to kidepo and back

headed home after a long day at the mud bath
view from 'Pride Rock'
lyin' in the grass
hiding behind a tree
ghost lion


To Kidepo and Back
In search of cheetahs.

January 26th

(roadtrip 16-21 Jan)

After the van overheated, and after Jack poured roughly a quarter of our drinking water into the radiator, we had lunch at the Kope Café in Gulu, stretched our legs a bit, and then headed off into uncharted territory (at least for me, and everyone else in our Matoke Tours pop-top safari van, including, as it turned out, Jack, the ‘experienced guide’ Matoke Tours had promised us). We were headed to the northeastern tip of Uganda that borders on Kenya and Sudan and holds the Kidepo Valley national park—Uganda’s most remote and least visited park.

Gulu is as far as the tarmac goes. We turned off the pavement and headed northeast to Kitgum and somewhere on the dusty red-dirt road we passed the imaginary line that VSO uses to demarcate the safe Uganda from the unsafe one. Having seen how painfully random the angel of death can be here, I have trouble assessing the relative risks of one geographic zone against another. I guess, given that I’m back in Kampala and I got to see an amazing park, the risk-reward analysis was the right one… or, as I’ve always maintained, it’s better to be lucky than smart.

Kitgum looks, to me, a lot like Soroti (without the rock): a sprawl of single level brick and plaster shops, interspersed with round mud and thatch huts, an IDP (internally displaced person—a refugee camp for the village people made homeless by the fighting between the UPDF and the LRA) camp or two just beginning to empty. The MOH (ministry of health) hospital sits crumbling inside a barb-wire maze, broken windows and rust stained plaster walls with murals about how flies transmit shigella from feces to food. A new sign announced that Baylor is going to be building a new pediatric wing. The outpatient department (OPD) had a large sleeping area for the kids who used to do the night commute.

The people of Kitgum just stare at us. (granted, we are coated orange with dust and look like we’re sporting bad fake tans) The kids don’t even break into the universal, ‘Hey Mazungu, How’re you?’ Maybe it’s just my imagination, but looking into the eyes of the people, you get the feeling that something bad has happened here. Many bad things. Maybe not even past tense.

We check into the New Loyima guest house next to the UWA (Uganda Wildlife Authority—the agency that maintains the parks and collects the park fees) office. Initially Roger and I were booked into the same room, with one small bed, which would have been pretty uncomfortable and, according to rule 4 of the rules posted on the wall, ‘strickly prohibited.’ Fortunately the management relented and gave us each our own room. I was so happy not to be sharing a bed with Roger that I gave him the room with the toilet.

The next morning we found the sign on the outskirts of town pointing ‘Kidepo Valley National Park 134km’ and headed into Karamoja—Uganda’s wild wild east. The road took us through rolling hills and plains and a minor mountain pass (a perfect place for the ambush that never happened). Some of the fields were verdant green, some sun-dried yellow, and some still smoldering from fires set to clear them. Dust, smoke and mist hung in a filmy layer in the valleys. Girls in flower print dresses hacked at dried grass with pangas (machetes), tied the grass into conical bundles the girth of your average rugby player, and carried the bundles, balanced on heads, back to their villages.

Villagers put new thatch on their roofs in Rom, or Orom, presumably while heeding the nearby sign warning them not to pick up grenades or step on landmines. I try to calculate the number of thatch bundles the girls would need to carry for one roof. My geo-spatial mathematic skills fail me as we bump off along the roadway—at least nineteen or twenty.

The women in the karamoja, as do women all over Uganda, carry their babes on their backs in a wrap, but, as I haven’t seen yet, they also use a half of a dried gourd to shade the baby’s face. Depending on the size of the gourd, it either looks like they have a giant beetle on their back, or a baby wearing an ill-fitting bike helmet.

