The White Nile

In Africa, they do everything BIG.

BIG animals.
BIG traffic jams.
BIG voices.
BIG tragedies.
BIG rivers.

The BIGGEST river, as a matter of fact, because inasmuch as the Nile River stretches 4132 miles from Lake Victoria in Uganda to the Mediterranean Sea in Egypt, it eclipses all other rivers of the world in length.

It's also an angry river. Right from its outset, the Nile rages and churns, down slopes and over waterfalls as it tumbles nearly 3000m on its way to the sea. There are hundreds of sets of rapids, some of them reaching "Class 6", which in whitewater terms basically means "try to paddle me and you're going to die". As a result, it was only paddled in its entirety by humans for the first time back in 2004.

So what does this mean for me? No, I had no plans to paddle the whole damn thing. That would have required a trip through the Sudan, which I've heard isn't all that nice at this time of year. Or any time of year. Luckily, there is another alternative: a one-day whitewater rafting trip at the very source of the White Nile, in the Ugandan town of Jinja.

I know that you'll all be expecting me to use a whole whack of descriptive language in order to convey the idea that my day out on the river was some intrepid, adrenaline-pumping experience that brought me to the verge of death and back. It wasn't. So I'll step out of character and just say that the rafting trip was fun. Fun, and a bit nerve-racking at times, because though the whitewater looks a bit scary to the onlooker standing on the shore, it looks downright terrifying when you're flying through it. There were 5 of us in the boat, plus guide, and for 7 hours we paddled until our triceps combusted, through the rocks and the waves and the impending doom. I must say we were a pretty decent team, too, because we were the only boat that didn't get flipped. With flipping comes the risk of being caught in an eddy, which can keep you under water for up to 20 seconds in places. Sounds frightening, though to be honest I was a bit crestfallen that I didn't end up getting tossed into the river once or twice. Would have made this blog post way more badass.

The point is that I had a great time, and would definitely be interested in trying it again... maybe next time in the Zambezi, where for added fun you have to contend with crocodiles.

Regrettably, the whole experience was nearly ruined by the high population of assholes that was permanently ensconced in the hostel in Jinja. Never in Africa - and only a handful of times in all my trips - have I been in a place with so many people that I didn't like.

The river itself is the culprit. With world-class rapids comes world-class rafters and kayakers - although that's just what they think they are, because in reality they're nothing but world-class wankers: young, testosterone-charged college dropouts who flock to Uganda from various corners of the 1st world to battle the river by day, and pickle their livers by night. You know the "Extreme" guys from Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle? These were them, times a thousand.

And where there's smoke, there's fire. Or in this case, a more fitting analogy is "where there's muscle, there's tail". Yep, what would a party hostel be without an infestation of teeny-bopping young ladies who've probably told their parents they've gone to Africa to volunteer at a school, but are actually spending most of their time exchanging contaminated bodily fluids with the local studs?

It was like clockwork. Each day at 6PM, the boys would rock up at the bar, strutting and yeahbroing and highfiving each other after a hard-fought day out in the whitewater. Shortly thereafter, Little Miss Camel Toe and her brood of virile pigeons would arrive, and for the next 8 hours, the STD Festival would be in full swing.

Now I'm not trying to say that I've forgotten how to have fun, or even to deny that a little promiscuity isn't chicken soup for the teenage soul. What I am trying to say is that this was not exactly the convivial gathering I'd been looking for when I came to Jinja. Normally, my fellow African travelers have been interesting, sometimes even inspiring types, capable of holding a decent conversation, namely one that doesn't always revolve around the soporific topic of past drunken escapades. I HATED the people at this hostel. If you weren't a full-time kayaker or a moonlighting skank, you basically had no place there, and since the entire venue was little more than a bar and some dorm rooms, there was no retreat for those of us who weren't keen on confabulating with incompetent McFuckwits.

So I rafted, and then I left. I've called in the US Military to strafe the place with napalm, though they haven't gotten back to me yet.