The Road

Fast food stops: I had almost forgotten the insistent (and persistent!) shouts of the road-stop vendors, trying to sell water, peanuts, bananas, roasted cassava, and goat on a stick (mochomo). The latter is usually beat against the window of the bus as the seller cries: mochomo!mochomo!mochomo!mochomo! For my snack? Roasted cassava and a bottle of water, please.

Chicken to go: Tonight’s dinner gets bought (live) on the road by the man seated behind me.

2.6.08

This morning I boarded the Post Bus (so named because it leaves from the post office and delivers the mail as it stops in each town) at 7:30 a.m. in Kampala. It rained for much of the journey, and the drops seeped into the old bus as it lumbered down the road, swerving to avoid potholes and streams of women carrying the day’s supplies squarely on their heads. I was grateful for a sweatshirt I borrowed in New York keeping me dry (thanks, Craig!) and the relative emptiness of the bus – no passengers or livestock crowding the isles. So nice.

Although I have only traveled this road a few times before, it was familiar and I settled into the ride easily. The sights and smells did not shake me awake with last year’s sense of wonder, electric in all its newness. No, on this journey instead I slept and chatted with my seat-mate, and watched Uganda pass by my window. With each mile I could feel the landscape slowly seep into me, like the rain that turned the road from a billow of dust to a soaked, deep red earth, full of possibility, leading me north.