international phone calls to the UK).

Top Tip: Stay away from Land Rover dealerships in Africa. If you need work done find a local shepherd, have him harness 30 goats to the car and tow you however far it’s necessary to find a guy in a Chelsea football shirt, sitting under a street light with power cables connected to it by electrical tape. As long as he’s got a spanner, a hammer and a bit of broken beer bottle to use as a welder’s mask, he’ll certainly do a better job!
So, we’re headed to a proper, Vocational Training workshop that we used previously on the way north through Tanzania. It’s 1,400km away (in the direction we were heading anyway) but I can trust them to check the car over properly. The power steering seal is still leaking (Schumann’s were supposed to replace it) and there’s still some muck in the radiator coolant but we’ll take it slow and I’ll get a second opinion from a professional before I make the final payment.

At least we’re back on the road. That should be a good thing – but, they’re Tanzanian roads.

What Does a 20 Year Old Land Rover Engine Look Like?

Posted on by July 16, 2015
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Leaving Rwanda we drove a scenic, beautifully tarred, 120km road to the Rusumo Falls border with Tanzania. Speed limits here are very low – typically 40kph and 60kph on occasional roads, so it’s still a 3 hour drive. We got stopped by police speed checks twice but, unlike most other places in Africa, a smile accompanied by a sincere apology and a bit of friendly banter was enough to get us sent on our way without either a fine, a bribe request, or the usual invitation ‘to buy a hungry policeman his lunch‘.

The Rwandan side of the border is unlike anything I’ve seen in Africa. Beautifully organised, air conditioned, and set up as a simple system of moving from one window to the next to get exit stamps in the passports and on the Carnet. Fifteen minutes max.  
The Tanzanian side is a typical ‘welcome back to Africa’. Tatty, rusting steel containers as offices, no signage or system to tell you how to get things done in the correct sequence, money touts everywhere, truck drivers pushing through queues to get their paperwork done ahead of anyone else. Not aggressive, but just disorganised enough to raise the hairs on the back of your neck.

Normal procedures apply: $50 each for Visas; $20 for for car duty / Carnet fee; $5 for Road Contribution. All receipted, but the haphazard organisation took up another hour.
We also changed our remaining Rwandan Francs for Tanzanian Shillings with one of the touts (there are no banks for miles on the Tanzanian side). The rate is appalling since the US$ has strengthened recently but the ‘bricks’ of money the touts carry have all been previously exchanged at worse rates over the last 3 months. Therefore, they’re out of pocket and no matter how many times you show them the interbank rate on Google, they won’t budge on the rate they give. I guess at the moment each of their buy & sell rates are about 15% worse than the bank rate.
I wasn’t looking forward to being back on Tanzanian roads. Between Serengeti, the Usumbara mountains and the northern corridor, on our original way up we’d had to replace the brakes, weld the chassis once and replace the rear axel when it snapped. 
Sure enough, the first 30% of the 160km to The German Boma (the next camping) was appalling. The remainder however, somehow materialised into a really good, tarred, highway, with no axel-crushing speed bumps. It still took us over 8 hours from Kigali in Rwanda to get the Boma Camp at Burhamillo, only 280km away. 
It wasn’t worth the journey. The Boma at Burhamillo is an old Colonial German Fort and there’s no bar, no food, no working shower, no place to wash up. It’s clean and safe but camping is just in a gravel yard within the gates. I guess at $6 for 2 people you can’t expect much, and there’s nowhere else.
The following day I’d expected another tortuous journey as we had 240 km to travel, east to Mwanza on the southern shore of Lake Victoria. The first 30km was miserable and I was steeling myself for a 12-hour day. Incredibly though, the road suddenly turned into a simple, but good, tar track. There is a lot of road building going on here and, even when the tar disappeared for 50km or so, the marram substrate that is being put down for the new road made a great surface to drive on. It’s probably got a lot to do with the town of Geita that the road passes through – one of the biggest gold mining areas in central Africa.
We got our first views of Lake Victoria as we headed for the southern of the 2 ferries that cross this end of Lake Victoria into Mwanza (it runs every 30 minutes – the northern one is every hour).  
 
