Finding the source of the Nile...kind of!

Over the years, I have spent a decent amount of time on the African continent, and have grown to love the land and the wild, natural beauty it supports. But more than anything, I love the ingenuity and entrepunerial spirit that allows so many people to overcome both the natural hurdles of living in a difficult environment, but also the man-made ones. It is no secret that corruption and politics go hand in hand, survival can be a struggle and there are many things hiding in the sand and the bush that can kill you with a single bite or sting. But nowhere else on this Earth will you witness smiles forged from genuine happiness, hear laughter stirred from true enjoyment and see people live on the land as true survivors, than in Africa. And all of that makes for a great adventure. 

On one adventure, my best mate and I decided to drive over two thousand km’s from Nairobi the bustling capital of Kenya, across the vast and unforgiving remoteness of the Serengeti in Tanzania, through the world’s most stunning and captivating country Rwanda, up and across the lush green expanses of Uganda, and finally back to where we had started. In doing so, we would circumnavigate the world’s largest fresh water lake, cross the equator twice, lock eyes with mountain gorillas, bribe, smile and talk our way across several borders, share boats, meals and handshakes with incredible people, witness even more incredible wildlife and battle the debilitating plague that is corruption in countries rife with tropical diseases and war torn histories, complete with the scars to match. All of this with just 2 people, a 26 year old Land Rover and a real sense of adventure. TIA. This Is Africa.

From day one it wasn't exactly plain sailing, but we were prepared for that, and nothing that a good supply of US Dollar Bills and a healthy dose of patience couldn’t fix! Our first hurdle? Getting out of Kenya. At our first border crossing point of the trip, the border between Kenya and Tanzania, our “travel fund” (that was codeword for our clean looking $$ bills) took its first hit. The Customs officer was insistent. No log book for the vehicle, no entry into Tanzania. We deliberately left the logbook back in Nairobi, it stopped anyone stealing the car from gaining instant ownership of it. 

While I was doing the arguing with Customs, my travel companion Tom had been approached by a man who happened to overhear our troubles with the officials. And so the 'help' began. It transpired that, for a fee, this could make some paperwork appear that would allow us 'temporary pass' into Tanzania and out the other side. It did seem rather convenient, or perhaps call it luck, that the man had an "office" on the other side of the road from the Customs building. We followed him to his desk, a plastic chair in a breeze block hut, where 5000 Kenyan Shillings ($60) later, we had the necessaries. Also rather conveniently, his friend was the owner of the local photocopier, and he would be more than happy to take our $5  for a compulsory photocopy. The photocopy machine ran off a small generator, which when not powering his office supplies empire, powered a small black & white tv. Now $10 richer, Mr Xerox switched off the machine and went back to watching his favourite show. The Customs officer saw us coming (not for the first time that day), and now wore a big beaming smile. He stamped the papers and smiled 'Welcome to Tanzania!'. Out we walked, heads shaking in disbelief and amazement, my eye just catching the poster that hung above the wooden doorway into the office - 'Keep Bribes out of Tanzania'. Ha. TIA.

We drove well on the uncomfortable roads, including bagging our first real safari experience,  crossing the Serengeti. The Masai people gave this area the name Serenget, meaning "the place where the land runs on forever", and now I could see why. We were having a proper adventure, driving without maps in the day, and sleeping in a tent on the roof by night, both the scorching sun and night stars our constant companions.  A few days laters, and we were rewarded by our first glimpses of the immense Lake Victoria. There it was, Africa's biggest mass of water, and with a surface area of over 26,000 sq miles, the largest tropical lake in the World. Named after Queen Victoria by British explorer John Hanning Speke during an expedition in 1858, the great lake soon became famous for more than just its size, as Speke claimed the lake to be the source of the River Nile. This of course has since caused great debate amongst the scientific community, but all we knew was that it meant we were going the right way! 

Tanzania done, we crossed into one of the most incredible lands I have ever had the fortune of visiting; Rwanda. For a nation with such a distressing history, I was amazed at the warmth and friendship we encountered. And just to top it all off, the scenery is rather stunning too. I don’t think i have ever seen the colour green quite the way I did in Rwanda, as far as the eye can see. I have vowed to return, to spend more time there, to be reminded of just how the night time air was filled with the laughter of hippos, the procession of elephants and the singing of all manner of birds, insects and people. 

