Canoeing in Christmas

(This is the 3rd part of my recent trip to Uganda… depending on how long-winded I am here, it may be the last… or they may be one more. You’ll have to read to find out!!)

We returned to the Golden Monkeys hostel in Kisoro an exhausted, but happy, bunch. We had seen – and perhaps more lingeringly, smelled – mountain gorillas from a change-of-shorts-requiring distance. The odour of a mountain gorillas is difficult to describe. If you’ve ever stood around the outside edge of a huddle of football players shortly after they’ve beaten St. F-X in a rainy playoff game in, say, early November – you’ll at least know roughly where to start. Add to that earthy-smelling undertones and, for some strange reason, vanilla yoghurt, and you’ll be close.

The gorillas, who we weren’t allowed photgraph using flash photography (it washes out their complexion, or something) had been co-operative. At one point, they sat directly in the middle of the only sun-soaked clearing in all of Bwindi, allowing the aperture enough light to function. At another, Posho the gorilla was close enough to actually see the outline of my heart as it enthusiastically bounched from throat to stomach and back 400 times a minute.

Our expenditures in Bwindi – which, we were repeatedly assured, were essential to the continued survival of the gorillas – were rewarded not only with the unrivaled opportunity to see the big apes firsthand, but also with a cardboard certificate, celebrating, I suppose, that we were able to survive the hike out of the gorge in which the gorillas had chosen to lunch that day.

The combination of the bus-trip and the hike and the financial outlay of about two month’s rent had left the group of us pretty exhausted. With the next day being the 24th, it was time to head to our Christmas Retreat. We had decided to stay at Byoona Amagara a bout a week earlier, and I had called to make reservations. I was a little startled to find that they had booked out of dorms, cottages, twin dorms and geodomes – but they did have space available in their special “Holiday Room” for only 150% of the price of the regular dorm. Would we be interested? Since 150% in this case meant 15 000 Uganda Shillings a night (roughly $7.50), I felt that would be fine.

We were tenatively excited about our vacation from our vacation. I mean, come on, HOLIDAY room. Further adding to the sense of excitement was that I would be canoeing to my Christmas lodgings. For a lad who has spent the sum total of his Christmas past in either Southern or Northern Ontario, this was a novel prospect. Hike a kilometer in chest-deep snow to get to the cottage? Yes. Spend Christmas running around the backyard in pajamas, a snowsuit and boots so sturdy they could support a family of four? Yes. Be chased by a raven over a semi-frozen streambed while my sisters decided between them who got my computer? Absolutely. But water in a non-frozen state on December 24th was decidedly surreal.

Lake Bunyoni – on which Itambira Island, home of Byoona Amagara, was situated – is reputed by locals to be about 2000 meters deep. Considering that we were at an elevation of about 1850 meters while on Itambira Island this struck me as somewhat unlikely. However, since each lake in Africa has its own unique method of killing you – billharzia, crocodiles, tilapia, enraged hippos, spears thrown by locals who assumed you were a very large, pale fish – I was not particularly ready to put myself to the test to find out.

From the dock at Rutinda, we arranged for a canoe to Itambira Island. MaryLou, Cliff and I were in one boat, and Ronnie and Becky in the other. Since MaryLou and I both feel we are among the world’s best paddlers, we were happy to grab a paddle to pitch in. Imagine my surprise, then, when the paddle turned out to be what I would chartiably describe as a large, wooden garden spade. The canoe itself was known as a dug-out, and while there was no sign of Lou Pinella, it did seem like a hollowed-out tree trunk with bales of hay for seats. This, I suppose, is because that’s precisely what it was.

We docked at Byoona, and were met by George who happily deposited MaryLou, Cliff and I in … a dorm. This seemed weird to me, since we had a holiday room lined up, but whatever. We were all pretty beat, so we took a nap before really figuring out what was up.

Some time in the not-too-distant future, I was awoken by what I can only describe as a shrill, Harpie-like screech originating outside the door of the dorm. Another guest – who, I should point out, I would later learn to love but at that precise moment, I wished only for her to be smited for the unholy noise she was making – was mildly irked that we were in what was apparently a dorm reserved for her. We were quickly ushered to our appropriate Holiday Room, which turned out to be the side-room off of the resort’s small library. While lacking in features such as ‘lights’, ‘mosquito nets’ and ‘anything to make the price hike worthwhile’,  I was still happy. We would be using candles for light, and the wooden construction was very reminiscent of my grandma’s cottage in Bala, Ontario.

We were to spend from the 24th to the 27th at Byoona, and it was mostly quite relaxing. I discovered that the lake was free of all death-causing items, and that it’s depth – while still unlikely to be 2000m – was at least 10m, since I couldn’t get to the bottom right off of the dock. I discovered that not everyone else feels Scrabble is a religion, one worthily defended by threatening gestures and shakes of the fists. I discovered that 15 US Peace Corps volunteers can be simulataneously wonderful human beings and the most irritating force to walk the planet since Will Ferrell (seriously… how do people find him funny?)

The Peace Corps were actually worthy of a whole separate blog post, but I’ll summarize by saying that they had all left their work sites without authorization, had been discovered to have done so through the slip of a fellow worker, and were thus all being threatened with either deportation or execution. From the amount of hand-wringing and wailing, I can’t exactly remember. It was unfortunate that I met them all at such a difficult time, since they almost all seemed like friendly and outgoing people – some, indeed, of the very highest caliber – and that began to shine through over the next 24 hours, before they scampered off to Kampala to recieve a tongue lashing from the country co-ordinator.

As for me… I celebrated Christmas Eve underneath a crystal-clear and cool night sky, looking at the stars, and thinking of my friends and family back home. (Yes, I thought of you, specfically.) Christmas dinner was locally caught crayfish in a masala sauce, over rice, with a cheese chapatti-pizza and a side of stomach flu. For Christmas, I gave a new geocache to the island (since the old one had disappeared without ever getting a find) and received a subsequent first-to-find, when I managed to find the cache I had rehidden for the owner, oh, two minutes earlier.

It was, in short, basically a Muskokan summer for Christmas. I went swimming in a cool, but not cold, lake; I wandered around the forest; I played Euchre and Scrabble and debated whether or not I really should have another beer (the answer was never really in doubt, sadly). The only thing that would have made it more perfect was having my family there… but as Dad says, you can’t have everything.

At least, not until I headed home… a mere 8 days after Christmas.