The tar road took us directly to the terminal. Wonderful. The only downside is that as the terminal is approached (from an arrow-straight highway) there’s a very small 10kph speed sign (that I missed) and we got stopped by yet another speed trap (10kph!). The cop wanted TS50,000 ($25). I told him I had no money ’till we got to the bank in Mwanza (where the ferry docked) and that I needed what I’d got for the ferry fee. We settled on $5 to buy him and his 2 pals lunch.

The landscape here is quite different to the terraced hillsides of Rwanda. More typical Africa. Actually more typical ‘Flintstones’. 
 
The ferry crossing is only 30 minutes, and there are 2 ferries operating. Great value at only for $4 for the car and two people – particularly as it saved us around 530km to go the long way round. 

 
Our crossing took a little longer than 30 minutes. Although we were loaded on first (and then should have been first off) the front ramp was broken, and the ferry was operating on only one engine. The 2nd ferry actually lapped us, and we were further delayed by everyone (including the articulated trucks & buses) having to back-off the boat and up the steep dock at the Mwanza side.

Still, in countryside like this, it’s just another opportunity to sit quietly and soak up the views.
Predictably (or I guess I should have predicted it) we were stopped again on the Mwanza side at another ridiculous speed trap. The officer was also looking for ‘lunch money’ but I told home we’d just given all our money to his ‘brother’ on the other side. He’d have to let his stomach rumble. It was all good humoured though (that’s the trick in these situations) and surprisingly he laughed and waved us on our way.
We camped at Mwanza Yacht Club on the shore of the Lake Victoria. A lovely setting and friendly people.
View from The Penthouse as the moon rose that evening… 
 That was the end of my relaxed state of mind for a while.

The next morning I gave the car its regular once-over check (my mechanical incompetence keeps that limited for oil, water, fluids, loose-bolt checks). However, even my limited knowledge told me that this is not what the water in the expansion tank for the radiator should look like… 
 We had passed Schuuman’s (a Land Rover / Ford dealer’s workshop) a couple of kilometres up the road and I reckoned that, having driven 200+ km the previous day, I could nurse the car back up there.

So, what does a 20 year old Land Rover engine look like? 
Well, after 3 days of this… 
 
…and this… 

 
…it looks like this… 

 
…and this… 

 
That was 16 days ago – and 4 days of promises that ‘we’ll have the car back to you at 10am tomorrow Mr Scott’.

As a result, since Hendrich & Caroline’s Defender (the only other 2 people around) is also in the workshop, our Hardcore-Overlander campsite doesn’t look so hardcore… 
 
The current diagnosis is that the head gasket is gone; the head will need to be skimmed as it’s warped; the piston rings are shot; the cylinder liners are badly scored & need to be replaced; the crankshaft needs to be re-ground and the bearings replaced; the steering rack is damaged; the power-steering box is leaking (I knew that much); and the brakes aren’t good (I knew that much too).

Still, it sounds like a bit of a miracle that we got this far and, if you’re going to be stuck, I can think of worse vistas we could have from our prison window… 
 
Amongst the dozens of pied kingfishers we can see from our cell, I guess tonight must be couples’ night in the fish restaurant at the yacht club. 

 

Exploding Lakes

Posted on by July 9, 2015
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There’s nowhere to camp in Kigali, Rwanda. Actually, there’s probably only a handful of places in the whole country.

We ended up with the rooftent pitched on the driveway of a B&B in the city that advertises camping (called TR Companion). They have a very small lawn that you could get a backpacker’s tent on, but for rooftents there’s no alternative other than a notably sloping, short driveway. Rwanda is known as ‘Le Pays des Mille Collines’. The land of a thousand hills. 
 
It’s a strange place: 3 bedrooms and a camping area (?) sharing one bathroom, with a single shower (no shower head) over a single bath. All crammed onto a small plot. The 15-person, full spec Swedish sauna in the garden is bigger than the campsite.

Still, it gave us a chance to head for a local supermarket and stock up with decent meat & chicken for the fridge. Lots of French products in the supermarket, due to the long-standing Belgian / French influence here since the early 1900’s (not all of it covered in glory, as with so many colonies).

