Day 1 went on for a while - in blog terms it was almost 6 months! But we got through and hopefully the rest of the diary won't be as dragged out. We woke up early on day 2, had breakfast - at this point I actually was getting up early enough to have breakfast (usually nutella on toast and milo) packed up our tent and got onto our big yellow truck 'Ben'.
We drove all day to a national park called the QE2 national park and stayed at camp site called Hippo Hills. This would be the first of many days where we wuold literally spend up to 12 hrs on the bus, stopping only to have lunch.
The highlight of the morning was having chicken on a stick - I suspect that these were semi cooked and simply reheated a little bit when people wanted to buy them. There were a lot of sellers of said wings along the dusty ugandan road.
I think only Katie, Bahn and I had chicken on a stick - not everyone was as keen to tempt food poisoning like the 3 of us. Katie was definitely one of my best friends on the trip. She always had a big smile, and the her Bahn and I really hit it off.That's Rich in the background.
Let me take some time now to describe the lunch process:
The truck pulls over a nice spot which is open and a little way from the road so that we don't get too much road dust.
Each person would then move to various task and as creatures of habit, we always seemed to fall into a similar roles. Some of the boys would pull out the table, and the girls would set up two basins with truck water (Josh would fill out wherever he felt the water was clean, the truck held up to 100L i guess), one for vege washing and one for hand washing. We would then get various vegetables from the truck, depending on what we had bought recently, the vegetables we would have consisted of: Tomatoes, Cucumber, Red Onions, Carrots and tinned betroot. There were probably others but these were our staples. We would slice most of them, and grate the carrots.
At the same time, other members of the group would get out various condiments: butter, mayo, Mrs HS Balls Chutney (AMAZING - such a shame I haven't seen it since - they even have a chip flavoured for this!), and the meat would consist of various hams and usually canned tuna. If we had recently been to the shops we would also have cheese as well.
I think that a few weeks into the trip we had the lunch prep process down to 3 mins FLAT From the bus stopping to us eating..
All the food was kept cold in eski's or in the trucks freezer which help most of the food.
We would also have loaves of bread and crackers and it was pretty much buffet style.
My typical lunch would be tomatoes, carrots, tuna, mayo, MRs HS Balls Chutney and cheese. I actually these lunches were one of the main reasons I lost weight in Africa - these were relatively healthy compared to my normal lunches, and actually quite satisfying and filling.
Others (Deb and Sangee) would typically finish with some fruit also.
There was usually a made rush for the tuna, so you had to be quick for that :D
We wouldn't wash lunch dishes but put them in a bucket to be washed when we got to the campsite.We would then pack everything back into the eskis and wipe the table down, put the table away and get back on the truck. The total time would be approx 30 mins from start to finish.
I think that for the next 60 days I would have this type of lunch for at least 30 of days but i actually didnt get tired of it. If you had offered me this food now, i'm sure I would protest after 2-3 days but strangely I didn't mind. I guess I knew that I didn't have any other options so you just accept it, eat and move on. Strange how quickly you adapt.
Along the way, we also bought some freshly caught river fish which we would have for dinner one of the nights. At some point we had also bought some Goat.
On the way to the park after lunch we saw some Elephants! My FIRST African animal experience!
That night we feasted on river fish, roast chicken and roast pumpkin and potatoes. All we had was 2 small barbecue racks over coals, and we managed to cook that sort of meal. The food was fantastic, and cooked so simply, just a bit of seasoning, eating while watching a beautiful african sunset. We were really in the middle of nowhere now, even though this was an established campsite, it was empty except for us and the sense of being alone with nature was really overpowering.
I enjoyed my first night out of civilisation immensely and fell asleep content. Tomorrow would bring my first 'game drive' and also a river cruise so I was really looking forward to that.
PS. The camp site was named hippo hills because hippos were known to wander up to the campsite at night. Did you know that Hippos are the biggest killer in Africa? They basically charge people and trample them to death.. So we were warned to be careful when we got out of our tents at night.. TIA...
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