Uganda Summer 2009 Part 8: African Life

Sipi Falls is part of a series of sudden mountain ridges that jump out of the ground just east of Mbale, near the Kenyan border. Up to that point, the eastern Ugandan countryside has some gentle rolling hills, but these mountains are like a wall built to block anything from passing further. The waterfalls have carved a steep valley into one of these ridges, and the Crows’ Nest faces a dramatic panorama of green cliffs and spectacular jets of waterfalls cascading down over rock caves. The Crows’ Nest is a tourist hostel catering to the tourist at the level of ‘village luxury’. It has electricity and quasi-Western food, so it is marvelous, but it also features pit latrines, giant larval-appearing moths, swarms of ants, rats, bats, a horde of skulking tail-wagging dogs, and a series of rickety huts that seem like they were constructed using some twigs and a stapler. I loved it. It was peaceful, cheap, and rustic. And it serves spaghetti (though the sauce is just cooked tomatoes), which you can eat as you contemplate the beautiful falls.

I elected simply to hike as much as possible, so I signed up for the ‘long hike’ as well as an afternoon ‘coffee tour’. As we set off on the long hike and I saw the tiny specks representing members of my group abseiling down one of the waterfalls, I did not regret my choice, though I think they enjoyed it. The hiking is very physically challenging because the valley basically drops straight down and then juts straight up. We carefully picked our way down one side, then crawled, climbed, and puffed our way up the other side. This is the rainy season, and the ground was mud. The trail was about as wide as a footprint, though it is frequently traveled, there are tiny tropical green shoots trying to overtake it every day. There was a lot of sliding and falling in the mud, and sweating in the heat. Little children would shame us by scrambling past as if the cliff were merely a swingset ladder they were scurrying up. We were basically hiking through many different properties, and I enjoyed this because we met many farm animals (I never seem to tire of greeting cows and goats as we go by), saw innumerable lovely traditional Ugandan banda-style huts, and basically got to wander through as the families were digging, harvesting, drying, sorting, and variously working on their crops, stopping to smile at us as we passed. Strangely enough, the children in the falls area do not say “mzungu bye”. They say “hello”! It was novel to be followed by cries of “hello”, though it is a more difficult word and often I heard “eh lo! Eh lo!” or “hewwo! Hewwo!” coming from toddlers. The native language is quite different from Lusoga, and it is frustrating not to be able to use this to communicate.

The falls were of course wonderful, particularly the final highest waterfall on the ridge, where you can approach it almost to the point of standing in the waterfall, and the mist engulfs you and soaks you if you stay to admire it. There is a local man with a little receipt book who stands in front of the waterfall and makes you pay a waterfall fee to get closer. We also stopped at a swimming hole on the way, and when we stuck our feet in, we were shocked to find that the water was frigid. It was not just cold, it was arctic. The guide estimated the water temperature at 10 degrees C. Despite that, myself and my teammate went for a full-on polar swim, which felt incredibly refreshing and fantastic, even though it was so cold I got pins and needles after about 30 seconds, and was painful after about 1 minute to the point I had to hop out. The water was rushing through the swimming hole, so I figured it was probably safe, though after I got out, I asked the guide "Do you ever see guinea worms?" "Oh yes! Guinea worms!" He smiled jovially. "They are there."

After a rest at the hostel, I set off again to learn more about coffeemaking. Myself and two other team members wandered through some of the fields where the coffee plants grow, and then visited a local house where the coffee is processed. They took the beans and pounded them with a mortar and pestle. The outer shells would crack off, and then the remainder gets shaken away from the chaff (is it still chaff if we’re not talking about wheat?) until only the beans are left. The beans are then roasted in a pan, we helped to roast them over a charcoal fire inside the home’s small, mud-floored kitchen hut. I think we burnt our batch badly. The hut was tiny and filled with thick smoke that was irritating to the eyes and throat. We huddled low on chairs, as our hostess bustled around the hut hardly seeming to notice. She grabbed the roasting coffee pan with her bare hands, dropping it after a few seconds and clapping her hands to dissipate the pain. Outside, rain was pouring down and washing through the courtyard (and leaking through the roof onto my head as well). She served us a pot of freshly brewed coffee, which we at first tasted doubtfully, but found to be delicious. As we quietly drank our homemade coffee, she came into the mud hut, soaking wet from the rain, and was drying her dripping face with a cloth as the smoke billowed around her. The rain was pounding on the tin roof so loudly that holding a conversation was impossible. She smiled ebulliently and looked at me and said “African life.” She hardly said much else during our lengthy visit, but her one simple phrase seemed to summarize the whole episode perfectly.

To be continued…