The B&B campsite is friendly and has an ‘honesty bar’ for beers, but there’s no fun in waking up in a ball at the foot of the tent in the morning after sliding down the mattress all night. 
We didn’t get a great deal of sleep either way. There was a hell of a racket most of the day and into the evening from about 1km away. Loud-speakers blaring music & passionate speeches, endless chanting and singing. I assumed it was a typically loud African wedding or some sort of 7-hour church service. 
Unfortunately not. The British Embassy was just up the road and the chanting was a major demonstration in the streets to protest at the arrest in London of General Karenzi Karake, as a result of a European Arrest Warrant issued following the genocide that took place here in 1994. Just what we need – a failed military coup in Burundi and now protests against the British in Rwanda.

We left the city the next morning, heading west to Kibuye on the shore of Lake Kivu. It should be a bit more peaceful there. It was only about 120km but it took us 4 hours. Unusually, this wasn’t because of the poor roads we’ve found throughout Africa. This time it was a combination of running into yet another anti-British demonstration against Karake’s arrest…
 …and because (although the road is immaculate and without speed bumps) it’s very undulating and twists like a roller coaster ride most of the way.

Once again though, the place is spotlessly clean and the countryside is beautiful. In places, perhaps because of the clay tiled roofs on many of the mud-brick buildings, you could be in the Midi-Pyrenees of South of France – I guess because of the French / Belgian influence again. 
 
When we arrived at Kibuye we headed for the hotel Bethanie, where pals of ours Paul & Ellen (who we’ve met up with a couple of times on the road) camped some months ago. It’s a pretty flash setup by African standards and in a beautiful location. 

 
Unfortunately, we weren’t able to camp as they were re-laying the grassy lakeshore area they normally allow camping on, but didn’t want it destroyed by some lump of a diesel-leaking, rusty Land Rover. We looked around at the only other place that offered camping (Holiday Hotel) but they wanted $20 each per night, PLUS and extra $10 if we wanted a shower! Nowhere near as nice as Hotel Bethanie’s location and, since Bethanie’s simpler rooms there were only $24 per night (including an en-suite shower AND breakfast buffet!) we checked in for 3 days. 

Our first hot showers for 2 months, a great setting, friendly people, good food and good bar service. It doesn’t get much better.
Here hilly fingers of land reach out into the sea-green waters of the lake before plunging dramatically into the water. Not much to do all day (other than a couple of boat trips on Lake Kivu) but sitting around watching the world go by sounded good to me.
View from The Penthouse… 
 
As you would expect, the fish in the restaurant was excellent. Favourite of all was the local equivalent of whitebait – straight out of the lake, around $1 a plate. 

 
Other than that, not a lot to report for a few days. We sat around and watched a family of Clawless Congo Otters playing in the beautiful water outside our room… 

 
…waved at the fishermen as they went past… 

 
… and actually saw more Crested Cranes in Rwanda than we had throughout the whole of our 5 months in Uganda (where they are the national bird and are the centre of the Ugandan flag). 

 
There are few dangers in the water here. Interestingly though, Lake Kivu has an odd history: the lake is part of The Albertine Rift Valley system, running North / South connecting Lake George, and Lake Tanganyika. It’s one of only 3 known ‘exploding lakes’. This rare type of natural disaster is caused by CO2 gas escaping from the lake bed (known as a Limnic Eruption) and rising to the surface. It doesn’t happen often, but in 1984 the cloud surfaced and suffocated 37 people (a similar event in Cameroon in 1986 released over 80 million cubic metres of CO2 and killed over 1,700 people).

Suitably chilled from 3 days of doing nothing, we headed back to Kigali. We’ve developed a small leak from the seal on the power-steering box, but nothing much we can do about that out here. It just needs watching and topping up. The rattle from somewhere in the drivetrain is driving me nuts though. I’ve had all the bolts checked 3 times since having the chassis replaced and no one can find anything. It’s odd, and only happens when backing off the revs in 3rd or 4th gear at speeds of over 40mph (60kph) – not that that happens much anyway.
Still, everything else seemed in order and the ride back was uneventful. 

