In Mwanza

me and a guy that looks like Eddie Murphy


We'll,we took the ferry to Mwanza, and now we're here... although it was quite the adventure getting here.

When we left Kampala, we were on the most over crowded bus you can imagine. The whole bus was packed with people sitting everywhere. They also loaded up every possible place on the bus with everything from corn, to packages, to bunches of bananas. It was packed! We left about 2 hours late. Once we got about 45min down the road we ran out of fuel. Fun! They brought it from the nearest town on a boda-boda (mini bike) and then they had to prime the old beast of a bus before we could carry on. It took over 2 hours. We were on the way again. We got to the border at dark and had no more problems from there on.

We arrived at a very cool place in Bukoba, right in Lake Victoria. It's an amazing setting where we ate fried Talapia and rice on the sand of the biggest lake in the world. Bukoba is a very neat quite little town, in a beautiful location.
The next morning I went over to the port to buy our tickets. I was informed the the boat had a problem and may not sail that day. They told me they would not sell tickets until they new if they could fix the problem. "Come back at 2pm." So I did. And then again at 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8. At 9:00pm we had our ticket for the lowest class. Since all the others were sold out many days before. This ticket ment that instead of having a private sleeper berth, we'd be in the hull of the ship where it's 100F with 300 other people that either couldn't get a sleeper berth or wanted to save less than $1 per ticket. When we walked down there, we immediately went out, and tried to find another place up on top somewhere. It was so packed with people and really hot and smelly. We actually found a sweet place on the top of the ship with benches to sleep on and a beautiful view of the stars over lake victoria right at the equator. It was amazing. It was quiet, we slept well, and had it all to ourselves. I quess it was too cold for the Africans. Oh, we left at about 11pm. The ship was scheduled to sail at 9pm. Not too bad I think.

We're now in Mwanza. The second largest city in Tanzania. It's far from the tourist areas of Zanzibar, Kilimanjaro, or the Seringetti, and we quite like it. We we're planning to take the train from here back to Kigoma, but lo and behold, no one knows when the train will leave. So for an extra $50 more than the train, which is uncertain, and a whole lot faster and nicer than a 30 hr bus ride on washed out roads... we're flying. We got a cheap flight striaght to the best beach on earth. Erin's pretty excited about that!

We're not sure what our communications will be like for the next week, so don't worry. We'll just be soaking up the sun!