Advertisement

Mishaps on boat ride to Bugala

Friday April 15 2016
EALAKEVICTORIAn

Changing boats at Kacanga Island, Lake Victoria. PHOTO | DICTA ASIIMWE

A speedboat ride to Bugala Island from Waterfront Beach in Entebbe is supposed to take about two hours, but for us it takes twice as long.

Bugala is a popular tourist destination, with several ways to get to the island. Two big ferries make five return trips a day; on a recent excursion with 10 people, we chose the more expensive option of hiring a speedboat that would theoretically get us to our destination quicker. 

The island is home to activities like sport fishing, boat cruises, quad biking and nature walks in the tropical forests. At night, hotels at the water front, like Brovad Sands Lodge, prepare campfires where visitors entertain themselves with stories and song. 

We were supposed to leave Waterfront Beach by 8am and have breakfast on arrival at Bugala. The journey started slightly later than planned. We would have still made it in time for breakfast, but our speedboat coughed and slowed to a crawl less than an hour into the journey.

The captain promised to summon a rescue boat shortly, but we had to wait for two hours for it to get to us. By this time we had almost arrived at the island, so it just sped past us and we only used it the following day for our return journey.

We spent more time getting to Bugala than the three-and-half hours we would have taken on MV Kalangala. The ferry charges Ush14,000 ($4) for luxury travellers and Ush10,000 ($3) for economy class, and makes one return journey daily between Nakiwogo landing site in Entebbe and Kalangala Bay on Bugala Island. The speedboat owner charges $600 for a return trip.

Advertisement

On our return journey, we were rushed to leave the island over fears that the high winds on the Lake Victoria could make travel impossible.

Less than an hour into the trip, we had to stop at Kacanga Island: The engine of what should have been a new speedboat started guzzling water immediately after leaving Bugala, forcing the captain to return to Kacanga, which we had passed about 20 minutes earlier.

At Kacanga, the captain and two other people dried the water out of the engine after which we re-embarked on the journey to Entebbe. Less than five minutes later, we were back at Kacanga. The speedboat could not continue.

We then hired a motorised fishing boat to complete our journey, which ended at Kigungu landing site, where the Catholic missionaries first landed 1879. Kigungu was chosen because its distance from Kachanga is shorter, compared with Waterfront Beach.

Kigungu it is mostly a landing site for fishermen, which means one has to either trudge through dirty water or pay Ush1000 ($0.3) to be carried over.

The return trip took us five hours to Kigungu, but upon landing we had to travel a longer distance to Kampala than we would have if we had landed at Waterfront Beach in Entebbe.

Despite the travails of the trip, we enjoyed seeing parts of Lake Victoria that are still unchanged by human activity, with the water free of algae. Birds swoop to catch fish from the water.

On both days, the lake was calm and we poured water from the lake on our bodies to cool ourselves down.

We visited more places than we had planned — we had lunch in Kachanga, a small island of about 3,000 people, where we collected shells and interacted with the locals.

Advertisement