Crtd 07-08-13 Lastedit 15-11-15
The Big Round: Preparations
Crew, Communications, Money Logistics, Defense
Plan
The plan is to go round the lake, roughly along all shore lines
counterclockwise. Total distance is roughly 1800 km or 1000 miles. The laps are
1. To Sese Islands (125 km), visiting Dominic's camp site on Banda and Loek's camp site near Kalangala
2. To Bukoba, where we have friends among the tourist office staff.
3. Down to the SouthWest corner, Biharamulo, a nature reserve practically void of tourists, and residence of Dale. We met Dale both in Mwanza and Entebbe. He has an hydroplane to commute from his island to the coast towns. Philemon knows his island, having passed it many times with his cargo dhow. We trust he will lead us there.
4. To Ukerewe, to see Doi's family.
5. To the Serengeti coast to meet Philemon's family
6. To Mwanza, to see hello to Mwanza police and immigration, and see Philemon's new plot at Kirumba
7. To Musoma, the Northernmost coast town in Tanzania East side of the Lake
8. To Kisumu, in a deep gulf into Kenya
9. Back to Jinja.
Lake Victoria. Our first laps: Jinja-Bukoba total 250 km (Other Maps)
We will make a small loop: Mwanza is planned as target 6, not
4, because if Tanzania
government officials start to
misbehave like they did in the memorable aftermath
of
Dhow Building, we do not want to be forced to leave Tanzania without having
met Doi's and Philemon's family.
The normal wind pattern is thermal. The sun heats land air but not lake air. As a result standard morning wind is lakeward and afternoon wind landward (standard winds explanation).
Papers
Since immigration officials like to encroach upon your privacy by looking in
previous pages of your passport to stamps which are not their business, and one
of them indicated expulsion from Tanzania by corrupt officials, I went for a new
and empty passport (see previous
greeting).
Communication
The rumour spread by advertisement is that there is mobile phone coverage along a large part of the coast.
For security, we considered a satellite phone. Phone from everywhere! But the
phone costs $1200/=, and
internet traffic will cost $5/Mb. Then: whoever you contact when harassed by thugs
(usually police or army) will be unlikely to come to help you. Better concentrate on
the gentlemen themselves.
But I bought, for $250/= a mobile phone with a cable
to my pc, and internet, promised to work in all countries around for Ush1200=$0.75/Mb, Pay As You Go,
just buy airtime in any local rotten kiosk nowadays in Africa usually within 100
m in any village. What I like of it is the No Pay As It Does Not Go. Nice phone, but SMS templates "I love you too", and "Honey sorry, have to work, be home late
tonight" can not be deleted.
Money logistics
The town banks in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda do not usually accept each other's
currencies. Customs and immigration offices even tend not to accept the currency
of their OWN country! For any serious trade, these are dollar countries. Not a
single
bank has offices in all towns bordering the lake. Of all credit cards, only
VISA may work for cash in all those towns, but VISA Netherlands refused me because I live in Uganda.
Fortunately just now, Crane Bank started to issue VISA cards. My first card
refused all types transactions. They gave me a second one. So, both VISA card and
ATM's (usually guarded by 4 or so armed soldiers) are shaky, we cannot be sure it
will work. Lots of money on board is risky because of possible extortion attempts
by police and army boats. If the VISA card refuses, I will have to use MoneyGram
or Western Union, friends sending money to a local office on the name of me as a
person, not as an account holder. Expensive, but this insurance premium is worth
it (the one who just wrote that cancelled ALL insurances he ever had, apart from
third party m'cycle and car, which is checked by road police, investing the
saved money in stocks of insurance companies).
Outboard
I asked our friend Emma, who sold me his 9 Hp canoe outboard
last year, to check
it for the journey. This ended up in a total dismantling of every part into
parts, not leaving any bolt tightened. I would term the treatment a complete
reconditioning, expensive ($120/=), but well worth it.
Photo: Our outboard completely dismantled in Jinja harbour town's main street
Photo: Yamaha 8 Hp b.yr.1973 as new
Defense, security
The lake is not yet ready for ordinary water tourist. Private
thugs usually fear our high boards: they can not look inside to see with what we
defend ourselves. Government thugs, in Uganda chiefly the
army (UPDF) gunboats, and
in Tanzania the police, know that we are not allowed to shoot them, so they
frequently have the courage to start annoying us with casually pointed guns and
unpleasant "controls" for beer, food, or even money.
Against that, we need to do some security preparation. First of all, I spent
some good money in Kampala to mount 7 new top grade hard crowns, made in Hong
Kong - moulds go, crowns return by post - over teeth that
without it might have crumbled while chewing police or soldiers. We plan
cannibalism because if others find them dead somewhere, we only get more
unwanted visits. Since Mwanza police has shown not to be shy of
seizing both your computer and your backups, we have two computer backup
external hard drives now, one, called DRY stays at Kingfisher, the other WET,
stays on the boat and gets updates. We have beautiful colour copies of all our
documents to show officials, and even those we will not allow them to touch.
