This hike was the first time that I thought to myself, what I'm doing right now could be on a Peace Corps brochure. I've seen poverty everywhere I've been in Uganda so far but its been gritty real poverty not the romanticized, poor but happy in paradise poverty. Well this might be as close as it gets. No money or formal education, but all the food you can grow and a waterfall in your backyard.
Max and I decided to bike up the plateau just outside Mbale that I mentioned a while back. Turns out, riding at this altitude is really hard work, I didn't know until now how much sweat I could produce.
This is about half way up.
Muzungu, you give me your bike!
A shop by a water tower where we locked up our bikes and proceeded on foot. That's goat hanging up in the shop.
Yeah, that should hold.
Hide and seek!
A fair amount of traffic going up and down, most people barefoot or in sandals. Somehow they didn't have any problems. Max ate shit pretty badly on the way down.
Planting on the slopes, look at the upper left corner, how the hell do they do it?
The summit; houses and onion fields in the clouds.
The weirdest thing, there was a shop next door to this house that sold sodas. As far as know there is no way to get anything up top by car or boda, maybe that's what people passing us on the way up were carrying on their heads. We found a place to eat lunch away from people so as not to rub in the fact that we were eating tasty food, but inevitably a crowd of kids formed to stare at us. We are used to being stared at by now and don't find it at all out of the ordinary for a group of slack jawed kids to silently stare at us unblinking for twenty minutes. So we were just talking as usual, but the crowd of kids was getting closer. Finally, a kid was standing right behind max and stopping mid sentence he says to me: there's someone right behind me isn't there? Yup. So he turns around and yells as loud as he can, and the kid runs off. This is the good work we're doing here in Uganda. Its fine though, theres always a few kids who laugh along.
The perfect mango grabbing tool. She was on her way up with it as we came down.
