Friday, March 21, 2008

Lake Mutunda


Lake Mutunda

So I decided to take advantage this past Sunday of my half day off for the whole week. Instead of resting after working 6 ½ long days I decided to try to see some of the surrounding territory and went on a little excursion. I went with Rebecca, one of the med students I work with. There is a lake called Lake Mutunda that we saw when we went on a the hike up the hill the Sunday before and we decided to go check it out. It was within hiking distance but since we only had half a day we decided to ride there. A guide accompanied us and arranged our trip for us.

We rode there on boda-bodas (motorcycles). It was a half hour bouncy and fun ride through some surrounding villages and banana fields to get there. Then a 10 minute hike to get to the lake’s shore. It was such a beautiful scene with the lake, surrounding mountains, and agriculture on the hills. When we got to the lake there were some kids swimming and a herd of cattle, goats and lambs drinking from the lake. Once at the lake we hired canoes carved out of wood to take us around on a 2 hour boat ride. We mostly just sat back and relaxed and enjoyed the peacefulness and the view. We saw a few cool birds like a kingfisher and a sea eagle. While we were on the canoes our guide was telling us about the local brew here. Banana beer. When we said we had never had it he said we should try it sometime. It was a great way to relax on our half day off and unwind. We even got some sun to give us color to our muzungo skin.

After the canoe ride we returned to the boda-bodas for the ride back. On the ride back the drivers pulled off into a village to a dark shack. We were like why the hell are we stopping and what is here? The guide walks in a comes out with a bowl of yellow nasty smelling liquid. He takes a few sips and hands it to us. It was the banana beer. All the village people were gathering around us to watch us. We each ended up taking a sip of the nasty yellow liquid. It actually tasted pretty good. Like one might imagine banana beer would taste like. We hoped we wouldn’t catch a disease either from drinking out of that bowl that has never been washed and the whole village uses to drink out of or from any microbes in that concoction they made up. Luckily neither of us ended up puking that night. When we got back to our town we joined a couple of other med students and hospital staff taking the same sunset hike up the hill that we had taken the weekend before overlooking Lake Mutunda which we had relaxed on earlier that day and watched the African sun set over the lake.

Rafi

Here is a link to pictures of our day at Lake Mutanda:
http://picasaweb.google.com/rafiki/UgandaLakeMutunda

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

STOOP! awesome to hear that you're saving lives....hope all is well....later man