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6th November 2006

Location: Kampala, Uganda
Distance Travelled: 10 500 km

The smell of wild dirty adventure was in the air. We opted not to take the main road from Arusha to Nairobi but rather unleash our intrepid travelling selves upon rugged roads and local villages to the south of lake Victoria - the second largest fresh water lake in the world. The going was tough but the tough got going. The main highway from Arusha to Dodoma, Tanzania’s capital, used to be tar but had fallen into disrepair making for rough and slow riding. We made camp at our first church and were looked after better than imagined with food and many well wishes. We decided to negotiate the 250km of rough dirt and another 100km of tar to Nzega in a day. A day to pass 10,000km, have our three month anniversary, travel on gravel at high speeds, watch Nic fall at pace and dive into a survival roll resembling Chinese acrobats, see Juls drop his bike and mash his steal panniers, make our first bribe to pass through an unfinished road and see Phill stung by another bee and react. We deserved DB.

Mwanza, a city on the south coast of lake Victoria was full of tension and anger not providing the group with memories of butterflies and warm fuzzies. Juls’ tank bag with the camera inside was one more razor blade slice away from disappearance while the police stopped us and told us not to venture out at night. That aside we still ate food and survived. We booked a ferry across the lake to Bakoba departing at 10pm. We arrived in a thunderstorm to have our bikes craned on deck and setup a constant guard over them. We had been forewarned not to leave them alone else they would be stripped by morning. We setup a night watch with shifts; Jerry did 10-12 as it was his Birthday the next day, Phill 12-2, Nic 2-4 and Juls 4-6am. We used a large tyre iron to scare away the locals and more than a few had to be persuaded.

It became a mad dash to get to Kampala, there was one simple reason, to get our Ethiopian Visas before the weekend. We rode through the rain passing fields of tea and sugar cane, dodging dangerous Ugandan taxi shuttles, stopping briefly at the equator - the first of our 6 crossings, and arriving in Kampala to traffic madness. Nic was knocked of the bike at an intersection and we ended up hiring a local to escort us to the Ethiopian Embassy. We arrived at 4pm on a Friday and asked if we could have a visa for their country in the hour before close. At first it was not taken well but our green friend George Washington paid them a visit and we walked out of Ethiopia back to Uganda with visas in hand.

We are currently unable to disclose our present location but tune in soon for an exciting encounter of rhinos, thick mud and road bandits.

Arusha to Kampala Images

Chronicle blurp

The sun shined off the vivid colours of the Masai Warrior garb who are renowned for killing lion to enter manhood. We ride motorbikes through continents. They stared in awe as we roared through the north east of Tanzania to Mwanza. We managed to secure passage on a vessel partway across lake Victoria allowing our quest to be pirates to come into fruition, temporarily. It was tough watching our beautiful bikes be hoisted 5 metres in the air on a small platform with no straps, but sometimes you have to trust the locals even if your gut feeling states otherwise. After little sleep and we managed to haul ourselves and bikes over the Ugandan border, pass the equator and ride into a traffic nightmare in Kampala. We lived to tell the story..