In our European world, travelling from one place to another is normally easy. Buses, trains, trams, underground, paved roads, railways and all sorts of comforts are readily available to take you wherever you need to, whenever you need to. A delay of two hours is frowned upon as a major disturbance and annoyance in your trip.
In the Karamojong world, moving from one place to another is normally far from easy. Hardly any infrastructure is available to take you anywhere, and unexpected factors often come into play – and decide on when and whether at all you manage to reach your destination. A delay of two hours on the way isn’t a delay – it’s arriving in remarkably good time. In fact, when a truck with the supplies you ordered comes a week later than expected, it’s just about the standard.
A major factor, of course, are the roads. A paved road is something you don’t even think about at home: it’s so obvious. A paved road is something you don’t even think about here either: it’s at least 5-hour drive away, therefore irrelevant. All that you are left with here are dirt roads, and those can differ vastly. If you are lucky, they are smooth and flat, if repaired recently and properly. Normally you aren’t lucky, and they are eroded, full of huge holes and various obstacles. Though to tell the truth, crater-size holes or deep trenches cutting through a road matter little to the local drivers: the main (dirt) road running through Karamoja is commonly referred to as a “highway”, and everyone behaves as if it really was one. Where an average European would drive 40km/h, they flash by at 100km/h.
The rainy season adds a touch of adventure to nearly every displacement, or makes it plain impossible. Roads turn into knee-deep slippery mudslides, dry riverbeds turn into roaring rivers which flow over bridges, bridges and culverts are washed away and entire areas are cut off (I think I’ll come back to the joys of Karamojong rainy season sometime soon). For a small illustration, this is Lopei bridge on the main road connecting the towns of Kotido and Moroto - or rather the place where Lopei bridge used to be. It was carried away during heavy rains some weeks back, so now if you want to use that road you have to plunge into the river, like Javi and Oscar on their way from Kaabong (which is only possible with dry weather and low level of water):
In the Karamojong world, moving from one place to another is normally far from easy. Hardly any infrastructure is available to take you anywhere, and unexpected factors often come into play – and decide on when and whether at all you manage to reach your destination. A delay of two hours on the way isn’t a delay – it’s arriving in remarkably good time. In fact, when a truck with the supplies you ordered comes a week later than expected, it’s just about the standard.
A major factor, of course, are the roads. A paved road is something you don’t even think about at home: it’s so obvious. A paved road is something you don’t even think about here either: it’s at least 5-hour drive away, therefore irrelevant. All that you are left with here are dirt roads, and those can differ vastly. If you are lucky, they are smooth and flat, if repaired recently and properly. Normally you aren’t lucky, and they are eroded, full of huge holes and various obstacles. Though to tell the truth, crater-size holes or deep trenches cutting through a road matter little to the local drivers: the main (dirt) road running through Karamoja is commonly referred to as a “highway”, and everyone behaves as if it really was one. Where an average European would drive 40km/h, they flash by at 100km/h.
The rainy season adds a touch of adventure to nearly every displacement, or makes it plain impossible. Roads turn into knee-deep slippery mudslides, dry riverbeds turn into roaring rivers which flow over bridges, bridges and culverts are washed away and entire areas are cut off (I think I’ll come back to the joys of Karamojong rainy season sometime soon). For a small illustration, this is Lopei bridge on the main road connecting the towns of Kotido and Moroto - or rather the place where Lopei bridge used to be. It was carried away during heavy rains some weeks back, so now if you want to use that road you have to plunge into the river, like Javi and Oscar on their way from Kaabong (which is only possible with dry weather and low level of water):
Roads aside, the other question is what you can actually put on those roads. A normal car won’t do. It is only here that I really understood the point of those big 4-wheel-drives, which always looked very ridiculous to me in a city: but especially in the rainy season not many vehicles actually manage to swim through the mud up here.
If you aren’t lucky enough to drive a big expensive 4WD – and most of the people of course aren’t – you can go for the “public transport” option. Public transport is far from fancy in this part of the world. In the better case it means an occasional bus connecting the main towns, driving at insane speed. In the worse (and more common) case it means a truck or a lorry, which is first loaded with whatever objects it carries, and when it’s full, people climb on the top of all that and just hold on. Fortunately, truck drivers are considerate to their passengers. As one of them told me – with people on the top of an open lorry they drive slower than usual: only at 90km/h! :-D
Even with such a degree of precaution trucks and buses frequently break down, and it’s not unusual to see a lorry on the side of the road in the middle of nothing, with people around sitting on bags of charcoal/food/construction materials etc., or setting up a small fire in preparation of spending the night by the roadside.
The last transport option, of course, is walking. Now walking is a strange thing here. On one hand, you can come across a young boy with a trunk and a mattress on his head walking by the roadside, and when you ask he tells you in a matter-of-fact tone that he’s walking to a school 15km away. At the same time, if you ask a local anywhere in Uganda where a certain shop/market/building is and if you can walk there, the answer is very likely to be “oh, it’s veeeeery far!!!” – and then the place is normally 500m down the road. (And this difference in defining “far” isn’t just because of the general impression that muzungus are completely useless, can’t walk more than 10 metres and don’t know how to wash a plate.)
It is perhaps hardly surprising that every time we travel longer distance, people mysteriously find out about even a last-minute trip and we normally end up with a few extra passengers in the car. Which isn’t always a bad thing, especially seeing the frequency of flat tyres and various breakages which seem to crop out ever more frequently on my last travels – preferably after nightfall, in the middle of nothing, with no mobile network, and with a half-broken jack. In those moments extra hands come in very useful.
As I’m setting off (late) for another 5-hour journey, I really hope that this time it will be without the flat tyre after dark – or that at least they managed to repair the jack in the meantime.
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