The UWA ranger manning the gate seems happy to see us. He doesn’t get many visitors. We unload in a cloud of dust and take in the park as Jack gets out to chat and take care of our entrance fees (Ugandan National Parks have fairly steep entrance fees—25-50$/day for foreigners—one likes to hope that some of the money goes to protecting the animals of the parks and supporting the local tribes that were kicked off the land). To the north of us stretches Kidepo valley, some 1400 square kilometer of lush green river valley, golden grasslands and purple hills. To the northeast hangs Mount Morungole just in front of the Kenyan border and to the northwest, shivering slightly in the haze, the slightly larger Mount Lutoke and the Sudan. The Kidepo and the Narus rivers only run a few days every year, but leave behind enough in the way of mud and watering holes to support a diverse animal population (even a few hardy crocs). Kidepo is the only national park in Uganda with the cheetah and the ostrich; the only park with the aardwolf, the bat eared fox and the caracal; and the only park where you can find zebras, giraffes and elephants together.

Kidepo was established in 1964 in the early hours of the first Obote administration (there weren’t 2 Obotes, just one guy who managed to get elected despotic dictator at two different points in Uganda’s short history—two points separated by the Amin administration and a couple of other botched presidencies…). The Ik people were forced from their land in an act that resulted in mass starvation and death for the tribe. I whisper a small prayer of thanks to the Ik for their sacrifice that has left this pristine valley for us to wander in.

Our campsite lies on a grassy knoll fronted by a large rock outcropping on which to sit and watch the gentle meandering of the elephants and water buffalo in the valley below. The Lion King fans in our camp promptly christen the campsite Pride Rock. In one of the two shelters in the campsite we find lion hair and the smell of cat pee. We will be the only campers in Kidepo during our three-night stay. At night, sitting by a dying fire under the glowing swath of the milky-way, we will be serenaded by the distant roar of lions triangulating in the dark.

Like little kids giddy with visions of Christmas presents, we unload the van’s roof rack so we can pop the top and start safari-ing in earnest. I had a dream in kitgum of a cheetah flashing across the grassland, startling a herd of zebra into flight. It was, unfortunately only a dream. There may be a cheetah in kidepo, but he didn’t find it in his heart to sprint across open ground in front us. And even the zebras were a little hard to find (Cara says there were only 6 zebras in the park, I counted 12-13, I have one picture that shows nine of them, and I’m pretty sure I never got all of them into one picture, I guess I’m going to have to do a stripe count to win this argument).

To protect us from the wild animals, UWA assigned us a ranger whose name we couldn’t pronounce. Roger called him Ethel. Jack called him Neville. I chose Nevus. Nevus carried an AK-47, which we can only hope had an empty banana clip. Mostly he dozed in the front seat of the van or stared methodically into the ditch. When we did spot game, he would nod his head and impart some profound bit of zoological wisdom, ‘that’s a giraffe, it has a long neck.'

The highlight of the Nevus experience came when he took us out on a ‘game walk,’ of which 90% of the route was covered by dried grass six feet or higher. In other words, we walked for several hours without being able to see anything other than grass and the muddy clothes of the camper in front of us. And, had there been lions or tigers or bears in the grass, they could have pretty much picked us off one by one. At one point, with his uncanny woodcraft skills, Nevus walked us almost onto the back of a sleeping water buffalo (given there are no hippos in kidepo, the buffalo would statistically be the most dangerous animal in the park, and the main reason that nevus was even given a rifle). Unfortunately, the dark olive color of his uniform made it impossible to tell whether he peed himself or not. The look on his face would suggest so.

During our 3 days in kidepo we saw only one other safari vehicle out in the park. Once. (It was the tricked out Land Rover from the posh fly-in Apoko lodge--$350 per person per night, with not nearly the view of pride rock) This would be a big contrast from Queen Elizabeth park where it wouldn’t be uncommon for 6 or 7 safari vehicles to converge on a lion kill, or, I’m told, the Serengeti, where 15 or 20 Land Rovers might gather for a leopard sighting. But being out there alone meant we had to rely solely on our own spotting abilities, and, as I mentioned, Nevus wasn’t much help. Jack had an eagle eye, but he also had to concentrate on keeping the van on the road and the passengers on the roof from flying into the ditches. So our first two days we saw lots of elephants and buffalo and oribis (super fast tiny antelopes slightly taller than a golden retriever), but, except for a few side-striped jackals hanging around park headquarters, we struck out in the predator department.

