We started today with another group prayer meeting with the Ward’s and yet again got encouraged immensely. After which I went with Pam to get some food and things in the car. The markets are quite good, with a wide variety of food and things available at good prices. Everything is between UGX 800 & 1000 a kilo, that’s less than a dollar a kilo. The butchers are a good experience, the whole isle of shops just smells like room temperature meat, and carcases hanging, with every part of the cow nicely laid out on display for purchase, we just got 2 kilo’s of rump for UGX 4000, that’s about $1.20 a kilo. It might not be quite as nice as back home, but it is still ok.
After this we headed to the boarder to get our visas renewed, which lead to quite a long day indeed. Here is a few photo’s I took as we drove to the boarder. It has to be one of the nicest drives we have had, scenic plus a fairly smooth journey:
These photos were taken at 11:30 am so it was not fog, but rather we were driving through the clouds, which really made it a nice trip. Our problems, however, started when we got to the boarder. The officers their said they only had authority to give one months extensions on our visas. Apparently we could go to Mbarara and get three months extension there. We were trying to talk them around to helping us when a man (who we later discovered was Ben’s friend Bosco) said that Ben had had the same problem. Which was a bit odd a complete stranger knowing us, and then he asked if our friends had arrived yet. Making it seem even more weird that this man knows so much about us and we had never seen him before, then he said that if we took Pastor Edward with us to Mbarara it could help us more. Does he know everything about us?
Anyway we set out for Mbarara as we needed the three months extensions, so what was to be an hour trip turned into another day of travelling!!!! When we got to Mbarara we had to wait for 45 minutes for the officer to get back from wherever he was – ‘he’s coming’ is all we got told. All he did was stamp and signe next to the visa, didn’t even check the photo’s or anything, but one good thing is that we thought we would have to pay another US$30 each, but he just stamped and said ‘So good day to you.’ A whole day of travelling for three little stamps.
I thought also that I would throw in a photo of Quinton: ‘Super Tourist’
