You arrive home on Friday evening after a particularly hectic week at work and wish you could enter bed and sleep for two days straight. This feeling of utter exhaustion and burnout has been haunting you for weeks now and you are at the verge of insanity. You’d give up if you could, but that is not how life works.
If you were younger you’d probably attempt running away from home, leaving the tyranny of your parents (or guardians) behind. But you are no child now. You are an adult and ‘adulting’ dictates that running away from home is out of question. The only tyrant in your life is life itself. You must keep at it or else the house of cards that is your life will simply crumble.
Then as you scroll through your phone lazily waiting to doze off, you see something that catches your attention. It’s an open-to-all road trip. One of your random contacts has posted it on their WhatsApp status. It is the same digital flier you saw on someone else’s Facebook a few days ago.
The price is not particularly intimidating and the destination is properly enticing. A round trip to Jinja for the price of two shots of whiskey. Seeing as you’ve been considering the prospect of quitting alcohol, this is not a bad idea.
Travelling is not only better use of your money, it also would take your mind off alcohol.
The advertised road trip is on tomorrow and you’d be damned not to take the opportunity. You send the payment using mobile money to the designated contact and off you go to bed.
Early the next morning, you jolt out of bed as early as possible and fly off to the meeting point, not wanting to be left behind. You arrive at 8am, an hour early because since this is your first time, you don’t want to take any chances. To your surprise, you find no one but the drivers standing next to their buses.
The crowd doesn’t start gathering until long after 10am. The only reason you are not weeping out of frustration is because you are looking forward to the trip. The prospect of laying back along the shores of the Nile unwinding is simply too important to whine about time keeping.
It’s like going to a pub
At 11:30am, two and a half hours after the scheduled departure time, and we were still at the pickup point at Forest Mall, Lugogo. It seems that, with these trips, it’s more about the road trip than anything else. It’s like going to a pub. There is no right or wrong time to arrive so long as the fun happens. Which explains why no one seemed bothered that it was coming to midday and there was no sign that we were about to set off. Or maybe time keeping is not one of our strengths as a nation.
Some young men were arriving with large bottles of whiskey, sharing with whoever they liked. It seemed like if you had a good vibe, or a nice haircut, you got a free drink. Others were arriving blaring music from bulky Bluetooth speakers. Some, especially the girls were arriving in groups of threes or fours, dressed like they were entering a night club. Short dresses, skinny jeans, crop-tops, top-of-the-range make up, the whole shebang. Exactly what you paid for. From this perspective, it was not surprising that no one was bothered about the poor time keeping.
By around 2pm, the crowd had swollen to about 600 people. Many of them were now very excited probably from being tipsy.
Upon arrival, many revellers jumped into the River Nile to cool off. Right) Jinja Bridge welcomes you to the eastern Uganda district.
By now one can tell who the organizers are because they are moving about, trying to make sure everything is in order. They are making frantic calls for more buses to come and join the convoy. Clearly the numbers have gone beyond expectation. These are brave young people, barely in their mid-twenties.
Celebration for its own sake
Some of the buses were now warming up for departure. The din of the large diesel engines was now competing with the music from the several Bluetooth speakers.
As the party travelers boarded the buses, there was so much celebration everywhere you’d think the country had won the World Cup. Lots of comedy and laughter, lots of loud whistling and screaming, lots of singing and dancing.
It was somewhat hilarious how everyone was simply not bothered that five hours past the scheduled time of departure, we still hadn’t moved a meter. But remember, there was no itinerary on the flier; only the destination and how much money it cost.
Just like they had promised, whoever entered the bus was handed a set of silent disco headphones. The DJ in my bus, a skinny guy barely in his 20s, was using his smartphone as the turntable, with the tiny transmitter strapped to his belt. He was one of very many DJs. Each bus had one.
The buses that were procured last would have to make do with the Bluetooth speakers that were in abundant supply. Now there were signs everywhere that we’d set off in a few minutes now and this somehow elicited fresh excitement.
We set off shortly before 2:30pm. The whole convoy of 20 buses and several other personal vehicles made a beeline for Jinja Road. The road was relatively clear and we were able to reach Mbalala, Mukono in a few minutes. Here, guys requested to stop and replenish their alcohol, and everyone had to stop. For thirty minutes, people shopped for alcohol and snacks while others took pictures and videos for their social media.
Mabira Forest mega celebration
The next stop was at Mabira. Time check, 4pm. By this time, we had had so much fun that it didn’t matter if we reached Jinja or not. So when we stopped at the Mabira roadside snack stop, we were in no hurry to go anywhere.
Again, these road trips are all about the road trip and not the destination, it seems. And you’d serve yourself better to remember that in future.
The travelers, now thoroughly intoxicated and happy, got off the buses and started a street celebration in front of the highway snack vendors instead of buying snacks. The vendors looking on, waited for the dancers to stop and buy the snacks but so few bought any. The adrenaline was in high gear and so few wanted to eat.
This obviously angered the vendors whose vending had been curtailed.
The 20 buses had utilized all the parking space so that no other vehicles could stop to buy snacks, and the remaining spaces were filled with celebration. By the time we left one hour later, the vendors were at the verge of throwing stones at us.
We arrived in Jinja as it was coming to 6pm and quite frankly, it was a bit of a bummer. It was an anticlimax. On the bus, we had been swimming is entertainment. Hit music in our ears and dainty dancers in the bus corridor. At this remote beach, far away from town, there was nothing special compared to the bus ride. And it was cold.
The large party was then divided in several groups. Those who love water jumped in the lake to swim and entertain themselves with other activities while day light lasted and those that were tipsy went to the bar for more drinks. The lovers that were here for a romantic outing sought the leafy corners of the property or secluded parts of the beach and the loners grabbed their phones.
The blue sky soon turned black and by 7:30, those that were in the water got out and warmed their bodies with alcohol or dancing on their partner’s bosom. This is how we would spent the next six hours.
The night sky was beautifully cloudless and sparkled with stars. The announcement to return home came through after mid night.
School study trip on steroids
It’s was an experience to smile about for many years to come. Remember the kind of excitement that school study trips would elicit from the teenagers? Multiply that by several factors.
These kinds of road trips are havens of freedom and debauchery in comparison. There is no teacher to hand down the law and you are allowed to use any intoxicating substances you want.
In many ways, going on these road trips is going off the beaten track. The trip is planned by someone you don’t know, so in a way, you are putting your life in the hands of a stranger with whom you have no understanding or contract. But we are all human. We just can’t let a chance for adventure pass. Blind adventure.
