Wahine toa

Wahine toa means ‘strong women’ in Maori, and I’ve been hanging out with a few of them lately.

Firstly my mother came to Uganda for a week. We went to Jinja, a wee tourist and NGO town at ‘The source of the Nile’. Then we cruised up to a national park where we went for a trek up a hill and saw some big mammals called cows and some curious looking birds, called chickens. We also saw loads of goats and a few lizards… actually in Jinja we did catch a beautiful green emerald snake moving swiftly through the barstools at the backpackers. It was about a mitre long and the width of my thumb, totally harmless, but we didn’t know that at the time.

My mother is very chilled out. She hitchhiked from Cape Town to Kenya before blogs were invented. Still she sleeps in shared dorms, jumps on the back of trucks and eats cooked green bananas sold through bus windows like she has never stopped travelling. Even on an pre-dawn trip to catch the first bus (the first bus gets the diesel, the others are not guaranteed) she didn’t fluff or fuss… even though that trip was in darkness downhill over roads that were more pothole than road, two motorbikes, six people, one headlight and almost no fuel for 20 minutes. Maybe there is a travelling gene. New Zealanders tend to travel a lot, our European ancestors were the intrepid few who braved leaving their home just to live on a island no one had ever heard of… but Americans also have similar origins and they don’t seem to travel as much while Australian do travel… although their ancestors didn’t choose to end up in Aus.



Also Margaret bought me a new camera, so next time I’m on a computer with a USB I’ll upload. I have managed to get other peoples photos as well so I might be able to fill in a lot of blog entries with pictures. Yay

When I was in Sudan a few people told me that it was impossible to travel south overland into Uganda. But a friend of my lovely friend Amanda had already done this; I knew of her, I knew her name was Michelle. It was possible because I knew that Michelle had done it and was living happily in Uganda. So while my mother and I were in Jinga we asked around and tracked her down. Cool chick, she manages a backpackers/campsite the looks over the Nile. Turns out she didn’t travel over land into Uganda, but she has travelled all across Africa as a tour guide.

I’m now hanging out in another backpackers; we swap books and play card games. There is a loud of Americans, a banter of Scots, a defensive of Israelis (I’m out of the Arab world) an ay of Canadians, a hang of Brits, a efficient of Scandinavians and a annoyance of Christian do-gooders.

In amongst them I found Flick, a dread-headed Aussie lass who I met in Sudan, she had come down from Cairo with her bike… push-bike. She has cycled loads of the way and also spent a fair wack of time on top of trucks. So yet another strong woman.

None of there chicks really think of themselves as anything special, they are just doing what they want to do and dealing with life as it comes. But they are unique because they do it instead of just think it, they take the risk and the have faith that it’s just work. They have the right attitude.

I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m still treading water: looking for jobs, looking for a life to start, looking for something to happen, something to be. Until then I send out CVs and hope my money doesn’t run out first.