Groomed Orderly Dirty and Dying. Chapter 3.
“ 9/30/19
I keep looking back on the videos from the trip. It’s so weird how the voice sounds so much like mine and when the camera pans to my face it looks like me. The plots line up but it can’t be. That man climbing those mountains is not the boy watching the video of the man climbing the mountains. It can’t be.”
Everything feels upside down and more than slightly left of center. I just woke up and fatigue is settling in. What day is it? It’s all coming back. I had a burger. We went to a market. A man yelled at me for taking his picture? I went to bed in Africa last night? Oh god that dream was real.
I’m sitting in a small plastic chair looking at my now destroyed bike box and letting broken swahili waft in and out of my mind. The pace is dictated by the old radio in the corner and I feel at ease and at odds. Through jetlag I feel the remains of the Persian Gulf pressed firmly into my skin. I really did try my best with the jerry cans late last night. The mosquito bites are beginning to make themselves aware around my eyes. I pick a little hoping it wakes me up. I forgot to take my malaria pills last night. Great start.
I’ve been sitting in this room all morning and impatience is starting to grow. I claw my toes into the concrete and grab at my stuff. I’ve never felt claustrophobic until now and the layers of the room have been dissected long past satisfaction. There’s a children’s cricket trophy on the small table to my left. The bat is broken off. Karl said it was the trophy for the mountain bike race he had won years ago. Next to the trophy is a small tv and a dark wooden dresser. Inside are some plates and bowls, coffee and tea. No food.
“Should I bring sugar?” he asks as we’re packing up.
‘Karl you do get that we have 2,000 kilometers ahead? You’re going to need a lot more than sugar.’
I return to the map and look around, still unsure what I’m looking for. I scan roads unknowing of what they bring and create grandeur illusions in my mind. Right now I’m dreaming of tribesmen and elephants. Maybe a lion.
All the while the room feels like the walls are falling in towards me. Karl has left ten minutes ago and I’m still in the chair waiting. It’s small ridges from the plastic moulds are gripping my wrists and growing shackles. He’s left his music playing and Justin Bieber comes on and the walls creep in just ever so more noticeably. Roosters are crowing outside. It’s early. They scream with abandonment breaking up last night’s dream and announcing a morbid reality. A motorcycle races down the alley adding to the commotion. Children run nearby, playing and laughing audibly. The walls keep moving, trembling all the while. The roof is made of tin and underneath it is a set of logs holding it up. No ceiling- And the mosquitos enter and leave with the movement of the wind. It brings with it the smell of fresh, American blood and they too push at the walls. They rumble. I’m here. Time to go. The large padlock on the door holds me down, locked to my shackles. “Don’t go anywhere without me” Karl said before leaving. My bike is ten feet away and rapidly approaching now. The walls are pushing it towards me and leave nowhere to run. I need to ride. I need the air. I need it now Karl.
He returns with some bread. We eat plain white bread for breakfast, a regular for him. I fill my bottles and fight to stomach two pieces understanding their importance and finally beg to leave. The sounds coming from the other side of the walls are crushing me and I need to see what’s causing them. I need to begin to understand if I’m in danger or not and this massive padlock feels like an even worse start.
“ 08/09/19.
Day 1. It’s chaos.”
The pace in Kampala is fast. The roads buzz with the energy of a developing world eager to cash out and make it big. Self employment runs Uganda and in the city hustle burns hot on the back of it’s motorcycle tail pipes. Drivers fly down the road on their small, 125cc motorcycles, or “boda-bodas” as they call them, looking for passengers or cargo and racing their competition through traffic. The boda-boda is the backbone of life in Uganda. It bears the weight of a fertile land producing more plantains and more people everyday and shuffles them all through bustling markets and about the ever-crowded countryside. The things I'd see on the back of them…
Boda-bodas are pouring smoke into the air and cutting me up in traffic. Karl and I are quickly on the main road heading out of Kampala. The traffic has turned me hyper-aware and losing my grip of life amongst the edges.
GO!
Watch for cross-traffic. This taxi just off my shoulder is merging with the other dozen. Cars are stopped here. Bodas accelerate together up the gutter. I follow, hop a curb and run the light. Karl is yelling directions and I lose him in an alley. Follow. Pedal. Grab the camera. I try and balance staring agape at the markets and evading traffic. Take a photo, get it wrong and ride into the back of a taxi. Back on the bike, hard on the pedals and file in through the gutter. I grab onto a boda going up a hill as a joke. The driver laughs and grabs my hand. He strokes my white skin. We make eye contact and smile. I pedal harder but lose him on the next climb. He’s back among the growing crowd of motorcycles dominating these streets. I find Karl. He pulls into a small market and I try and breathe.
Woah…
This is fun!
Breathing is hard now. In the dense city streets the smog still lingers. Coal fired pans fill the markets and old dying cars leak oil on the roads and pour smoke into the air. We sit amongst it all and I look for my inhaler. Karl is having a boy at a motorcycle repair stand re-dish his wheel. I talk with the woman two shops down. She sells windows and mirrors in a small windowless and mirrorless shop. She’s worked here for 30 years. I end the conversation as we get back on the bikes. ‘Do you like glass?’‘
“Not really.” She replies.
Karl and I walk off to find some food. The bread from earlier has long disappeared and I’ve heard distant rumors of these things called “Rolexes”. I’m a hungry curious. We find some.
If a boda-boda is the backbone of Uganda, Chapati, Rolex and fruit are the intervertebral disk of the dietary spine. Chapati is an unleavened flour based, pan cooked bread. Derived from India, it is made on a small, coal-fired pan flaking small bits of char into the bread that stick to your teeth for 20km. Chapati is basic. Not much flavor, but for $0.10 you get plenty of calories for the road. A Rolex is simply two rolled up Chapati with an omelette in the middle. Most of the time it contains onions and peppers. A Rolex costs $0.75 and is about 2,000 calories. Heaven.
Karl and I are finally getting a chance to talk now. I met him through a friend of a friend by the omnipotent reach of Facebook. He’s a man from Kenya, but after moving to Uganda at four years old, he’s a self proclaimed “Ugandan”. He’s left his old country, and returns only briefly. Karl is 27 and married with two children. A devout Muslim. Every morning he would pray and every night he would return to his prayer mat for sleep. He gave me a quran to take along.
The first night we stayed in his home. His children were out with their mother. In his home were clothes for only himself. The cot I slept on had a pair of children’s shoes below it and little else. There was no running water, no kitchen and no bathroom, only a small latrine outside. The house had a mysterious feeling to it, like something was wrong. Like this home had never supported life before. It being my first night in real Africa, I fell to assuming that this is life here. Some places it may well be, but something still felt off.
We’re back on the bikes and out of Kampala. We eat pineapple along the road and watch as the convoy of trucks roll by. The Chinese are here buzzing with their typecast Chinese industry. The trucks roll through endlessly pounding through holes in the roads. I stand up and peer over to great, green rolling hills and small rivers dancing with the Earth. We should be at the Nile tomorrow morning I remember. I’m excited. It’s time to go Karl.