I was on my way back from a mission in northeastern Uganda. All the radio installations were succesful and the staff in the suboffices were happy. they had though one request and that was to get them all connected together by radio.. Thus so they would be able to use their handsets to talk from office to office. I had seen the landscape and figured out that it should be no problem to achieve that final goal also. I had found that the perfect location would be Mount Napak or Napak hills as they referred to it. Asking around everyone told me it was an easy climb and that it would be easy to secure a location for a repeater on the top.
The plan was to head back to Kampala but as it was very early in the morning we figured that we could make it to the top and back and still make it to Kampala before sunset. The guys had told me it would take less than an hour to get to the top. We met with the local village council who was all to happy to appoint one of his deputies help us get on the way. We drove to the foot of the mountain were we met up with some Karamojong guys who would guide us up the mountain. The karamojong guys said it was an easy 30 minute walk to the top. Perfect we concluded as that would give us even more time to get back and on our way home.
the karamojong are tribe that roam around in Uganda and into Kenya with their cattle. They rarely build anything permanant. They rather just follow the seasons and the grazing patterns for their cattle. They are a very tall tribe and almost always dressed in a tradition chequered skirt. they dont carry any belongings with them except for the 3 essential things they have. A toothbrush, A walking stick and a woooden T shaped piece that can serve either as a stool or a pillow. that is it.. just the bare essentials. In some cases you will find them with a gun also. the gun is mainly for protection. Since they dont like to shoot their animals they sometimes do targetpractice on passing cars. The intent is not necessarily to kill but on a number of occasion ofcourse this has been the end result !?
The guides we got for the mountain was though not the gun carrying ones which made me more at ease.
We started to walk. As usual I carried a bottle of coke but as the walk was supposed to be like a walk in the park I only had a small bottle. We started of in a good pace withthe karimojong leading the way. I think it took about 10 minutes then all us rookies were tired.. these guys were not walking.. they were running!!! We requested them to take it slower and we managed another 10 minutes then we stopped again and said that maybe it is better we lead the way and they follow our pace.
Slowly we started to realize that this 30 minute walk was probably going to take a bit longer or shall we say much longer! As we felt we were already high up we decided that to eturn without reaching the peak would just be achieving nothing we all agreed that we would continue all the way even if it would take a bit longer time. 3 hours and 45 minutes later we finally reached the peak. The mountain is stnading about 1000 meter above the surrounding areas. On reaching the top we were told that we had passed several villages?! We had not seen any but they had seen us. As the karimojong living on the mountain are very suspicious to visitors they hide and only make themselves known if they know your intent.
The view from the top was spectacular. We could see almost 150 km towards the north or as far as we wanted the radiosignal to reach. We talked to the guys in the Kotido office just on our small radio and they could not believe we were on the mountain top so far away. We located a good site for a repeater and then it was time to head down again. By this time we were exhausted but the local guys had barely even raised the pulse one beat. I found out that it wss not uncommon that they ran up the mountain all the way, or ran between the different villages even if they were as far away as a marathon or two! At the same time I also realized that they actually had no concept of what 30 minutes would be. 30 minutes or 4 hours did not make a difference. You reach when you reach and that was it.
Continuing down we stopped at one of the villages and suddenly we were greated by the villagers. As we had run out of anything to drink they offered us water. Infact they even offered to slaughter a goat for a barbeque. We kindly said not to the goat but drank some very fresh water from the mountain. As they have a serious problem of guinea worm in most of the areas we had to sift the water through a napkin.
After a 20 minutes rest we continued down the mountain. It took almost as much time as going up and we were exhausted. We had though found a good site for our systems so I was happy with the climb.