Part 4 in the Breaking of the Hartsel Sketchiomete

Trip Start Jul 18, 2007
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Friday, September 21, 2007

Oh Rubondo Island.  We continue with this tale filled with sketchy transportation with the boat ride from the Nkome ranger station to Rubondo Island. This is a super cool boat that we took.  Imagine a long white row boat that could sit about six people.  Now cross that with a canoe and stick a motor on the back and you have our next mode of transportation. The guy running the motor got in first, we handed him our bags and he stored them under a tarp.  Then our guide got in.  He was carrying a fairly big rifle.  We tried to ask why but he chose not to answer us.  I assume it was for wayward hippos and crocodiles but one can never be sure.  We strike out across Lake Victoria at a pretty good clip and the guide gives us a tarp so we don't get wet.  I loved every minute of it.  It had all the fun of being close to the water that a canoe brings you, but the exhilaration of a motor boat.  Plus, the lake is gorgeous.  We would get into some parts of the lake where you couldn't see any landmass anywhere and I could have sworn we were on the ocean.  We passed by many small islands, but I didn't get many pictures because I didn't want my camera wet, and we were going a little too fast to assure a non blurred outcome.  Finally, after an hour and a half of excellent boating through increasingly choppy water, we arrive at Rubondo Island.  We were immediately greeted by Lindsey's contact on the island and the head of the national park, who was a woman and we were all excited about that.  We had been seeing far too little of women in powerful positions.  They were genuinely happy to see us and made us feel like we had been friends forever.  Apparently we were the only guests on the whole island, and they only get about 500 guests a year.  If you are ever in the area, I highly recommend going because they treat you like royalty. They took us to our bandas.  Now when we heard we would be staying in bandas we were expecting very little.  A few cots, hopefully mosquito nets of some form, an outhouse out back, very shack like.  However, what we got was the Ritz Carleton of bandas.  First of all, they were way bigger than we expected.  We walked up on to our porches that were not more than twenty five yards from the shore.  Oh yeah that's the other thing.  We had two bandas for the four of us.  As Anna and I walked into ours, we were greeted with the sight of a bright and airy room.  It had two large windows, clean linoleum floors, a locking cabinet for our belongings, and the best part:  two queen sized beds with full box mosquito nets.  It was the most glorious sight I have ever seen.  Then we saw there was a door on the other side of the room.  We go through it and find that there is a shower room, and a toilet room with a western style toilet complete with toilet paper.  Anna and I almost cried.  After a long day of ferries, Off Road Expresses, and boats, this was way more than we could have possibly asked for, or even hoped for.  It was getting close to dinner time, so as the sun was setting over the part of the island that was across the bay from our bandas, we were led to where we would prepare our food.  Again, when we heard we would be cooking our own food, we expected it to be over a fire.  We had looked for aluminum foil but hadn't found any so we were praying that they had some sort of cooking utensils.  But once again, the fine people outdid themselves, we walked into a small shack (really more what I was expecting our bandas to look like) to find a three burner kerosene stove, a sink, and a cupboard full of plates, cups, silverware, and more pots and pans than we could shake a stick at.  And believe me, we tried, but the stick shaking just wasn't happening (I've always thought that was a funny expression so I thought I'd include it).  Our guide person was apologizing that they didn't have the new kitchen built yet and hoped we could make do with these humble accommodations.  We just looked at him like he was crazy and assured him a million times over that this was more than excellent.  We made rice with carrots, onions, and the random spices we had bought.  Did I mention we forgot salt and cooking oil?  Because we did, and that was really annoying.  Our rice was flavorful, but it really could have used that salt.  I also attempted to sauté some of our raw peanuts with some spices without oil.  It worked surprisingly well, and we had our appetizer.  It was obvious we cooked way too much, but we finished what we could and then made some tea, and sat on these huge stone benches around the dying embers of a bonfire that had been roaring earlier.  It was a full moon, and the lake had quieted since our trek earlier in the evening.  It was so peaceful.  We talked for a couple hours about how much it sucks being a girl (especially a white girl) in Tanzania, religion, and general ponderings of the universe.  Then we went back to the kitchen, washed our dishes, and returned to our bandas to find that electricity had been turned on for the evening hours.  I still can't believe how nice this place was.  As I spread out in the acres of room in my queen size bed, I marveled at the fact that my feet weren't even close to pushing out the end of my mosquito net.  Then I drifted into the best sleep I have had since coming to Tanzania.