We had been warned that there would be no beverages in Kidepo. So we were overjoyed to find that the canteen at park headquarters would sell us cold beer (a steal at 2000 shillings). One evening, while we were sitting around the parking lot savoring a cold Nile Special and an orange savanna sunset, a van marked Blessed Safaris pulled up and unloaded an obese man of European descent and of at least six decades and a young Ugandan woman whose legal age of consent could certainly have been questioned from where we sat. They checked into one of the bandas (huts) at park HQ and we never saw them out in the park. The markings on the side of van advertised: ‘safaris, gorilla tracking, camping, rwenzori hiking, and wedding arrangements.’ We were thinking of adding sex tourism onto their list of specialties, but there was not one magic marker among us. Maybe this trip came under the wedding arrangement category.

With the dawn of the 3rd day, we pointed the van north and headed into the far reaches of the park in search of our cheetah. According to Nevus, who may or may not have once seen a cheetah, this was where the cheetahs prowled. The ostriches too. Nevus said we might see ostriches if we got there by nine… or noon… or something like that.

Roger, a serious birder, wasn’t interested in spotting the cheetah. He was after bigger game: the karamoja apalis. A warbler found only in this little isolated part of the world. We, being helpful safari companions, offered to help him look for it. ‘Just what does a karamoja apalis look like?’ We asked.
‘It looks just like the grey apalis except that it is a slightly lighter grey and it has a patch of white on the wings.’
‘Okayyy.’
The karamoja apalis is only four or five inches long. Much harder to spot than a cheetah.

We left lush grasslands of the Narus valley and climbed up into a sandy scrub terrain. The grass was shorter and sparser and it looked like the perfect track for a cheetah to hit 70kph on. But it was not to be. We did spot a few stray ostriches strutting through the brush, but the big flock (do ostriches have flocks?) was hot-footing it into the Sudanese distance. The termites packed the sand into surrealistic seven foot funnel topped castles. The sandy expanse also proved to be prime tsetse fly habitat (the female tsetse fly prefers a loose sandy soil to lay her single egg into). The tsetse fly is a voracious blood-sucker that has adapted to the decrease in the game population by learning to chase safari vehicles. Unlike the mosquito which stealthily sneaks a sip of blood, the tsetse fly slams its proboscis through clothing and skin in a painful bite. The tsetse fly also brings the possibility of an added bonus: African trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness). Jack assured us that the tsetse flies in Uganda are ‘disease free’ as he drove the van at breakneck speed trying to blow the flies out of the vehicle, all the while slapping at a fly that had gone up his pant leg. Given that Uganda has had at least two outbreaks of sleeping sickness in the past decade, and that trypanosomiasis is one of those diseases where the illness and the treatment both carry high mortality and morbidity, I wasn’t feeling like taking any chances as I hunkered in the back protecting myself from attack.

We drove all the way to Sudan looking for the elusive cheetah. To no avail.

But we did get to see the Kanatarok hot spings—a pint-sized burble of sulfuric hot water leading to a long swatch of green grass in an otherwise dry expanse. And, with the permission of the small contingent of UPDF soldiers guarding the frontier, we made a brief foray into the Sudan. Unfortunately, there were no Sudanese immigration officials at the border to stamp our passports.

And, as we wove our weary way back to pride rock, Jack stopped the van and quietly pointed out the three male lions lying under a tree. One by one, the boys strutted just out of camera range and lay down in the tall grass occasionally raising a regally maned head to check on our progress. I am told it is very rare for 3 adult male lions to hang out together—which begs the question, could this be a gay pride?

Later, after our evening game drive and another cold beer and warm sunset, on the road back to camp, we saw one, then two of the big males on the prowl. At one point one of our lions crouched in the grass about 20 meters from the van and roared. I don’t have words to describe it. I swear it shook the van. It was a grunt/roar/snarl rolled into one that boomed across the grass and echoed in the hills. And then across the darkness, one of the other lions answered back. I could just imagine being an oribi shaking in the grass, he hears a lion on one side, then the other, he bolts for clear territory—into the waiting jaws of the third lion.

