A fun-packed Saturday

Disclaimer – the following story really isn’t funny.

Working Hours

Because I seem not to be able to stop working, I stupidly stitched myself up to do a day’s hard graft last Saturday. I’d volunteered to man the PEAS stall at the pleasingly assonant ‘Mayuge Day’, which was like the County Fair, if you like. Being an efficient soul, I had also arranged a meeting in the same direction at 7pm with a lady called Helen, another NGO volunteer, to discuss the thrilling topic of bricks.

The day got off to a bad start with that common travellers ailment that need not be named, so attending the Mayuge fair was pretty risky – I didn’t anticipate finding many toilets, and I didn’t anticipate any I did find to be the sort you’d want to use. But I decided to attend anyway – after all, what’s immodium for? Thankfully the day passed without any further intestinal crises, but it got past 7pm and I hadn’t yet left Mayuge.

Close Encounters of the African Kind – pride comes before a fall.

I began the ride back under darkening skies along Uganda’s best road, a beautiful stretch of wide, smooth tarmac, through endless fields of sugar cane. I was watched over by the (still prostrate) Orion, the one-eyed Great Bear, and all their friends, plus the slimmest sliver of silvery moon sitting low in an inky sky. I was captivated by the atmosphere and revved up to a decent cruising speed. As I rode I pondered upon what a Uganda veteran I was now. I’d been around for three whole months – I could practically write the guidebook! One thing I had definitely learnt, I smugly reflected, was to expect the unexpected on Uganda’s notorious roads. Yes – as long as you’re ready for anything you’ll be fine. Then I hit a central reservation at 100km/h.

For a few revolutionary seconds I became the first man to achieve completely unaided flight, before inventing a new sport, sledgeless grass sledging. When I came to a standstill I quickly reviewed my state of mortality, decided that I was alive, for the moment, and hastily got to my feet to make sure it stayed that way – I didn’t want my two accolades to be instantly annihilated by making myself a sitting duck for a pursuing vehicle to wipe out. A dizzy look around revealed that I was still in the central reservation, a good ten metres from the bike, which was half in the road and half out. I couldn’t even see as far as the point of impact.

There was a scarcity of passing cars, none of which stopped, probably because they couldn’t see me either. This was a bummer because the bike was wrecked and I couldn’t get it out of the road. I texted Helen and told her I couldn’t make the meeting cos I had a flat tyre.

Eventually two local guys came to the rescue. I planned to leave the bike by the side of the highway and come back when I could see something. But then Helen, who I’d only met once before, and only very briefly, called and offered to pick me up. This was the start of a favour that gradually grew to pretty epic proportions, so she gets a much-coveted Blog shout-out (plus beers for the next few months, no doubt).

She showed up in a mate’s pride and joy, a 1974 Land Rover. As an ex-army girl, she stood back and barked orders while us lads lifted and pushed and pulled and shoved and strained and eventually fitted what was left of the bike into the back of that piece of bombproof British engineering.

We offered to drop the worthy assistants back at the sugar factory, where they worked and lived. This is when our noses told us that the bike was leaking petrol. Fearing that this would cause a catastrophic explosion and a subsequent river of caramel across Eastern Uganda, we stopped on a deserted but refreshingly well-lit roundabout next to the factory entrance, where a guard watched us suspiciously. We asked him for a jerrycan to drain the petrol into: I’d just filled up the tank owing to yet another fuel crisis, so I wasn’t about to pour the precious yellow liquid on the floor. I disconnected the tiny fuel line and eight-and-a-half litres of glittering fuel started trickling lamely into the plastic container.

Realising we’d be there for some time, we settled ourselves down. At this point the guard approached us and perfunctorily requested us to move our car as we were “causing an obstruction.” Well, we were hardly parked on Uganda’s busiest roundabout. We were obstructing a grand total of nothing. “Ur, we don’t really want to start the car until the petrol dries,” we pleaded. “Well you’ll have to,” he countered. “If you don’t move it you will cause an accident.” An accident worse than blowing up your factory?

After several seemingly endless minutes we’d still only collected a fraction of the tank’s volume into the jerrycan, and one of the local guys lost patience. He went to fetch a pipe to siphon the petrol from the top of the tank. Now there’s only one way that I know of to get a siphon started: suck. Which is how he ended up with a mouthful of petrol. That was really beyond the call of duty, but he knew as well as I that such self-sacrificing levels of service significantly increased the value of the subsequent gratuity. And the more he coughed and spluttered and spat, the more those shillings ticked up.

A later, beer-assisted post-mortem of the accident revealed its cause clearly. I was riding through the middle of a sugar plantation on a virtually moonless night. It was really, really dark. Even the bike’s full beam double lamps barely seemed to light the way ahead. Suddenly some drops of very muddy water coming from goodness knows where made a mess of my visor. I attempted to wipe them away with the sleeve of my leather jacket. This had the effect of smearing the mud, thus reducing my visibility even further. Meanwhile, the start of the dual carriageway section lay silently in my path. Against my own advice which I had been smugly intoning in my mind barely thirty seconds earlier, I foolishly neglected to expect not to expect it. In fact, I don’t think I knew it was there until I’d hit it, which shows just how little I could see.

Of course, there was no warning that the road divided, and no lights to light it up. This was simultaneously the cause of my crash and the reason it wasn’t more serious, as there was no bollard or signpost for me to hit. I therefore walked away with little more than a scraped knee. The most unfortunate thing, apart from the damage to the bike, is that by escaping uninjured I must have used up most of my lifetime’s quota of blessings in one go. I was very, very lucky.

Friendometer

The strangest thing about the whole story is that later the same evening I got the chance to give some feedback about the cause of my accident to someone who could actually do something about it. Helen took me for an anaesthetic beer and I found myself sharing a table with a member of the extremely wealthy Ugandan-Indian Madhvani family. They own the plantations, the factory, the surrounding population and the stretch of tarmac where I had my accident, which, as he helpfully pointed out to me, is why it’s Uganda’s best road. But even the best roads can use improvement. I gave him an entry for the Madhvani comment box.

Competition Time

I’m giving a point to Ibbsy, partly because it’s great to hear from him and partly because his caption for the chicken photo had me clucking with delight. We had actually put it in the larder to stop the dog eating it but the smell was fowl. Happy thought it was a poultry creature and wanted to kill it, and Galvin egged him on, but I didn’t feel like chicken tonight. The only thing for it was to sensitise the dog, and you can see the results of that below…

You must be able to come up with some decent captions for some of those, between the lot of you. I’m also still accepting the identifying of deliberate mistakes for anyone who’s still enjoying finding them. Ben’s recent absence of pedantry was due to a broken leg keeping him from the blog, apparently, which is strange, as surely that’s the ideal time for such pointless activities.