Our last day in Kigali we went to the Genocide Memorial Museum. Having read something about the tragedy (and vividly remembering the news coverage – broadcast only after the event!) I thought I knew what to expect. 
What I didn’t expect was such a graceful, thoughtful, straightforward, explanation of the situation that allowed such an appalling 3-month period to occur. The Museum is an outstanding, modern, succinct presentation of the events that took place in Rwanda only 20 years ago. It was an absolute catastrophe – in a period of only 100 days, over 800,000 people were killed. Not just murdered – slaughtered. 

When we think of the term Genocide we think of some lunatic mobilising an army and using them to mass-murder some supposedly ‘offending’ part of his community. To some extent that’s what happened here – except that this was hand-to-hand butchery with machetes, knives and nailed-clubs: carried out by neighbour upon neighbour, husband upon wife, adult upon child, priest upon congregation. Almost all of those killed (men, women, children & babies) were abused, tortured or humiliated prior to dying. Many of those not hacked to death were either attacked then set alight in crowded churches or thrown in their dozens into long-drop latrines and left to drown / starve / trample each other to death. 

The story and exhibits the museum uses are somber, sober and very moving – passionate without being sensationalist: but dispassionately telling the story without making political statements. Many recently-filmed video testimonies are played of survivors telling their stories. 

This was one ‘tribe’ against another (following decades of inter-marrying) and wiped out 12-15% of the population in 100 days! The world stood by and did nothing. In particular the United Nations (with the exception of some troops on the ground who demanded help and got none). It’s probably not something that every tourist will visit (there are 250,000 bodies buried there in an area of only 3 acres) but it is something that I would wholeheartedly recommend.

Today Rwanda is a peaceful place (with the exception of the demonstrations against Karake’s arrest in London – he is the head of Rwandan Security and was instrumental amongst the RPF when they came back to Rwanda in 1994 to stop the massacres). 

The huge amount of aid that has poured into Rwanda over the last 15 years seems to have been used wisely. People are relatively prosperous by African standards, the infrastructure is excellent, their is little crime and the sense of community is highly visible – we arrived back in Kigali on the last Saturday of the month and throughout the 120km drive communities were out in their thousands on the streets, singing and chatting as they cleared paths, removed litter, cleared ditches, repaired walls, etc. It’s the law: last Saturday of the month is a mandatory community day.

People here no longer describe themselves as Hutu or Tutsi (the two main tribes involved). They describe themselves as Rwandans. They are friendly, but reserved people. Sober, but laugh readily when engaged. Well educated and well mannered. It is the warmth, forgiveness and resilience of those who survived the massacres that best defines Rwanda.

It’s hard to imagine that everyone over 20 years old you meet in the streets of the city or the villages lived through this event. It’s even more amazing that they realise it for what it was and live together in the peaceful harmony that they do – as one people and one nation.

We were sorry to leave but, as I write this we’re stuck on the shores of Lake Victoria in northern Tanzania. The car’s in a workshop up the road and the engine, unfortunately, is not in the car… 
 

Moving On…

Posted on by July 5, 2015
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It was time to move on from Kasese. Either side of flying home for Charlie’s wedding, we had been in Kasese District for about 5 months and leaving was a bit of a wrench.

Having had so much warm hospitality here (from Amos & Lavinia in particular) made it feel like we were leaving home – although these days it feels like our home could be any one of a number of places: Charlie & Luke’s, Judith & Paul’s, Caroline & Philip’s. The Land Rover may be where we live, but where is home these days?

We spent a couple of days preparing the car, making a couple of minor repairs to the rooftent… 

 
…having a final picnic in Lavinia’s garden with Kevin, Blessing, Ronette & Rosette, the girls that she has fostered… 

 
…and getting some final alterations / repairs to clothes from Rose. Rose is one of the original tailoring students that AWU trained some years ago and Helene has become like an aunt to her. 

 
She’s spent most of her life getting around on her knees. Finally she got a 2nd hand (22nd hand?) wheelchair about 6 months ago – but it’s broken. Hopefully her wheelchair will be fixed soon. It’s not easy to find the necessary parts here but we’ve made arrangements to have the axel repaired and a proper seat made for her. Being wheelchair bound must be difficult at the best of times in this heat – can you imagine how uncomfortable spending day after day on a plastic garden chair must be?