Sitting on top of the van in a savanna lit only by stars listening to our lions roar, it was nothing less than the safari making moment.

for more kidepo pictures click here

Eviction Notice

January 30th

Eviction Notice

The rumors have been circulating for a while:
There’s a cardiologist coming from India to start the new IHK Heart Centre. (I’m going to refrain from commenting on the wisdom of putting a ‘heart center’ and ‘cath lab’ in a hospital with a barely functioning museum piece for its main x-ray and an emergency department that doesn’t consistently have oxygen, let alone an EKG machine, in its main resuscitation room.) The new cardiologist has a family and is going to need a house… Ian is thinking about giving him ours… blah… blah…

But IHK pretty much runs on gossip and rumors, so I figured that when the time came to actually make a decision, Ian would have the courtesy to come and tell me about what he was thinking. Apparently not.

On Thursday, Dorothy, a second or third tier administrator from Human Resources finds her way to the closet I call an office (which I share with Justine, senior sister for OPD and Linda, team leader for emergency) and nervously sits down.

A bit of background. The house I live in with two other volunteers (Helen who manages the IMF which is the funding for the charitable work at IHK, and Cara who heads the physiotherapy department) is rented by the hospital. Before the volunteers lived here, Ian’s adopted daughter Rose (see much earlier post July 09 about Rose’s walk) lived here when she was clinical manager for the hospital, before she went to Yale to pursue a PhD. The house is furnished with Rose’s belongings. Rose left her stuff in Helen’s care. But ultimately the house is under IHK (Ian’s) control. It is a lovely sprawling 4 bedroom house, probably pre-independence era on a big lot (mostly left wild and unfinished and a place for Wilburforce to disappear into and come back out with a jack fruit or mango or spare auto parts), fenced and gated and within walking distance to the hospital. But it has failing plumbing and electrical and crumbling structure. In other words, it’s the perfect house for volunteers but you probably wouldn’t want to live here.

So Dorothy starts this long preamble about the new cardiologist coming. And his big family. And how hard it is to find a house in Muyenga (It’s not hard to find houses in Muyenga—you just have to be ready to outbid the American Embassy which is in the process of moving its staff to this, the perceived safer, side of town. And the new cardiologist, as part of his deal, is going to get a car, so he really doesn’t need to live within walking distance of the hospital). And therefore, it seems, well, that is to say, Ian has decided, that the only possible suitable place in all of Kampala for the new cardiologist to live just happens to be the house I’m living in.

I have to move out the first week of April.

But apparently Dorothy told Cara we’re moving sooner?

The suggested living alternatives are not nearly as appealing as my present digs. Small rooms in smallish apartments. With single women as roommates.

Another bit of background. In Uganda, if a man and woman spend the night under the same roof, they are assumed to have had sexual relations. Even in Kampala. Nancy wasn’t particularly happy when IHK moved me into a house with two women, but at least in my current living situation the neighbors (and even the girls in HR have asked the question openly) have to guess as to which one I’m sleeping with. (Just for the record. I’m not sleeping with either or my housemates.)

It’s all so very complicated.

And to complicate things more. To our usual Friday night, end of the week, south side volunteer, beer and bitch session at Fuego, Sally (not a volunteer, niece of Ian’s business partner in the construction business and here as a sales agent for Ian’s new housing project… did I just say housing project, hmmm.) brings the new cardiologist.

Well, he’s not really a cardiologist, he’s a cardiac anesthetist. (who knows, maybe anesthetists do cardiac catheterization in Kerala?) His name is Prasandan and he seems to be a very modest, likeable, smart guy. It sounds like he has a critical care background as well—which is good, maybe while he’s building the new heart center he can work on improving the mortality rate in the ICU.

So we all went out to the Coconut Shack. For Indian. And Sally is rambling on about how good the Indian food is here in Kampala. And Prasandan is poking about his aloo gobi like something died in it. And someone asks Prasandan where he’s going to live. And he says something about a nice house in Muyenga that’s coming vacant soon…

Another Kampala weekend...

Sunday morning… January 24th…

Two weeks have escaped me again. My seven-month anniversary in Uganda has come and gone in a whoosh of imaginary candles.

This morning I awoke, as is my Sunday usual, to the sound of emphatic Christianity. ‘Praise him… Prraaisse himm…. PRAISE HIM…” (and you hungover pagans behind the wall, this means you too!) Although I did stagger in about 0330 this morning (story to follow… or precede… somewhere… maybe), I am actually not hungover. But I could make serious use of another good hour of undisturbed snoozing.

