The Link Bus from Kampala to Kasese and Other Stories

For the past three years, my partner, Leela, has been regularly travelling to a peninsula in the far West of Uganda to carry out her PhD research. I had been hearing about the place, the people, and its wildlife for so long that I was beginning to fear that my perception of the place was doomed to remain the one I had formed in my own head, but a couple of months ago I was finally able to visit for a couple of weeks, and experience the Mweya Peninsula for myself.

In total I saw 181 species over the 18 days, with 150-ish of those being lifers. But I didn’t want to do a full trip blog for this, I started to write it a couple of times, and it always came out sounding quite “and then we went there, and then we went there”. So, I have decided to frame my trip in 7 short excerpts, as well as one longer story; one which took well over 7 hours and ended any hope of my back remaining functional past 50. That story is a coach journey, and it was just a small part of an incredible trip. I want to emphasise that this blog was by no means written to deter you from undertaking birdwatching trips which push you outside of your comfort zone. Much to the contrary, this piece aims to celebrate the variety of stories and places I encountered; in particular said coach journey, which I wouldn't trade for anything.

N.B. Each story appears after a short description of an event that occured during the Link Bus voyage, they do not take place at the same hour in which the Link Bus event occured despite the titling suggesting otherwise. They do however appear in chronological order in relation to when they occured during the trip as a whole. Also I should add a Trigger Warning for an image of a dead animal and accompanying description.

 

7am

It takes a few minutes for our taxi driver, Fred, to manoeuvre into the crowded Link Bus Terminal in Kampala. It is full of buses, people, and boxes containing goods waiting to be shipped around East Africa. By the time we are out of the taxi there is a general air of departure, people are hurrying past us towards the bus closest to the entrance to the terminal, which we are hoping to be on. A man in Link Bus uniform sees us and hurries our way. We are the only Wuzungus (a Bantu term for white person) in the terminal, which seems to entitle us to special treatment, and we are taken to the front of a very stagnant queue for tickets. Despite such preferential treatment, it takes us a while to acquire the tickets, and by the time we get to the bus a small group of men have shrouded the door. “It’s full” they tell us. Leela pushes past them and looks on the bus, the back seats are empty. We get my big backpack in the luggage hold, and sit in the rightmost two of the empty 6 seats at the back. The bus is green, with yellow seats, and is busy with people eager to escape the city. Before we leave, two men get on the bus and take two of the remaining back seats. We set off at 7:13, bound for Kasese, 372 km away in the far west of Uganda.

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Having arrived in Uganda the day before, Leela has decided to take me to the Entebbe Botanical Gardens to help me familiarise myself with the birdlife of Uganda. As we walk towards a sheltered corner of the gardens, near the banks of Lake Victoria, Leela points out a grey bush. She says she has seen it before and tells me to go closer. The grey colouration is coming from spider’s webs which have covered the entire bush. The webs are laden with small midges, locally called lakeflies, which I am to become more familiar with as the trip progresses. The spiders who have made the webs remind me of the orb weavers I saw in Costa Rica. One scuttles away as I walk towards it, deeper into the webbed shrub.

 

8am

One of the men who has sat near us is in an animated conversation with a woman who has just got on at a stop on the outskirts of Kampala. He keeps pointing to the seats next to him, and saying something in Luganda (one of the official languages of Uganda, alongside English) as he points to them. The vigour with which he points to each seat, and the way his hand bounces between each point is leaving me close to laughter.  Why he is pointing with such vim isn’t immediately clear, but just before we leave the urban sprawl of Kampala all becomes apparent. Three people get on the bus, and walk towards us – his mum, wife, and daughter. They settle in next to him, and he pushes up next to me. I try to remove the image of him pointing from my head as we drive away, but to this day the voracity of his motion still lingers.