We headed towards Rwanda, a little concerned about what we’d find since the recently failed military coup in neighbouring Burundi has caused problems there and there have been a lot of refugees making for Congo and Rwanda. 
The road south from Kasese is pretty good, with the exception of the 30km section through Queen Elizabeth National Park. Whatever UWA spend their extortionate National Park Fees on in Uganda, it certainly isn’t maintenance.
Surprisingly though, the 100km we had been warned about south of Ishaka to Kabale was great. A new road is actually being put in, winding through the increasingly hilly valleys cultivated with sugar, tea and coffee (no sign of milk). 
The sub-surface that has been put down has made for one of the best roads we’ve driven in Uganda. We actually did the 250km to Lake Bunyonyi (about 40km north of the Rwandan border) in 5 hours rather than the expected 6-7.
Rwanda has a reputation for being expensive (by African standards) and everything this close to the border seems to reflect that – fuel is 20% more than Kasese at 3,200 Ugandan Shillings a litre (£0.65 / $1). Even that’s difficult to complain about though since Sterling is strong at the moment and there are now 5,200 UGX to the Pound, compared to 4,300 when we first arrived.
We camped at Bunyonyi Overland Resort, on the lake shore. View from The Penthouse… 
 
It’s a beautiful setting in a very well set up camp, amongst the terraced hillsides and simple villages. Pretty steep terrain here though. Even the safari tents have taken quite a bit of work to get a level sleeping surface… 

 
It’s colder here. Almost sleeping-bag weather. The lake is at almost exactly 2,000 metres elevation (higher than some Alpine ski resorts). 

 
At 6,500ft depth that means that the bottom is marginally below sea level (2,500 miles away)! Pretty cold for swimming but at least there aren’t any crocs (supposedly). Only the occasional wildlife sighting in camp… 

 
…but plenty of birdlife around… 

 
We spent a couple of days there, chilling out and revelling in the good, cheap food and beer. A great spot to relax. Camping only $8 each but, at least while we stayed, no power for the water heaters – still no hot shower for the last 2 months!

As we left, I wasn’t looking forward to the border crossing at Katuna. Our renewed Carnet for the car was dated wrongly by the RAC and I was worried that the authorities would get pretty arsey about the discrepancy with our car being in Uganda for over 8 months. 

As it turned out, it was a breeze. Only 15 minutes to get the expired documents stamped out for the Uganda exit then 45 minutes to get the new ones stamped in for Rwanda. Now that we’ve got the new Carnet started with one stamp in it, hopefully there’ll be no issues at future borders.

All in all, a painless process. After a quick (and useless?) temperature check for Ebola at a medical checkpoint, we paid our $30 each for Rwandan visas (unlike most nationalities, UK citizens don’t need to apply in advance online or take printed copies of the approval to the border), and changed our Ugandan Shillings for Rwanda Francs with the touts. The exchange rate was excellent – at least 10% better than the banks.

It took us no time to get to Kigali, only about 80km away. Rwanda is such a small country (22,000 sq km) and so different to Uganda. Beautiful terraced hillsides and volcanic mountains covered in rice paddies, sugar, papyrus and huge tea plantations. Mind you, at 2,000m of tropical altitude it’s not often easy to get good pictures of the landscape – they didn’t call the film ‘Gorillas in the Mist’ for nothing.  

 

Now We’re Cooking…

Posted on by June 26, 2015
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For the Fuel Briquette training day at the AmahaWe Uganda library we hired Rachel & her colleague Leo from Afode (a local WWF sponsored NGO) who have been using a steel briquette press of Tanzanian design. 

We brought about 30 people down from the Rwenzori mountain villages to the library, each pair representing one of the main groups from AWU making Briquettes at present. 

They’ve all been making briquettes by hand or with a timber lever press for a couple of years now so they’re well experienced in the principles, but they hadn’t seen a process like this before.
First things first, breakfast was provided – chapatis, bananas and African Tea (about 50:50 milk & hot water with a tea bag waved across the top of the cup). It was going to be a long day and some of the women had been travelling from remote communities since 6am for a 9am start. 