Country number 4 was next, and what would turn out to be an unwelcome, but in hindsight, incredible sequence of events. In Uganda, we both nearly died, and in doing so, added to our adventure! 

Not long after our throttle cable snapped, and with the help of a local mechanic replaced it with a spare part from a scrap heap Cessna aircraft, we crashed. Or rather, our back shock snapped on a large pothole, we flipped over, both forward and sideways, rolled several times, and came to a halt several hundred yards down the road. The the Landrover was lying   on its left hand side, both doors crushed in and the roof not much better off. It took me a minute to regain consciousness, my head and neck in a bad way from the impact, Tom was nowhere to be seen. I was covered in wreckage and most of our belongings, and couldn't move, the drivers door was too far away, the only option was to kick out the already crumpled and shattered windscreen and try to climb out of the front of the car.  When I tell this story back to people, it is not the detail of how we rolled or the fact that Tom was outside of the car when I awoke that shocks people. It is what happened next that most find hard to believe. As I forcefully moved the windscreen out of my way and dragged myself onto the road, the dust still settling from the cartwheeling 4x4 only moments before, a hand reached in through the now open hole, not to help me as I tried to make sense of what had happened, but to grab at whatever he could get his hands on. He was not alone, as an entire village descended on the waylaid vehicle, and like a swarm of locusts, began to take anything they could find in the wreckage. Crash, bang, robbed. I found a man walking away with my washing kit and a wing mirror! Matters were made worse when the police arrived 4 hours later, after hearing reports of two foreigners running over and killing a child from the village. 

Some $700 later, and the murder charges were dropped (thankfully!), but the small matter of fixing the car, and my suspected broken neck, remained a problem. The Police took the car once we found a tractor to get it back onto its wheels, I went to Kampala for an x-ray. The next hurdle came when a recent Ebola virus outbreak rendered much of the hospital unsafe for us, and so i left Kampala never knowing if my headache was of any real cause for concern! The police did their part to make things harder for us when they stole what fuel remained in our jerry cans and replaced it with water. The friendly mechanic who then poured 40 litres of water into our engine had no idea what damage he was doing. We spent a week trying to fix the car after that, and limped our way back towards Kenya. Our crazy adventure continued at a pace when Tom was attacked on the side of he road during one of our regular breakdowns. This time, our luck was in, as a passing Ugandan Army truck came to our rescue and helped get us back on the road, minus the attacker! 

On the final leg of the expedition, we hoped our luck would change, it didn’t! But in recalling this part of our adventure, I feel it is worth noting that whilst everything I have written so far about our time circumnavigating the World’s largest fresh water lake may sound a little, terrible, I can assure you it actually wasn’t. Not that the crash wasn’t a nightmare, and the ensuing police dramas a real headache. It was. Not that the constant battle with the broken car and the shocking, bone crunching roads weren’t soul destroying. They were. But all of the mishaps and mis-fortune had been preceded by a real, modern day adventure of the grandest scale. And even when things were going badly for us, we were still speeding across the Serengeti, forging our way through the Rwandan jungle, or searching for the source of the River Nile. It is a fascinating and stunning part of the world, and we were right in the thick of it. It could have been a lot worse. Things were okay, we were both still alive, and had one hell of a story to tell. That story is made complete with my account of the final 24 hours of this great adventure, 24 hours which tested both of us to new levels, and which forged a friendship that really has withstood the test of TIA; ‘This Is Africa’. It involved a thunderstorm. A really big thunderstorm.

The rain fell like I have never witnessed before. The torrential downpour fell in such volume, that the water on the ground simply had no time to flow away before it was joined by gallons more. We had to drive across the Rift Valley, for another 500km, in the rain, with a new windscreen that I had taken from another car, which was now held in place by medical tape. Whoever drove received a regular dose of water to the face, like someone spraying a hose right at you, whoever was passenger had the equally grim task of leaning out of the window with a torch to illuminate the road (our lights didn't work by this point!). A few hours into the drive and we were stopped in our tracks by a young boy standing in the road with an AK-47, thankfully, he was simply enforcing a diversion, and not anything more sinister!

4 weeks after we set off, we had done it! We had driven around Lake Victoria, and survived a few bumps along the way. As for the true source of the Nile? I’m pretty sure you can have an adventure trying to find out!