Stacey spent the night in our guest room. She is hungover. She assures me that our church is not nearly as obnoxious as the one near her house. ‘Hardly noticed them,’ she said. ‘Almost soothing, really.’ We set about planning the next kampala vso cluster fundraiser: Battle of the Obnoxious Ministerial Bombasts. We are quite sure we could fill a large venue with volunteers and expats. Nearly everyone we know has a horror story of Sunday morning torture. Judging could be done with a decibel meter and a panel to assess the quality of the rant. The revenue from rotten vegetable sales alone could roof a couple of schools.

So I dig out a pair of shorts and go for a run.

One of my buddies is waiting for me at the bottom of Tank Hill (the large hill near our house crowned with water tanks). Moses is an aspiring boxer (if I had to hazard a guess, somewhere between the fly and the flea weight category). As I drag my sweaty hypoglycemic carcass up the hill he shadow boxes circles around me in an elaborate dance, as he tells me how I should sponsor his career and take him to Las Vegas, and we could make millions. I contemplate kicking off one of his kneecaps and dropping as one perspiring mass onto his chest, but instead I put on what passes (at my age and fitness level) for a burst of speed. He doesn’t stop dancing, but at least I make him breathe hard enough to cease with the banter.

I run down through the gravel pits and into the flats of Bukasa and Namuwongo. On one stretch as I pick my way through the back streets back to Kironde road, I notice a gentleman peeing into the ditch. Taking a short call (elimination here is divided into short calls and long drops, I’ll let you work that our for yourselves) on the unprotected verge of a busy street is perfectly acceptable here—and taking a long drop not that unusual either. As I run up the road I think he may have a prostate issue as he seems to be making an inordinately long time of it. But no, he’s masturbating. He smiles at me as I slog past.

I guess we all have our own ways of worship on a Sunday morning.


Friday. January 22nd

Three Belgian medical students doing an elective rotation in Rwanda are visiting Queen Elizabeth Park. Their driver makes a stop at one of the crater lakes. He pulls the van to the side of the road that runs along the rim of the crater. And misjudges the slope and stability of the shoulder. And the van rolls down the hill into the crater. One of the students says she lost track of the rotations at seven. Fortunately the lake is much receded.

Later Friday

At the Centenary Park (it is unclear to me which centenary the park celebrates—independence was in 1963. Maybe the centenary of 100 years of being a slightly underenthusiastic part of the British Empire in its heyday?) We, however, are celebrating the new gentler, kinder, happier VSO Kampala Cluster—monthly Friday night gatherings: less whinging, more drinking. It is also graduation night in Kampala, so there are 4 parties within earshot, each with a speaker system larger than the space your average kampala family of 8 sleeps in. Needless to say, conversation is difficult, and they are charging 4000 shillings for beer (robbery, out and out highway robbery), so mostly we are milling around.

Modified phone log:

2130h: (loud music and giggling in the background) ‘Hello, Robert, its Ian, there’s three Belgian girls in a traffic accident out of Kadongo. One of them has a vertebral fracture. The Belgian embassy wants to fly them from Kasese to Nairobi. Can you do it?’
‘Tonight?’ (trying to calculate time for complete metabolism of two 500cc Nile Specials at 5.4% ethanol by volume)
‘No, in the morning.’
‘Are we flying the helicopter?’
‘No, the Belgians are arranging a plane.’
(against better judgment) ‘Sure, no problem.’
‘Good. I’ll give you the number of the guy from the Belgian embassy.’ (side conversation with someone who actually understands the workings of a blackberry) ‘uh yeah, I’ll text it to you.’

2140h: I call Bart, first secretary of the Belgian consul (later, when impatient with the fueling process he will be self-promoted to deputy ambassador). Once again I have forgotten to purchase airtime for my phone (most of the phones here are pay as you go, and you have to purchase little cards from the airtime shops and enter the code numbers to keep your ability to phone out—you can still receive calls when you have no airtime), but I figure I have a few minutes left.
(loud music and giggling in the background)
I’m trying to keep the conversation brief while trying to find a less than deafening corner of the park to hide in. He’s trying to give me minute details. Finally we agree that he will pick me and my gear up at the hospital about 11am.
‘Good. I’ll give you the number of the doctor in Kadongo.’ (side conversation with someone about the workings of his blackberry) ‘uh. Yeah. I’ll text it to you.’