The morning started with a demonstration of the char grinding machine. 


One of the most time consuming tasks in making briquettes is grinding up the charcoal (either made directly from plant waste or ‘salvaged’ small pieces of charcoal from the street sellers). Doing this with a pestle and mortar is hard work, creates a lot of unhealthy dust, and is quite wasteful. This machine quickly and cleanly grinds it with a lever-operated paddle and sieves it into a heap below. 


Bits of stone, plastic or litter are picked out of the char to prevent anything noxious being mixed into the briquettes. 

In this particular recipe there will be no paper or anthill. The char dust will be bound together with a porridge made from cassava flour (itself ‘salvaged’ from the ground at a mill, being too gritty or lumpy to sell). The cassava flour is sieved… 

 …then cooked up into a runny porridge on a rocket stove. 

 

Once cooled a little, the porridge is mixed with the finest of the char dust… 

 

…then, as the bigger granules are added, there is no substitute to doing this with your hands. These women are so keen to learn and, despite many of them wearing their Sunday-best, they just get stuck in. 

 

Once mixed thoroughly (it can take up to 30 minutes) this char and cassava porridge recipe can be formed into briquettes by hand… 

… or used in the timber lever presses that a number of our groups have been using throughout the southern Rwenzori Mountains… 

 

…but what we’re here to show these women today is a new style of steel press for faster, less strenuous, higher quantity production.  

 

The press bed and ‘briquette pockets’ are loaded with the mix…  

…then the material is tamped down into the moulds to make sure it’s tightly packed.  

 The final part of the moulding involves slamming the very heavy steel lid onto the moulds three or four times.  

 

This ensures that the material is highly compressed.  

After that, the foot lever is operated and the bed of the mould is forced upward, pushing the completed briquettes out of the moulding tubes.  

 

Result… 24 perfectly moulded and compressed briquettes made in around 3-5 minutes (once the mix has been made up). All they have to do is dry for a couple of days and they’re ready to burn.  

 After a lunch of stewed goat, cassava, matoke, rice and g-nut sauce, the afternoon session was a chance for everyone to get stuck into making briquettes on the new press, mixing porridge, grinding char dust, etc.

Before everyone left for their long trips home (some had come 60km) the final part of the training day was a demonstration of how we’ve made oil-drum charcoal from farm / field waste such as maize cobs, coffee husks, banana leaves, sawdust, etc.   

 
Now these groups really can make Fuel From the Fields 

  
 The great thing is that these training day attendees represented many of the 36 women’s groups between Kasese and Bwera on the Congo border. Each group consists of 20 women and they love to share their knowledge. These 30 representatives will show the remaining 600 women how to use this mix to make these improved briquettes. They in turn will show other women.  

Typically a team of 5-6 people will make around 200 briquettes a day using the wooden lever press. We rented the steel machine from Rachel for a 3-day period after the training day. In that time (still learning and not yet up to full speed) a team of 4 people made over 3,500 briquettes. These will be distributed to various groups as samples, given to women’s groups and sold in the local community to raise some small funds for AWU projects.
All we have to do now is try to raise the 2.5 million Ugandan Shillings (£600 / $900) needed to get our own machine and these teams will really be able to start to raise themselves out of poverty. As mentioned before, we’re focusing on giving them a hand up, not a hand-out.
If you’d like to help, please go to the AmahaWe Uganda website and make a donation:
Click here to view AWU website

It really will make a difference to hundreds of women – and therefore hundreds of families.  
   

A Training Teaser…

Posted on by June 17, 2015
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Having taken a deep breath and got my previous rant pretty much fully out of my system, let’s get back to something more positive.

There’s been great progress with the AmahaWe Uganda team in Kasese.

Funds were raised in the UK for a new bike in order to be able to collect materials, move the Fuel Briquette machines around to remote villages for training, and deliver briquettes or crafts made for sale by the Good Samaritan Vocational Training Centre. 
The bike arrived last week and looks pretty cool…  
  The team are a bit nervous of it at the moment. Normally the roads and dirt tracks are pandemonium out here. They’re all used to buzzing around like mosquitos on little 125cc Chinese or Indian motorbikes. It’s like watching a cross between a Red Bull X-Games stunt team and a game of British Bulldog. The reduced manoeuvrability of a trike is going to take a bit of getting used to. 

