Kabale to Buhoma - Day 308

Date: June 22nd, 2010
Distance: 102km
Country: Uganda
Song of the Day: Fall - Something Corporate
Significant Crashes to Date: 3
Watches Busted to Date: 2

Rode out of town today. Happy to be on the road again. The bike also seems to be performing much better. It really doesn't seem like as much of a struggle to crank it down the road anymore. I guess I should have changed the bottom bracket earlier. A bit of a tail wind didn't hurt either.

I started the day traveling through a valley. Cows were grazing on the valley floor. The hillsides above were terraces with small fields. It was quite a pretty site. At the end of the valley was a huge hill. I felt good getting to the top. From their I left the main paved road.

I ended up riding on the upper slopes of a range of hills. Spread out below me were more terraced hillsides. It appeared that as far as I could see all the arable land was being used for something. I should have been going faster, but the views were just incredible. The only thing that really kept me moving was the children, which are terrible. They would chase after me yelling "give me money, give me money". That was frustrating. I even had one little girl run up and throw a stick at me. I can understand why the adults beat the children here...

I did make it to the first section of Bwindi Impenetrable National Park between Ndego and Rohija. Coming from the top of this ridge line I could see the park boundries quite well. The terraced farmland stopped with a line of jungle.

The park itself did live up to its name. It was up and down a lot over bad gravel roads. Even with the new bottom bracket I was struggling. I also crashed again. It was almost exactly the same thing that happened in the highlands of Guinea. I guess I am averaging about one crash for every 100 days on the road. I broke my second watch and snaped part of the band. I also apparently have lost both sets of bike gloves I had while in Kabale. So when I landed I sprained my wrist. I am not sure if the gloves would have helped that, but it would have been better. I also bruised a rib going over the handle bars. All in all, not that fun.

I did make it to Rohija, but there really didn't seem to be anything there. I thought it would be more of a town. I decided to just keep going all the way to Buhoma, which is on the north end of the park. The roads were still bad, but they were mostly downhill. So I could cruise pretty well.

It did get dark before I got to Buhoma though. The last 10km were absolute hell. My wrist was really feeling bad and I couldn't even grip the handle bar. I ended up pushing the bike for anything that wasn't flat. I found a place to stay that wasn't horribly expensive and went to bed.

-Dravis