Having never flown from Manchester airport, I settled in to my confused looking tourist / foreigner state quite quickly, negotiating my way to the terminal (following another guy with a big suitcase).
At the terminal I met up with June Lovell, a fellow ILO-er also travelling to Uganda, spotted by her 'cut offs and sparkly flip flops' description from our chat earlier in the day - more on June later!
We flew with Emirates via Dubai and thank goodness our luggage was checked straight through as despite the online check in, bag 'drop' is still bag 'stand and wait for 45 mins with everyone else' so I was glad we didn't have to pick them up in the middle!
I'll not bore you with my relatively uneventful flights [you take off, you eat, you watch a movie (Three Billboards - I recommend!), you sleep, you land...repeat.] however I was rather excited at finally going on the Airbus A380 - only ten years after they came in to service! #airplanegeek
Arriving at Entebbe I was a little apprehensive about Ugandan customs etc as we had been warned it could take a long time with lots of questions about what we were doing there. However no need, we sailed through with barely a glance up from processing the paperwork! That led us outside to meet up with Zebbe from Mbale CAP who had travelled to meet us and Abdul our driver. I was pretty relieved to see a 'Helen and June ILO' sign as we came out of the terminal, I'm a fan of when things go to plan!
Having had pretty decent sleep on the flights we weren't too tired so took the opportunity to get out and see what was going on at the Ugandan Wildlife Education Centre. I was pretty surprised to be seeing such animals so soon! (See next post on our visit).
We stayed overnight in Entebbe before embarking on the long drive to Mbale the following day. Leaving just after nine in the morning we headed towards Kampala taking the new dual carriageway style bypass to avoid the city centre. 'This new road is pretty quiet' we queried...'That's because its not open yet! came the reply! Obviously this doesn't stop Ugandan traffic taking whichever route is most convenient or stopped the workmen introducing a toll to the drivers who are using it!
We took lunch at Jinja, a mid-way point we hope to get back to and visit one weekend if we can, before continuing on and finally arriving in Mbale about half past four thus concluding my two day journey via trains, planes and automobile!
Packed and ready to go!
View over the Jumeriah Palm, Dubai
Driving to Mbale
No comments:
Post a Comment