Finally on my way back to Uganda

I arrived at the public taxi park in the mornings at around 8:45am. I found touts shouting Kisumu…Kisumu…Kisumu and chose to select the car behind because the one on the front stage had a woman in the front seat and I wanted to sit in it. I told the screaming touts begging me to give me time, they sensed that I wanted the front seat, so they now turned to persuading the lady to swift to another seat, but she was determined not to do so, and I kind of agreed with her. I didn’t see any reason why they wanted her to swift for me. She was a traveler too, who wanted to have a greater view of the road just like me. Yes I must admit, she was right and I would have done the same.


An hour later, the front car taxi was full with its 14 passengers allowed under the law but with few extras on board too. Passengers started jumping onboard very quickly and within minutes, it was full and ready to hit the road. We cruised downtown on Uganda road (the road from Kisumu to Busia is named Uganda road) mostly because it crosses to Uganda. I felt sad leaving Kisumu. It’s a clean and well-organized city. Its cuisine had an impact on me. I liked them, but now I was here in the taxi waiting to be bumped into potholes as deep as graves. The taxi stopped at Caltex Petrol station to pump air into the tyre and this took us around twenty minutes.

We started our journey, as usual by the traffic police station picking money (bribes) from the taxi conductor, stopping now and then. It’s so frustrating and annoying habit. We were soon in Maseno and I requested the driver if I could take a picture of the Equator boundary marker and he agreed he stopped, I jumped off and quickly took the photo. It looked nice to see the environment around that place.
Equator mark but pictured when the camera had default date settings.

I quickly noticed something that took my attention, the huge number of churches and other worshiping centers on the road from Kisumu to Busia. Each township and village, had more than seven churches and I counted more than two hundred of them minus mosques. I recalled seeing kids heading to school on Friday in bare foot, yet now, they were coming from churches in smart clothes and shoes. Do parents of these kids wanted to appease "God" to grant them something? Why would they make their kids walk to school in bare foot and then dress them smartly on a Sunday morning mass? I asked the driver why would Kenyan parents do that to their kids. He had no answer.

I spent more of my time keeping quiet and taking pictures and by around 12 PM, I arrived at the border, very tired, crossed quickly and jumped on a bike bodaboda to the Busia-Uganda taxi park. I jumped in a taxi that took almost a year to get passengers, later it was full and on the road, the driver was a younger man, who was good and in his 30s. He was very careful on the road. We arrived in Kampala at around 3:30pm. It felt not so nice to be in our ugly city. I put everything behind and embraced it by entering restaurant to have food and later home.