Touring East Africa in a Clunker

Will Boase is a 23-year-old British photographer living in Jinja, Uganda. He and business partner Steven Creswell just made the foolish decision to open East Africa’s only Kombi (VW bus) tour company, despite the fact that their fleet is ten years older than they are, and VW parts are nearly impossible to find in Uganda.

The goal is to show clients the slower side of the country with trips that aren’t specifically focused on game. I rode along one of the first Kombi Nation tours, through Lake Victoria’s Ssese Islands and south to Lake Bunyonyi, which is right on the borders of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was a wild adventure, in the sense that everything went spectacularly wrong—we lost hubcaps, suffered bouts of alcohol poisoning, ran out of gas and spare parts at various points, and got arrested. It was still a thousand times better than being one of 25 vans circled around a lion, taking the exact same picture 50 times and marvelling all teary-eyed at the majesty of Africa.

We crossed through capital city Kampala to catch our ferry. There are hundreds of riot police waiting to bust skulls on every street. Kampala can be a little civil-unresty sometimes. President Yoweri Museveni has been cracking down on protesters who are angry about unemployment and rising fuel and food costs. For some reason, that weekend he had literally hundreds of riot police all over Kampala waiting for a fight. When we were waiting for the ferry, we saw a bunch of protesters in pick-up trucks screaming and shouting their way to meet the cops. Don't know what happened after that, but safe to say someone got their head kicked in.

Steven Creswell and Anna Kucma are our two guides working for Kombi Nation. Creswell owns the vans and Kucma basically manages the guys’ lives.

The Kombi rattles and groans a lot, the door is sticky, the windows don’t always work, the hubcaps come off on bad potholes, there’s no 4WD, it smells really strongly of gas fumes inside, and the mirror is cracked.  But it's still better than a Land Rover.

Look, it’s a giant horrifying Golden Orb spider!

We found this nest in Entebbe’s botanical gardens while we waited for our ferry. Spiders are the worst.

Creswell and Boase are hilariously British and are always plotting their next big business venture. They say things like “bimbling about” and sing Monty Python songs when the van breaks down.

Riding the ferry from Entebbe to Bugala, the largest of the Ssese Islands. Our cigarettes got confiscated for the entire four hour ride, which sucked. (Photo by Will Boase)

This is Hornbill Campgrounds on Bugala, the largest of the Ssese Islands in Lake Victoria.

Tina Pen is a German expat living on Bugala for 17 years now. She owns/manages the Hornbill Campground. In her spare time she enjoys smoking weed, getting super drunk, and adopting baby monkeys. She told me that one of her orphan monkeys entered into a sexual relationship with her German Shepherd guard dog, and was capable of performing oral sex on said dog. Actual quote: "Monkeys are very sexual creatures." Imagine it in a turbo-German accent and you will understand why I fell off my bar stool laughing. I told her she was full of shit and she berated me for about an hour, then called the maintenance guy over to confirm her story.

Tim Lukyamuzi is Kombi Nation’s navigator. Here he is standing on a beach. (Will Boase shot this photo.)

Boase points out something fascinating on Bugala Island in Lake Victoria. Rooftop rides are the best.

Riding on top of the bus through bumpy island roads was a lot of fun…

…Even though palm oil plantations are fucking up the entire island. Most of Uganda's edible oil is imported from Malaysia, but the Uganda government listed agricultural development as its top priority in the most recent budget, and land grabs are no big deal for them. This means residents of Bugala have been asked/forced to give up their land for new palm oil plantations, which are completely destroying the natural beauty of the place. Lonely Planet just named Uganda as its number one tourist destination, so I have no idea why they would do this to a place like Bugala. Money talks, I guess?

But the fun stopped when we got arrested for reckless endangerment or some stupid thing near the port to Masaka. A traffic cop on Bugala noticed us out on a rooftop ride the night before we left the island. When we drove to the port the next morning a cop spotted us and spazzed. He started screaming and ordering us around, then shouted to his friends to "prepare the cells." Those were inside a two-room shack of a police HQ. He marched us in to meet the man you see in the picture.

We had to argue with, plead to, and placate every cop on the island for a while, and they had all sorts of insane charges--including "reckless endangerment"--that they were threatening to lay down. Luckily another guy in actual handcuffs needed the only jail cell, so it wasn't a matter of being locked up while we negotiated. Basically, police there are broke-ass and they wanted to "fine" us, even though we saw a huge truck with about 20 people riding on the roof drive by unharassed about five minutes after we got out. The VW attracts a lot of attention and foreigners have money, so I understand the logic there, but it was still a terrifying pain in the ass. Eventually he agreed to let us go. Then he posed all dramatic for a photo.

Luckily we didn’t miss the ferry back to the mainland, because it was three hours late.

Sweet relief: ferry back to mainland > a jail cell. (Photo by Will Boase)

Marabou storks seem majestic when they are flying, but they’re actually filthy gutter birds who eat garbage and look gross.

Lake Bunyonyi, home of the dope-smoking Batwas (it is not OK to call them "pygmies" anymore). The water here is absurdly warm, considering it is the second deepest lake in Uganda and surrounded by mountains.

It started raining the second we got to Lake Bunyonyi, and didn’t stop for about 12 hours. Here we are posing in front of the most beautiful lookout point in all of Uganda. Isn’t it spectacular? But then it stopped raining and we went dugout canoeing.

Among Lake Bunyonyi’s 29 islands is Punishment Island, where unwed pregnant girls were sent to starve or drown on the swim back. We didn’t make it that far because it’s hard to canoe when you are drunk.

Then it stopped raining and we finally saw the islands. Hurray!

The terraced hillsides in southern Uganda are really pretty.

Wouldn't you want to rip around the Ugandan roads in this? (Photo by Will Boase)