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The sun has begun to set over Mabamba swamp. We are in our fourth hour of searching for a Shoebill, and as of yet, we haven’t had an ounce of luck. Our guides scan the papyrus beds from both ends of the ramshackle canoe we are sat in. They each carry long poles, which they have been using to push the boat through areas of thick vegetation that have grown across the narrow channels which criss-cross the swamp. I stand up in the middle of the boat and scan. I see a single yellow and brown bird dart along a small channel nearby us. My ID book later confirms this to be a Yellow-throated Longclaw. The guides turn to us and inform us that we will have to leave before the light fades, and we turn and begin to wind our way out of the swamp, seemingly destined to remain Shoebill-less.

 

9am

A small TV is hanging from the ceiling halfway along the bus. It began to play music videos by local Ugandan artists just after we set off. By the 20^th video I notice that the music always has the same drumbeat and bounce along in time with it. This disappoints Leela to my right, but entertains the patriarch to my left. He smiles at me as we continue along the road, nearing our first stop: Mityana.

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The Mweya Peninsula sits at the far north-east of Lake Edward. A small village is situated on an area of high ground in the centre of the peninsula, with two safari lodges taking advantage of the edges of this raised area to provide panoramic views over the lake and the surrounding scrub habitat. Leela and I are wallowing in Acacia Lodge’s infinity pool, which looks out over a lower area of the peninsula, creatively named the Lower Peninsula. It is late afternoon, and the sun is beginning to disappear behind the Virunga Mountains in the West. Some elephants wander around far below us, and a couple of hippos emerge from the edge of the lake. More remarkable than the megafauna, however, are the thousands of Policeman Skipper butterflies which are zipping over the peninsula, heading south. They are coming through through in waves, much to the delight of hungry Angola Swallows and Little Swifts, soaring above our heads. I spend much of that evening trying to catch one of the Skippers, with mosquito nets and other improvised equipment, but it is not until the sun has set and our house’s porchlight is left on that I see one settled, drawn into the light alongside hundreds of lakeflies.

 

10am

Mityana hasn’t quite woken up as we pull into the side of the road. Only a few people get off, including the conductor, who greets another man dressed in Link Bus green. This man turns out to be his replacement. A few vendors approach us on the right-hand side of the bus. The windows are high up, and they must hold their sodas high above their heads in cardboard boxes to offer them to the passengers within. Sadly, we have come prepared with refreshments and snacks, including several hard-boiled eggs provided by our Entebbe accommodation earlier that morning. It isn’t long before we pull away, and the vendors hurry back to the other side of the road.

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My torch beam catches some eye-shine on the far side of the runway. The animal jolts a little to the right; another hare. We are driving along Mweya’s runway for small aircraft, searching for nightjars. Someone has reported a Pennant-winged Nightjar a few days earlier and I am hopeful that I might be able to catch up with one. We come to a sudden stop, Leela has seen something ahead. I turn forwards and am shocked to see two elephants on the path up ahead. They look towards each other before locking tusks and trunks. The clatter of tusk on tusk is audible over the drone of crickets. Lapwings cry out from somewhere unseen behind us, and the elephants pause their parlay. Leela informs me this is a pair of young ones, practicing for more serious tussles in their long lives to come. They raise their tusks again, youthful ivory ringing in the hot evening air.

11am

The bus slows down and pulls up at the side of the road. “Short call” is the word from the conductor, which Leela informs me means a toilet break. I get out to stretch my legs. The road hasn’t been tarmacked for a few miles; it now consists of an orange dirt. The deep green foliage to each side of the road has been coloured a pale orange, and with every passing car the air becomes thick with dust. We reboard the bus after a couple of minutes and wait for a few more people to re-emerge from the roadside bushes. The TV’s music begins again as we pull away, a cloud of orange dust billowing behind us as we continue down the road.

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I cannot comprehend the stench. The air is sweet with foulness and rot, and Leela has insisted on getting out of the car. In front of us lies the corpse of a Hippopotamus. It can’t be more than a week old, says Leela, but the heat of the Ugandan sun has hastened its decomposition. Its skin has fallen from its skeleton, so discoloured and saggy that I have just mistaken it for a tarpaulin. I saw Vultures circling this part of the Lower Peninsula a few days ago and was excited to see them. The smell that is burning my nose seems to be the price I must pay to increase my list.

