Sipi Falls

Sam and Joe on homemade ladder

Last Friday (October 5) we took a day trip to Sipi Falls.  This was our first really long drive outside of the city.  Our 170-mile trip to the falls took over six hours due to the condition of the roads.  There are no freeways here.  The roads all seem to be two lanes with the occasional passing lane thrown in on a hill.  Cars, semi trucks, and motorcycles all jockey for position. Then add people walking, riding bikes, and hauling water and chickens and just about everything else you can imagine on the sides of the degrading tarmac (pavement) with potholes every three feet and you have yourself a fine specimen of a highway.  Oh, and don’t forget the police and military checkpoints.  We spent a week on the road that day.

At one point we needed to pull over to check the map.  As Dave started to pull away he promptly ran over a carton filled with glass bottles set on the side of the road to be picked up for recycling.  They still do the glass deposit/return game here.  It was obvious this was a big deal when people started swarming the car yelling that we would have to pay 30,000 shillings, no 40,000 shillings!! ($16), to make up for the loss.  Dave would have none of it.  He’s fed up with being targeted for jacked-up prices just because we are white.  He gave the lady who owned the bottles 4,000 shillings ($1.60) for the three broken bottles (from the sound of it, I had guessed it was more like twenty broken bottles), and then gave her another 10,000 shillings ($4) just to get her to stop yelling (and for the carton, I guess).  So many people swarmed the car you would have thought we had run over a child!  And who puts a carton of glass on the road!?

 

But I have to say that even this couldn’t ruin the beauty of Mt. Elgon.  We wound up a very steep mountainside to a little town called Sipi and pulled into the drive of a popular backpacking lodge.  The place was deserted, but we met Moses, who agreed to take us on a hike to the falls.  I need to insert here just how non-commercialized natural attractions are here.  We had to find someone who knew the trail in order to get to the falls.  In the U.S., we would have hotels and a six-foot-wide paved trail to the falls, with several shops and restaurants along the way selling “My parents went to Sipi Falls and all I got was this lousy t-shirt” t-shirts.

Moses jumped in the car and directed us to one of the trailheads.  We wandered a dirt path down through the grounds of a traditional lodge, over a small river, past several grazing cows, through banana fields, past caves in a cliff, down a ladder built to scale a cliff face, through more banana fields, past a family farming their land, and finally to the falls, which thundered and sprayed us until we were soaked.  Dave tried to stay dry with a huge banana leaf, which worked for about a half a second.  It goes without saying that we were the only people there.  We passed a cave on the way down and magically, on the way back up there was a makeshift "soda stand".  Naturally we bought sodas, had a good view of the falls.  A couple of enterprising young boys brought around a chameleon they had caught among the coffee trees and let us play with it, then charged us for the privilege. This was all agreed upon without words and we had a blast.  Eagle-eyed Moses spotted another chameleon and Dave caught it.  Very cool lizard.

Going back up was the hard part.  While we all huffed and puffed and slipped around on the muddy trail, Moses had no trouble at all, and he was wearing simple flip-flops. 

The drive home was challenging for Dave.  Driving at night on these terrible roads with very dark people walking just inches from the cars going by is frightening.  Our friend Ssimbwa told Dave that a missionary couple killed a person on the very road we were driving.  Did we mention that people are invisible here at night?  No highway lights, only diesel dust that hazes over any view.  Trucks take up the middle, knowing pipsqueaks like us will pull aside, into the abyss of potholes and people.  Jinja we love, so we stopped there to have spring rolls at the same restaurant where we ate the week before.  These are spring rolls worth stopping for!  It was 11:00 pm by the time we got back.  Dave is a hero for getting us back safely. 

Ssimbwa had advised us against making the trip by ourselves.  We didn’t tell him we went until the next day. ;-)