2150h: I call the doctor in kadongo. He can’t hear me. ‘(slighltly incredulous tone) Are you in a bar, doctor?’
My phone runs out of airtime and the call ends.

2155h: He calls me back. Maybe slightly irate. Says his phone is almost out of airtime. We agree that I will call him in the morning to reassess the status of his patients.

0030h: Tom from IHK transport/ambulance wakes me up with a call to reiterate all of the information in the above conversations.

Saturday morning.

I wander into the hospital and start scrounging for equipment. One of the patients reportedly has an unstable cervical spine fracture. I grab the only spine board and the only two stiff neck collars in the entire IHK complex. Both of the collars are size regular and dirty (in the states, we would consider these single use items). I hope she has a regular size neck. I choose the cleaner of the two. I also manage to put together a few straps, a pad for the board, and a folding stretcher.

One of the nurses grabs me and says my patient is here. I had thought my patient was in Kasese, but she explains that an ambulance has just arrived from Jinja with a drowning victim. Okay, she has my interest.

In the ‘trauma room’ is an asian man involved in a camping accident that had something to do with a barbeque and a tent. Apparently he ran and jumped in the lake to put out the flames. The rescuers who fished him out of the lake decided that they had saved him from drowning and pronounced it so. My ambulance team stuck with the story. His lungs were clear and his oxygenation and ventilation intact, but he did have burns to maybe 30% of his body surface. We admitted him to our plastic surgeon. (in the states at a good burn center his prognosis would be excellent, here, well, we can always hope for the best).

Bart picks me up in the Belgian Consulate’s Prado edition Landcruiser and we make a quick stop by VSO to pick up my passport (VSO has been hanging on to my passport for the better part of 6 months in an ongoing, as yet unsuccessful, effort to get me a 1 year work permit/multiple entry visa). I am hoping that this jaunt into Kenya doesn’t result in me being forced to purchase yet another temporary single entry ($50) visa. Bart assures me he will handle it.

I was expecting that we could drive to the hangar of the chartered aircraft, load my gear, and be off in a matter of minutes. But that, it turns out, would have been just silly.

Imagine yourself in a line at airport security. You are already late for your flight to Addis (or Amsterdam, wherever), and then you notice that the people in front of you are trying to thread a folding stretcher and a spine board (not even to mention the medi-bag with the scalpel, scissors and oxygen tank) through the x-ray machine… Imagine your impatience as the security team decides they want to stop the flow of traffic through the only functioning check point in an international airport so that they can go through a medical bag that contains just about every device that a potential terrorist would want to carry onto a plane—if the plane were headed somewhere other than Kasese.

But, surprisingly enough, we manage to clear security a few milliseconds before the several hundred people behind us explode into a frenzied riot of exasperation. And we find the twin turbo prop Eagle Air plane the Belgians have chartered. And I have an interesting conversation with their engineer (Vlad) about how I’m going to secure a stretcher to the floor of the aircraft (Vlad ties the stretcher down to 4 disparate points in the plane, making it impossible to walk around and still allowing the stretcher the latitude to leave the floor by a good eighteen inches in the possibility of turbulence—I make him leave me a wrench so that I can remove 4 sets of seatbelts, and, screwing the anchor bolts for the belts into the holes in the floor from the removed seats, manage to secure the stretcher.)

Modified Flight Log:

1400h: take off for Kasese an hour and a half behind schedule. Spend the entire flight securing the stretcher and making plans for securing spine board to stretcher.

1445h: land in Kasese. Meet and examine patient. Look at x-rays—some subluxation of c4 on c5—might be a unilateral jumped facet, could be a normal, hard to tell as x-rays are crap (but, in the defense of the hospital in kadongo, no worse than I would have gotten at IHK). Fortunately the patient has full strength and sensation in her hands and feet. As we like to say in the business: she is neurologically intact. For someone who has suffered a potential cervical spine injury, this is a good thing. Load patient in plane and make her as comfortable as one can be while strapped to a board in a stiff collar (fortunately, the tiny hospital in Kadongo had a pediatric stiff collar to fit her tiny neck).

