Time to Play Catch Up - Heading to Gulu

So we stuffed the 11 of us in the van, which has affectionately been dubbed the clown van, and headed off to Gulu, which is approximately five hours away. After meeting up with a New York mission group, headed by a man named Bob Schooley, that was also heading up north, we set out two hours behind schedule.

For background info, Gulu is in an area of northern Uganda that had been hard hit by the Lord's Resistance Army, a group that kidnapped children and murdered untold numbers of people. To escape falling victim to the LRA, local villagers fled to what are known as IDP, Internally Displaced Persons, camps. The difference between IDP camps and refugee camps are that refugee camps are for people fleeing from one country to another. IDP's are for people who are fleeing from one region of their own country into another part.

Until two years ago, the Gulu area was considered too dangerous for most people to visit. In fact, my Fodor Uganda book actually had a passage that said it was suicidal to attempt to go in this region but it was written two years ago. Everyone says it is now safe to travel even without military escort in northern Uganda as the LRA has moved to Congo at present.

So now back to our journey. You may think that riding in a van with 11 people, each with backpacks for two days of travel would be fun, but add in rutted dirt roads that are sometimes covered in miles of random speed humps, and you have a small picture of our trip.

Guess what we learned on our long drive? They have drive throughs in Uganda, but they are very different than American drive throughs. If you pull up into most of these little villages or trading centers, your car is swarmed by people selling boiled peanuts, a flatbread called chipotti, orange drinks that have been made and put into bottles to look like orange soda, and meat on a stick. We actually bought batches of the chipotti, which was very tasty. I guess we'll find out soon if it was a smart thing to do.

On the drive, we saw approximately three fleeting glimpses of monkeys and passed a beautiful waterfall. We arrived in Gulu around 6:00, then had to wrangle rooms, which turned out to be surprisingly hard to do. Apparently there are very few hotels up to western standards and lots of relief type workers in Gulu. Three van loads of people pulled into the hotel compound as we were waiting. Bob Schooley's group ended up not getting rooms at the Pearl Africa and stayed instead at a hotel with plastic tub showers, but at least they had toilets. As for our rooms, they were rooms. It's probably best to leave it at that.