I spent the weekend at the Byoona Amagara resort on lake Bunyonyi. Well, I should probably say I spent the weekend going to and coming back from that place, since I was there from dusk on Saturday to 1pm on Sunday. The resort is a peaceful well maintained environmentally friendly and socially responsible island retreat with the best food I have tried since I set foot on this continent. 
The views from the top of the lake are great. The weather didn’t allow for much enjoyment, but it clearly has possibilities. The place where I took this picture was way out of our budget, but we managed to appear when the rain started and they let us stay under the roof long enough to take some photos.
In order to get to the island we took a “taxi”, a matatu, a car ride from a friend of a friend of a friend, and a canoe. On the way back we opted for the motor-boat, a taxi (almost a real one this time), again a matatu and another “taxi”.
The “taxi” is an overloaded car that covers medium range distances (often the same itinerary back and forth) and drops and picks people up on the way. We were so lucky that ours run out of gas just a few kilometers before our destination and the guy had to take a boda, the motorcycle version of a taxi, to go and get some to the closest gas station. The “taxis” are usually in determined points of the city and between the driver and the two or three partners that are around shouting the destination and pushing people around to get it full one has to be alert not to get in the wrong one.
The bodas remind me of the motorcycles that men used to ride in my parents village. There are hundreds of them, everybody uses them, and they can transport just about everything, including coffins (I hope it was empty!).
The matatu is an incredibly overloaded van, but overloaded to a point that got me thinking way too much about the possibilities of this country to go anywhere if they don’t begin respecting themselves a bit. I don’t know how those thing still work. The incredible number of passengers, the crappy road, the continues stops, the big pieces of “luggage” on the roof, nothing makes sense. I kept thinking it was going to crack open any minute. But it didn’t, and it’s probably still doing the same route, up and down again, loading and unloading people as if they were sheep. I am beginning to think that animals have a better life than people around here. With so much rain, they are never short of food, and I can’t see them putting a cow on top of each other to get them to the next city. In fact, I don’t think they move them around at all.
I was on the second row of passengers (in front of the bars are the driver and 2 passengers). Two more rows were behind me. Each one of them had more people than the designer thought there should be. None of the passengers complained or even blinked when the second driver/ cashier told them to squeeze. In Rome do as Romans: I didn’t complained (not too openly at least), but laughed, indeed I laughed, we just couldn’t believe it.
The car ride was… something. After the matatu experience it was nice to seat in a car with the right number of passengers. It was a good and powerful 4x4, so the bumps on the road were nothing more than an annoyance. The unexpected finding was at the other side of the window. Seeing little kids smashing rocks with hummers that were almost bigger than themselves by the road is not something I was ready to digest when going to a touristy area in the middle of nowhere. Is not that this is a country of contrasts: everything is dusty, everything is cracking, nothing is luxurious, but there are people that do worse than others. Here in Ishaka the hospital and the Medical School keep the business going and it seems that everybody is more or less able to get their share. Stepping outside of the fish bowl was an experience. I guess I saw the place I came to see. Our day by day has somehow fallen into a routine and everything feels pretty normal, but I am in Africa after all.
Some of us were more relaxed than others on the canoe ride, but we all had fun.
Canoeing to the island was really nice, except for the couple of water-scared individuals of the group, I suppose. We got to see a bit of the low fog coming out of the lake at sunset and arrive to the island with enough light to see our steps. We had, as I said, the best food ever. They are slow, that’s true, but a bit of African tea helped keeping us warm while the bravest sang at the rhythm of the Spanish guitar (played by a German). In the morning we enjoyed some bird-watching while having a great breakfast, both for the food and the location. We went for a nice walk on the island and kind of got lost but the place is small, so we soon were back and ready to start all over again.
People have some sense of humor around here.
When we arrived back to the hotel it was hard to look at the same menu again. I have been meaning to talk about the food choices for a while. I’ll do it soon. The post will be much shorter than this.
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