1545h: take off for Nairobi after a long wait for Ugandan immigration to come and stamp an exit stamp in the Belgian girls’ passports. Spend an anxious 2 ½ hours wondering if the spine immobilization is adequate to keep the turbulence and impact of landing from paralyzing the patient. During the flight, the patient’s two friends decide that instead of getting off in Nairobi, they are going to fly back to Kampala. Bart’s hair starts to go gray.

1815: land at Nairobi’s commuter airport. Wait for ambulance that was supposed to meet us on the tarmac.

1830h: communicate with ambulance. They were waiting on the tarmac at the main airport.

1845: ambulance arrives. Transfer patient to ambulance. Examine patient. Patient can still move fingers and toes. Relax sphincter tone for first time in four hours.

1900: pilot announces we have to take off. It is getting dark and if we don’t take off immediately, Eagle Air will have to pay extra to have the runway lights turned on.

1905: land at the main Nairobi airport. Pilot explains that in his hurry to take off before having to pay for the lights he made the command decision to refuel at the main airport (where the lights are free). Because the airport is quite busy, though, we are directed to a taxiway out in the cargo zone, closer to Tanzania than Nairobi.

2000: waiting for fuel truck.

2100: still waiting for fuel truck.

2200: fuel truck arrives. Long discussion with pilot. Apparently the fuel guys can’t accept cash at night. Ugandans don’t carry credit cards. (Unless they’re shopping at the gift shop at the Sheraton, they really have no place to use them) The pilot wants to use my credit card. In the interest of getting the plane the heck off the ground, I think about it. Hmmm… even if Visa security did approve a purchase in Africa for a 1000 liters of Grade A jet fuel (at 67 cents a liter, in case you’re wondering), would I really want the number of my credit card floating around a runway in Kenya in the middle of the night? Uhhh. No.

2230: two remaining Belgian girls change minds, again. Want to get off plane and go stay with friend who has just texted to say she’s not going to get a CT scan until Monday. Bart’s bruxism is definitely getting worse. He makes a few phone calls. It won’t be happening.

2245h: pilot somehow solves payment issue. Fuel guy puts rickety ladder into bed of pickup and balances there putting 200 liters of fuel into left wing tank. Bart gets up into pick-up to steady rickety ladder so that we don’t wind up with our second cervical spine injury of the night.

2330h: finished refueling. Take off for Entebbe.

0005: flying over Lake Victoria. Come to the realization that all of the pouches under the seats are devoid of life vests. Look around for the life raft. Nope.

0030: flying over Lake Victoria at 10000 feet in an unpressurized, unheated plane. Freezing my heinie off. Look for the overhead bins to see if there might be a blanket. There are no overhead bins. No blankets either. And, according to the pilot, Vlad never fixed the heater, because 'why would you need a heater in Africa?' Why indeed. Continue shivering for remainder of flight.

0130h: land at Entebbe. Taxi to spot a good half kilometer from terminal. Walk to the terminal and get a luggage cart. Push cart back to plane. Precariously load a spine board and stretcher onto a cart designed to hold a suitcase. Carefully push gear through doors of terminal into immigration area. Lone officer is sleeping. Push on through. The customs officer looks at me suspiciously.
‘Did you clear immigration?’
I tell the truth. ‘Yep, just passed right on through.’
‘Do you have anything to declare?’
I’m standing there with a luggage cart that has a seven foot long spine board extending off the front like a diving board and is otherwise heaped with medical crap. It is very difficult for me to pass up a straight line like this. But I do. ‘Nope, not a thing.’

0230h: drive Entebbe to Kampala. Unload Bart and the girls at the Belgian embassy. The Belgian ambassador is going to put the girls up at his residence. Ask yourself: If I got into trouble in a foreign land, even during business hours, let alone at 2 in the freakin’ morning, would my country’s ambassador offer to put me up? (speaking from experience, if you are American, I can tell you that your answer would be no) One point for Belgium.

0330h: Moses, the driver for the Belgian embassy, drives me back to the hospital to unload the gear, and then drives me home.

Re-Entry

a few pictures from dubai



January 12th

Sixteen hours is a long time on a plane. Three weeks seems like a long time for a trip home for the holidays.

