Gone-da Uganda and Rwanda

I leave for a tour of Uganda and a little bit of Rwanda tomorrow night with 9 other students from my group (the rest are going to Tanzania) and our Academic Director Odoch, a native Ugandan. I’m looking at the itinerary for our trip right now and am pretty ecstatic about the trip. Tomorrow night we drive overnight through the Rift Valley and to Kisumu, the same route I took two weekends ago. But this time we’ll continue to the Uganda border and cross through Busia early in the morning. Some highlights of the trip which we’ll hopefully get to (things tend to be pretty laid-back and subject to change in East Africa):

• Taso, a Ugandan NGO that was first on the continent to address HIV/AIDS, at least partially responsible for Uganda’s renown success against the epidemic
• Sipi Falls in the rainforest
• Source of the Nile and Bujagili Falls in Jinja, Uganda
• Nile Breweries (hopefully a tour and taste test included)
• Kampala, the capital and site of most of “The Last King of Scotland”, here we’ll meet up with the group of SIT students studying in Uganda this semester. We’ll go to the Uganda Museum, Kasubi Tombs, and we’ll get a personal dance performance from the Ndere Dance Troupe, which performed in Last King.
• Rwakarwe Rural Development Project (herbal medicine) in Western Uganda
• Queen Elizabeth National Park for a game drive and boat tour
• Kigali, the capital of Rwanda...where we’ll see the sites of the ‘90’s genocide
• Then back to Kampala and eventually Nairobi!

…All that in 10 days. There’s going to be a crazy amount of traveling, but it should be a very cool trip.