12pm

Mubende is alive with activity. Leela has exited the bus briefly for a ‘short call’ and I am enjoying a touch more legroom. Much like in Mityana there are vendors selling their wares, this time whole cooked chickens alongside sodas, but they are having much more luck than they did at our earlier stop. It is lunchtime and the patriarch next to me is delighted at having purchased some small chicken bites. He slowly unfurls the black plastic bag that they have been sold in, revealing the mass of cooked fowl beneath, and takes one before refurling the bag. His wife has purchased a much larger chicken skewer, which she is sharing with her daughter. Leela gets back on the bus, and we leave Mubende.

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The decision to take the AirLink flight back from Mweya to Entebbe was an easy one (as you’re about to understand). Our flight isn’t direct however, before we make our way to the shores of Lake Victoria, we are heading to Kisoro in far the Southwest of Uganda. The plane is small, but the legroom is ample, and the view from the window is astonishing. Tea plantations have given way to deep, dense jungle. It stretches out as far as I can see. A check of google maps confirms this as the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, and I scan every forested slope, hoping to catch sight of a Gorilla between the trees.

1pm

I am experiencing more discomfort than ever before. Both social and physical. The roads, despite being the Ugandan equivalent of a motorway, have speed bumps. And they aren’t just one bump; each bump is preceded by 5 small bumps which rattle my brain within my skull each time we go over them. It has also become apparent that the back of bus is exacerbating the impact of the bumps, we have just gone over a bump that has sent me 50cm off my seat, landing harshly on a chair that is more plastic than cushion. On the social side of things, the family next to us seems to have a very problematic relationship with litter. The patriarch has strewn his black plastic bag tidily next to my left foot, alongside the Coca-Cola bottle he has also just finished. His wife has been watching Ugandan TV dramas on her phone for the past two hours. I found them entertaining at first, but this episode is different. The screen has gone blank and the noises the phone is producing can only be described as 18+. On top of that, the music videos have continued, and in this 7^th hour of the journey, I have now very firmly had enough of the same drumbeat. I look at Leela on my right, and I have never seen her look so drained. I can only offer her our one remaining hard-boiled egg. It will be 3 hours until we reach Kasese. I feel the shake of a 5-bump speedbump and pray that the driver might go over the next bump so fast that I am knocked out for the remainder of the voyage.

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The sound of the engine on our canoe is familiar as our guides steer us onwards into the Mabamba swamp. I couldn’t handle a trip to Uganda without having seen a Shoebill, and we are back to try again. There seems to have been an explosion of Swamphens since we were last here, and they hot-foot it out of the way as the canoe speeds along the narrow channels which today have promised our prehistoric target. Canoes shoot past us in the other direction, carrying wuzungus who seem only mildly amused; a worrying sign, but my fear is short-lived. We turn a corner and there, on the edge of the reedbeds, stands our quarry. I found its presence somewhat mesmerising. A creature so odd and specialised, but one with such character. I occasionally find myself looking at the pictures I took of the bird and staring into its eyes. The swamp is one of the top tourist attractions in Uganda and financially supports a whole community on the edge of Entebbe. I wonder how many eyes that Shoebill has stared back into, unaware of the impact its presence has on those who make a living out of showing it stand motionless, waiting for a lungfish to move in the murky depths below.

 4pm

It is marginally cooler in the waiting room in Kasese than it was on the bus. I am sitting with all our luggage on three metal seats watching a TV. Here in the middle of Africa, I am being treated to views of central Boscombe, a place I will be moving nearby to in a month’s time. AFC Bournemouth are playing Leeds United. As I sit there, I wonder if Marcos Senesi will ever have to get the Link Bus from Kampala to Kasese? It’s doubtful, and I think that Bournemouth’s medical staff might have something to say to him if he did.