It seemed like I had just recovered from the upper respiratory infection I caught on my flight home (or was it the hangover from the 2nd annual west coast vodka and latke party) and I was just reaching the point of taking warm tap water for granted and then suddenly I was once again strapped into seat 37c of the Emirate 777 in the section of the plane reserved for screaming babies and tubercular coughing fits.

The holidays were a blur. I would like to say I reconnected with all of my family and friends, but that would be a lie. Mostly I concentrated on reconnecting with Nancy. Everybody else pretty much had to come find me in Noe Valley. We did manage a little road trip (the only kind of roadtrip available to you when the family vehicle is now a mini cooper) to Yosemite in search or our own little piece of the white Christmas everybody else in the northern hemisphere was wallowing in. And I did work a few night shifts in the ER at Seton—just to show my face and temporarily overcome the lurking anxiety that a year long sabbatical in the third world might ruin me for ‘modern medicine.’ (those of you in America will be happy to know that I can still burn through your healthcare tax dollars with the best of them…)

And then suddenly I’m kissing Nancy goodbye at SFO (she was actually getting on a plane to NYC the day before I left) and watching the aircraft safety video. I will say that flying steerage on Emirates is slightly better than some of the other airlines I’ve flown recently. The seats are more comfy and the added 19mm of legroom goes a long way to warding off those pesky DVTs and the entertainment system has the widest screens and most baffling array of controls in the air today. In the 16 hours from San Francisco to Dubai I managed to read half of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson and watch 5 or 6 movies—even if I did fall asleep for at least 250 of the 500 Days of Summer.

Another nice thing about Emirates is the free hotel room (and buffet dinner/breakfast) that comes with a layover of 8 to 23 hours (and a ticket price over a $1000). So while I was checking into the Millennium Airport Hotel—at 8pm when my internal clock was saying 8am after a night of a few fitful dozes—I noticed a sign for the ‘Dubai City Lights’ tour. How could I resist?

The Dubai City Lights tour consisted mostly of 90 minutes of freeway driving in the frigidly air-conditioned van with occasional stops for our driver, Hassan, to poke me awake and offer me the opportunity to make photographs of yet another shopping mall or hotel built ‘in the traditional style’—ie like a sheik’s palace. For those of you who haven’t been to Dubai lately, the city planners are, if appearances don’t lie, on crack. Aside from building artificial islands shaped like palm trees and huge indoor ski slopes, there are so many skyscrapers under construction that they have more foreign construction workers (many from south asia who reportedly get paid less than $10/day) than citizens.

Oh yeah, and they’re broke.

Highlights included the Burg al Arab hotel (the ‘world’s only 7 star hotel’), described by Sam Wollaston in the Guardian as "...fabulous, hideous, and the very pinnacle of tackiness—like Vegas after a serious, no-expense-spared, sheik-over", and the Burg Khalifa (formerly the Burg Dubai—recently named after the Abu Dhabi sheik and president who bailed out the Dubai economy) the new tallest tower/building in the world—more than twice as high as the Empire State Building and 40% higher than the Taipei 101 (formerly the world’s tallest). The Guardian has labeled the new tower “a bleak symbol of Dubai's era of bling.”

It was hard to really take in the height of this giant needle in the middle of the night, standing in the entry of yet another shopping mall and surrounded by palm trees wrapped in christmas lights. It wasn’t until we were sitting on the tarmac at Dubai International a few miles away that I came to appreciate just exactly how tall a building that rises nearly a kilometer above the desert floor is. Pretty effing tall. As we did a fly-by from a safe distance I wondered if, like the pyramids, Dubai will be some archeological tourist site a thousand years from now…

And then about 8 hours and one stop in Adis Adiba later, I was standing in the Visa line at Entebbe (I still don’t have a work visa yet). Joseph said that Christmas in Kampala was quiet—‘everybody left.’ I’m not sure if he meant the kampalites or the VSOers on whom his taxi business depends. At the very least, there weren’t any riots.

And then about a day later, after wandering around the hospital in a daze and the faintest pretense of coming to work, I’m sitting in the private garden of the Ugandan Parliament (one of the hashers had booked it for the Monday hash), recovering from a mad run around city center, drinking a beer with Julian (dirty dick) and David (federo—prince of Buganda) and it dawns on me. I’m back in Kampala. Again.