Next morning we got up fairly early to make our breakfast of oatmeal.  Most of our fruit hadn't fared very well on the off road express, but we had a few bananas left that we mashed into the oatmeal, along with some granola and dried fruit that Anna brought.  It was quite delicious, as oatmeal almost always is when you're in a camping/camp type atmosphere.  We would discover the next morning that if you put peanut butter in the mix too, it made it even better.  As we were washing our dishes, one of the park workers came in and tried to wash our dishes for us.  We said we were perfectly able and they'd done more than enough for us already.  They would try to do our dishes for the rest of the time that we were there, and we only let them on the final morning when we were pressed for time.  They were really way too nice to us.  Our guide Simon then took us to the Park office where we paid our fees which were less than we were expecting.  We paid ten dollars for what we thought would just be a hiking tour of the Island, but we got a lot more.  We did hike around the island in the morning and that was really cool.  Everything is soooooo green and thick.  I have about a million pictures of trees.  We saw bush bucks, sitatungas, and tons of huge spider webs made by tiny spiders.  We hiked up to one of the tallest points of the island and got to look out over all of Lake Victoria.  Well not all of it, because it's huge and it would be nearly impossible to see all of it.  But it was a good view anyway.  As we were hiking back down at about noonish, Simon was like, ok what do you want to do now.  Lindsey informed him that we would like to hike on more trails.  He informed us that that was the only hiking trail on the whole island.  Ahhh we say.  He suggests that he could probably get a park vehicle and drive us around the island though.  We said that sounds grand.  We went back to our bandas to eat a fine lunch of peanut butter cucumber sandwiches (don't knock it until you've tried it) and the rest of our fruit while Simon went to get what we assumed would be a land cruiser.  We assumed wrong.  Simon walks up and informs us that the small car isn't working so we would have to go in the back of a big truck if that was ok.  We said sure, why not, imagining a large pickup.  We were wrong again.  It was a big blue truck, not unlike trucks used to haul gravel and rock to and from construction sites.  Ahh yes.  So these two guys help us into the back and we rumble off into the jungle. 
             I have come to the conclusion that riding in the back of a big blue truck is really the only way to see a jungle island.  Granted we scared most of the animals away with the throaty engine, and yes we had to duck, dodge, and divert branches of trees so that they wouldn't hit us in the face, but that was way too much fun.  We saw these flowers called fireball lilies that only bloom for two weeks out of every year, and I felt very privileged to be there at a time when I could see what really looked like little balls of fire popping up through the dense undergrowth.  We saw all the tell tale signs of elephants (mainly dung.  Things I never thought would come out of my mouth #16:  There's elephant dung on the tire of our car.), including a tree one of them had managed to push into the middle of the road.  No worries though.  The guys that had helped us into the truck jumped down, pulled a pair of machetes out of who knows where, and start chopping up the tree.  It was moved in less than fifteen minutes, and we're talking a big tree.  I was impressed.  I really wanted to try my hand with the machete but I figured I'd probably end up losing some sort of appendage, so I didn't ask.  A little while later, Simon stops the truck and we all get out.  He takes us through some trees and to the edge of the lake.  What is in the lake, you might ask, less then fifty yards from these fearless travelers?  Hippos.  Tons of Hippos.  Just hanging out in the water.  Now I wish that Simon had a gun, though he assures us that they are more afraid of us and won't come out of the water.  Did you know that hippos are the most dangerous animal in Tanzania?  It was sooo cool to see hippos in their natural habitat and not in the zoo.  I still made sure I knew my friends with the machetes were.
             We drove back to the bandas as the sun was setting through the trees, another great night of potatoes and carrots, tea, and huge queen sized beds. 
             I woke up on the morning of my 21st birthday, August 30, 2007, to the words, "Meredith, there's a hippo on the beach."  Oh what a way to start a new year.  We had made plans the night before to watch the sunrise over Lake Victoria because, come on, how many times in your life do you have the opportunity to do that.   Monika, being the only morning person of the group, offered to get up early and start boiling water for tea.  On her way to the kitchen she was walking along the beach and looked up and found herself a couple yards away from a hippopotamus, indirectly between it and the water, which is not somewhere you want to be.  The way Monika tells it is that "The hippo looked at me, I looked at the hippo, the hippo went (Monika makes a really fun hippo roaring sound), and then I ran away."  By the time I got out to the porch, I could just see the dark shape of the hippo, lumbering along the sand, presumably to go join its friends.  Then, with a cup of peppermint tea in hand, I watched the sunrise.  Have I mentioned how gorgeous and huge the sun is in Africa at sunrise and sunset?  Because it is.  Now granted I'm not usually conscious for sunrise in the US but I'm pretty sure it doesn't look like this.  I am pretty sure the intense orangey red color of the sun and the hues of pink, orange, and purple the sky adopts are pretty unique.  I can never get enough of it.  We ate breakfast, packed our things and got back into the boat.  Did you ever play with a parachute in elementary school PE?  I remember we would do this wave type thing with the parachute where you would raise your portion as the person next to you was bringing theirs down.  The parachute would just flow in this really cool way, and that's what the water looked like.  No real waves, it just looked like the surface of the water was solid like the parachute flowing up and down.  Man that was nice.  Simon took us around to some of the smaller islands to see crocodiles.  One of them almost ate a bird but the bird got away at the last minute.  Lindsey and I were sad that we hadn't had our cameras ready because that picture would have won the Wang Center photo contest for certain.  We get back to Nkome and wait at the ranger station for another park vehicle that has offered to take us back to Mwanza. Again, we were expecting a Land Cruiser.  Little did we know that this would just be one more form of transportation to break the Hartsel Sketchiometer...
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