We are (finally) running out of our we-took-a-bus-in-Africa-and-you-won’t-believe-how-weird-it-was stories. (Relieved? Us too.) But first, here’s possibly the strangest one of them all:
From Gisenyi, we backtracked to Kigali to overnight in the capital before catching a morning bus up to Kampala, Uganda. We boarded a bus in Gisenyi at 6:00 p.m. for the three-to-four hour journey to Kigali.1 The trip was progressing fairly smoothly until, well after nightfall and not far from Kigali, one of the passengers had something of a mental breakdown. He attempted to disembark from the bus while it was in motion, and other passengers had to restrain him to stop him from falling out onto the road. When the bus driver stopped the bus, he leapt off and ran into the darkened woods. The other passengers began looking for him, and, when he was finally located, he refused to get back on the bus. There was a great deal of animated discussion amongst everyone about how to proceed before our bus driver eventually left him in the care of some other people along the side of the road.
We continued to Kigali in a sort of stunned silence. Once in Kigali, we encountered a standard police checkpoint on our way to the bus station. We filed out so that the police could inspect our bags, and someone told the police officer about what had happened with our fellow passenger. The police officer then had us get back on the bus, boarded the bus, and directed us to a nearby police station. There was some discussion, and then we all got back onto the bus to drive to one of the larger, central police station in Kigali, where the police began to take statements from some of the other passengers. It was almost eleven o’clock before we reached our guesthouse.
Luckily, our bus ride the following day on the Jaguar Executive Coach was drama-free. The bus had comfortable 2×2 seating and wifi(!) – although the latter only worked once we crossed into Uganda, and even at that it was pretty intermittent. Perhaps even more notably, the bus stopped only twice over its 12-hour journey: once at the border and once for a restroom/snack stop. Our seats were in the very front row of the bus, which afforded us an excellent amount of leg room as well as a clear view of the road ahead.2 We were surprised at the extremely poor condition of the roads in Uganda – it was like we were traveling on a one-lane road with eroded edges rather than a purported two-lane highway.