Benjamin (our Executive Director here) has somehow already run himself over once!
Work at the library has progressed well. A small Internet cafe has been set up (no one around her can afford data on their phones and there’s hardly a land-line telephone in the whole district) and the shelves are pretty well populated with a wide variety of reference books (more are always needed). 

  The team also run a vocational training programme in in Kajwenge (in the Rwenzori, on the road to Bwera at The Congo border). The programme is coming on well and, following 6 months of daily training, this intake of trainees is about to graduate.

At present there are 8 people learning sewing skills… 
  
…7 people in shoe making… 

  
 …10 knitting trainees… 

  
…and 19 in the hairdressing group. 
 It may look pretty unsophisticated but there are few work opportunities in the mountains. It’s typically a subsistence lifestyle up here and people are keen as mustard to learn some sort of trade in order to be able to earn a little money for their families.

What’s needed here is a ‘hand up, not a hand-out‘. 

To date, most of the equipment and training costs have been funded by the AWU UK team. But this is changing. A few months ago the tailoring team were awarded a trial phase of a school uniform contract from Bwera school. 
Our team made trousers from scratch and altered pre-purchased shirts to fit the new intake of children. After transport, materials and manufacturing wages paid to the trainees enough profit was made to pay for the trainers for the next influx of Good Samaritan ‘apprentices’. Their next goal is to win further school contracts, to make the next phase of shirts from scratch and to secure a contract for the knitting team to make school jumpers. 

With time, a little more investment and the dedication of the AWU team we hope that it will not be too long before The Good Samaritan Centre can be made self-sustaining entirely.

Back at the library in Kasese, the ‘Fuel From Fields’ briquette making and training continues. The briquettes have proven really popular in the mountain villages – every one that our women’s groups make saves them money on firewood or charcoal. They’re cleaner, healthier, better burning, less smoky and reduce the deforestation that is causing soil-erosion to local farming communities. 

Out here, collecting firewood can be a dangerous business. The town is on the edge of Queen Elizabeth National Park and only 2 months ago a woman was killed by a lion while out searching for brush-wood.

While our briquettes are popular on a make-for-your-own-use basis in the mountains, it’s been more difficult to date to make them in quantities that can be sold commercially in Kasese town. Labour is a bit more expensive, charcoal is widely available (and the price doesn’t fluctuate so wildly in the wet season) and making our team more commercially aware has been a bit of a task – they’re evangelists and community workers by background.

Things have turned a corner though. Martin, one of our ex ‘street-kids’ (who has been mentored by the AWU team for the last 10 years or so) has been involved with our briquette making for a couple of years now. 
  
While our team were struggling to find a way to improve the project, Martin used his own initiative and found someone with the expertise to supply a more sophisticated type of briquette press in order to make the fuel briquettes in greater quantity, using less labour.   

 As soon as we saw their equipment we knew this could be a real step up. Three days later we had rented the machines, moved them to the library yard in Kasese (on the trike) and set up a training day in order for representatives of our women’s groups to find out more.

We hoped this would be a real opportunity to step up a gear: to learn new recipes to make the briquettes more efficient and new processes to make them more efficiently.

More to follow… my data is running out and you’ll have to wait for the next post to find out how it went. 

A Bit Of A Rant…

Posted on by June 15, 2015
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There’s a huge amount of good, grass-roots work being done by AmahaWe Uganda, other NGOs and small groups of local community leaders around Uganda. Progress is slowly, but visibly being made in trying to raise rural communities out of poverty. 

Effective community programmes are about giving people a hand up, rather than a hand-out.