Photo: Quite some new hard furniture for the captain's jaws
We will stick to last year's carefully taken decision not to take guns. Guns are nice because you can scare and kill, but,
You are not allowed to scare and kill police or army - the main danger
If you apply for a gun license this will go in police and army files. It will make the dhow more interesting to them and to the ones to whom they sell the gun license list
With a gun you can make unintended holes in undesired places
If you start to shoot the other guy will do the same
For scaring off, we have some flares. We have some last resort means, that were good enough to conquer Troy (even better because theirs were bronze and ours are steel): spears, bows, arrows, a bucket of carefully selected stones and a catapult. And for the rest we think of Homer's Hector: "then he decided to die as a hero".
Guests
Despite announcements, no guests have registered. Of course, flying in at one of
the coast cities (and out again at the next) is possible too. But is this type
of holiday, low budget as it is, in the taste of the modern tourist? The answer
clearly is no, we conclude, not without some satisfaction.
Shopping
Shopping features big stocks of cherished items difficult to come
by at the lake sides such as (captain only) 10 kg coffee beans, 20 chocolate-hazelnut spread,
20 peanut butter, 10 kg cheese, and crew only items such as soap, toothpaste,
skin cream, tea, sugar 10 kilo. Desired by everyone is milk powder, malaria
pills. The captain has no illusions of bread being available, so he expects
after a while to come down to spaghettis with a tin can's content thrown over it
or the crew meals of maize porridge and fried fish, with coffee as his
consolation.
Waiting for Crew
I asked Philemon to bring
Daudi, a Tanzanian sailor that has even myths told about him, but he could not
come. Philemon will bring Kos, a son of his sister. Philemon and Kos will
be late, because they have been searching for six days on the lake to find the
dead body of Philemon's brother in law (not Kos' father), who had a boat accident. They found it.
Waiting for Mail
My sister Willemien sent me a packet with pumps, an ampere-clamp and medicine on
July 24, more than three weeks before our planned day of departure, August 15,
when it had not yet arrived. Anyway, crew is delayed too. The Source of the Nile mooring is not
exactly a penal institution. I bought new golf clubs. A fortune ($275). A full set of good Wilson stiff shaft irons, and an astonishing
Calloway "Big Bertha" driver, doing over 230
meters here (air pressure 870 mB). Waiting for crew and mail I kill a shot off my
9-hole average every few days.
Meanwhile....
Dagaa fishing frenzy
In the last two months, there has been an explosion of
dagaa
(a 3 cm mini-fish) fishing in our bay. This is done in the moonless parts of
nights with nets and lights. We used to have a long line of lights but
only along the South shore up to Nazu point. Now the bay is full. The South
shore villages receive trucks, lately, who buy dagaa to bring it far inland. Our
dagaa fishing birds, the aigret and the kingfisher are speedily diminishing
their presence. Now their food is eaten by the hungry children inland. But when
in ten years overpopulation will have reached the stage where people will start
again slaughtering each other with AK47's and panga's, the rivers will again
flush plenty of food for all fish, like they did during the Rwanda genocide,
when the fish catches were enormous. Between Gods well-designed equilibrating
processes are the whites, some of whom feed the children, others protect the
Lake's biodiversity. The interferences of those whites with those three
astonishing things we
do not have in Africa (thoughts, compassions and money) create interesting
patterns of disturbance.
But nature bounced even more quickly: after a few weeks the host of
guest-fishermen and their canoes disappeared. Probably the trucks change their
loading place when a fishing ground gets depleted, and the canoes follow.
Cookie visits
Cookie insisted on being reported on my web site with a photo
of herself. Armed with our paddle she went
in the martial pose.
� This arrangement: Cookie
Edith
Photo: Edith stepping on board
We hosted Edith, Professor in Philosophy, but fortunately
not of the sort reminding me of the void corridors of
my former department.
She
was reading Waugh, I Homer, so there was no danger to enter any philosophical
conversation and make fools of ourselves, though she did explain me Thomas
Aquinas idea of privatio to help me grasping some aged and sympathetic
European missionaries that you can still meet in Jinja. Translated in my words,
evil is absence of God, like cold 0o Kelvin is the absence
("privatio") of molecule movement. This is supposed to make compatible the ideas
that God is almighty, created everything, yet there is evil. So God created the
things - and perfectly so - but not the states they are getting in, which might
be states of evil. Though not particularly impressed with Thomas (naturally,
because Thomas
intended to impress popes) am grateful to be enlightened in this...I smoked
more than my ration of cigars in her good company, and that of government death
threat stickers, she smoking her cigarettes. On the golf course, after several
attempts, she managed to actually hit the ball somehow and immediately decided
on return home to sign up to a local golf club.
Photo: Sharing the local ugali and sato with Doi
Waiting for mail continued in another style
Finally, August 23d, I decided to provide a Post officer with
good airtime and hire Brian (19 year old, golf handicap 0, on average going
round 2 under, a mobile phone owner) as a
courier to bring the packet to Entebbe. I shall come from Kalangala (Sese
Island), where we expect to be even 10 days from now, to pick it up.
I checked us all out at Jinja immigration (Vessel nr...yes we have it,
TVM044/06). Lake Victoria has no international waters. Yet we now are in no
country until we reach Bukoba.
We are NOWHERE!