Journey to Kinkiisi

 

We left Kampala for Kinkiisi at about 9.30am on Tuesday . Kinkiisi is, I have disovered, the village in which Kirima Primary School is found, Kirima being the name of the sub-district in Kanunga province from where it draws its pupils. Kinkiisi is pronounced 'Chincheesy' as a 'k' followed by an 'i' is always pronounced 'ch' – but not if followed by any other vowel! The village is right in the south-west of Uganda, very near the borders with Rwanda and Congo, close to what is mysteriously called on the map 'Bwindi Impenetrable National Park', home of the famed mountain gorillas.

The road out of Kampala takes us south, parallel with (though inland from) Lake Victoria. About 65km out of Kampala we cross the equator though with so little sign or ceremony that I only realise it has happened retrospectively. The landscape is flat, very green, and largely planted with fields of banana trees. By now w and e are turning west the further we get from Kampala the worse the road gets. The pot holes get bigger, necessitating the driver to zig-zag across the road – fortunately there is little traffic. Eventually the pot-holes merge into each other at each side of the road leaving narrow band of tarmac in the centre with red dust tracks on either side. We stop to buy a snack of matoke, cooked plantains which you eat skins and all – they taste like a cross between a parsnip and a banana. Hamlet has stayed behind in Kampala to sort out the water supply at the High School in Kinkiisi which has failed, so I am travelling with his wife Kellen, a teenage girl who lodges with them, and an old man who has been taking his disabled daughter to University in Kampala – and a driver. The 4X4 vehicle is a new (though second-hand) purchase and although very comfortable begins to show its age as we bounce over the potholes. Six hours into the journey a sudden screech and a dramatic judder announce that a tyre has ripped, the hardened rubber unable to cope with the constant impact with the rough road. Out come the tool kit and the spare tyre but the jack doesn't work and the spare tyre, though inflated, has a nail in it surrounded by a large hole in the tyre. The driver decides that we will drive slowly back to the last garage we passed so we limp back noisily, to the great amusement of the children and villagers we encounter. Some hours later we are off again having purchased a second-hand tyre for which, the driver says unhappily, we have been hugely overcharged, especially as (he can tell from the tread) it has obviously been stolen from a government vehicle. Never mind, we are on the road again which now perversely, improves steadily until, as darkness falls, we reach the end of it at Rukungiri. From now on the road is unmade but unabashed by earlier experiences the driver hurls us along at high speed, the road closely flanked by dense leafy vegetation and woodland. We pass the occasional village, most in total darkness despite the fact that it is only 7.30pm – few have electricity. On we drive for an hour and then a second hour and it feels increasingly remote and far from civilisation. Imagine the most remote place you have ever been to and then keep going – in the pitch darkness, especially, it feels like a journey into the deepest unknown. But at last we arrive at Kinkiisi and Hamlet and Kellen's house. I can see nothing of the village in the darkness but am deeply thankful to find that my room has a comfortable bed – and a hot shower, newly installed last week!