But what’s going on in the higher echelons of Uganda at the moment? Although I’m no razor-sharp political commentator, there seems to be a lot going on at the top of the food-chain, without much state-sponsored improvement reaching the local guy (or, more likely, woman) struggling to support a family. 
There’s an election next year. The President has been in office since 1986 and hopes to be re-elected next June. So…..
State-sponsored TV and newspapers are full of wonderful stories of The President cutting ribbons on major new road programmes. Unsurprisingly, none of the work will start till after the election though.
As a result of teachers going on strike for 10 days, they have been promised that (if he’s re-elected) The President will make sure that his ministers ‘make good their failure to deliver the pay rise that was promised 3 years ago‘. In the meantime, the striking (unpaid) teachers were advised that if they were short of money until the strike ends, their Union would be able to lend them money – at 24% interest:
Parliament has outlawed Homosexuality and anyone providing assistance to homosexuals can also be criminally prosecuted. As a consequence, substantial amounts of Aid from USA and Western Europe have been cancelled over the last 6 months in protest. That’s hit the grass-roots really hard.
As more villages get electricity, inevitably more people are getting television (The President has stated that his ambition is for 40% of the population to have electricity by 2040). The government controls most TV broadcast content and local channels show hour after hour of only four programme types:
– numerous conferences The President has attended ‘where world leaders sought him out for his considered advice‘; 
– South American soap operas: 

– Indian soaps with voice-overs in 3 languages (at the same time!); 

– and an endless stream of strutting, shouting, blood & thunder preachers. 

It’s pretty easy to differentiate one channel from the next – one is all national anthems, ribbon cutting ceremonies, cheering children waving presidential flags and hand shaking photo-opportunities; another is push-up bras, boob jobs, short skirts, flash cars and affairs with the gardener; the third is loud, dramatic, Bangla music, pantomime hard-stares, weeping daughters and men with outrageous moustaches; and the last is over-fed, over-manicured men in sharp suits, shouting at ecstatic audiences and encouraging them to phone in and ‘pledge financial support’.
Fashions are changing. When we were here 6 months ago, women would never be seen in skirts above the knee and trousers were particularly uncommon. In towns now (probably as a result of those South American soap operas) very occasionally a skirt can be seen that’s a couple of inches above the knee and at least a dozen times a day women can be seen in trousers. 
Helpfully, 5 months ago, in a bid to stop what he felt was the moral decline of the nation, a Government Minister announced that women in short skirts were ‘just asking to be raped‘. Funnily enough that’s exactly what happened. Over the subsequent 2 months alone, rapes (pretty rare under normal circumstances) increased 900% and were only brought back under control by a threatening, but laughably-worded, retraction issued by the Ministry of Health and the Commissioner of Police.
Birth control and family planning information is available through the churches and a number of Aid Organisations but the newspapers were still full of the life-story of a 27 year old local pop star who died a week or so ago – leaving 10 wives and 14 children.
Front-page news for at least 2 days was that, after 16 years as a Member of Parliament, The President’s wife would not be standing for re-election next year. ‘It’s what God intended‘ she told the desperately disappointed reporters and officials at her press conference, who praised the many great projects in which she has been involved. Although she’s very disappointed not to be able to continue serving the people, she confirmed later in the article that she would be able to return quickly to Kampala at any time by helicopter if her advice is needed.
It seems she has a new role, working in an advisory capacity to a consortium of local entrepreneurs and land owners in North Western Uganda. It will no doubt be interesting to see what happens in that region over the next few years. Particularly since it holds the world-famous Murchison Falls National Park (under which has just been discovered a huge reserve of oil). Maybe it’ll be a Chinese oil or construction company helicopter for those trips back to Kampala.
Back in the real world… 
 … we’re still continuing with our AmahaWe Uganda Fuel Briquette programme with the team in Kasese. They’ve also have started a Kitchen-Garden training programme among rural communities and their Good Samaritan Centre now has 30 unemployed people in its full-time Vocational Training Programme. 
In particular, women’s groups in the Rwenzori mountain villages have taken up these initiatives enthusiastically. They’re not likely to get electricity until after 2040. They’re unlikely to see much benefit from the oil discovered. They’re more likely to get a push-up bra from the government than a road. The need to do something positive about deforestation that is changing their environment and eroding their farmland is greater than ever. The projects they are involved in allow them to save every shilling possible on firewood and home-produced food. As a result they’re more able to send their children to school (even if only occasionally), put food on the table and buy medical treatment when they get sick.
More on those positive initiatives to come next time (now that I’ve got my rant out of my system).