Considering how much and how well Esther had cooked for me, I expressed my desire to buy her a Rolex (fried egg rolled in chiapatti) for breakfast this morning. She appreciated it very much and told me she didn’t remember the last time she had one. I suppose it would be comparable to buying gas station food for Wolfgang Puck. Leslie was taking Esther to Kampala for her annual medical check-up so they offered to spare me the taxi ride (sorry, Mom. I didn’t lie about not needing to go to Kampala again during the riots, this wasn’t my original route of departure). It was a nice conclusion to the trip, leaving Mukono the same way I had come, in Leslie’s car. I hadn’t seen The Real Uganda’s founder since my first day. This was unintentional of course, I love the girl, I just hadn’t needed her I guess, nor her me. So we arrive in Kampala around 10:00 am and my next mission is to acquire a boda to take me in the rain to the old taxi park: that one was a little sketchy. Moving on, at the old park I got on a taxi headed for Entebbe, which filled in 40 seconds, just as Leslie said it would thereby being a more efficient option than my original route. In Entebbe I enjoyed one last boda ride to the Entebbe Backpacker’s hostel where I could wait and a shuttle would take me directly to the airport a few kilometers away. I split the shuttle with an English girl and we went through the tightest security I have yet to experience in an airport setting. I think I was searched and scanned and patted down on four or five separate occasions before I actually got on the airplane. Better than the reciprocal I suppose, especially since learning about the death of Osama bin Laden. One quick rant about that issue: as an American abroad during this event, I certainly did not feel safer knowing that he was killed. This was mostly because of the shameful way that Americans rejoiced and celebrated his murder on international television. Their hatred towards the people who attacked us on September 11th was just as evident as the hatred some extremists have towards America. When will we ever learn? An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. I was very embarrassed of my own nation’s response. I was not necessarily against the end of bin Laden, nor were the Africans and Europeans I heard express their opinion, but we were all against the American extremists who celebrated the way they did. Thankfully, the people I was around were wise enough to know that the actions of one person were not necessarily representative of the whole. Ok enough. My thirty-six hours of travel back to Seattle, Washington, USA had begun with the flight from Entebbe, Uganda to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A brief layover then the dreaded 18-hour flight to Rome to refill (they didn’t even open the doors to let us out to see the airport for a minute; I really don’t want to talk about being in Italy and not getting to be in Italy) and then over France and across the Atlantic to Washington, D.C. It was now supposedly 8:00 in the morning and I had a 9 1/2-hour wait for my next flight to Seattle. All I have to say about this period is Starbucks coffee and microbreweries. The short five-hour flight across the country and before I knew it: home.

Thank you to all of my loyal readers and the flaky, glance-at-it once-in-awhile ones too. I hope you enjoyed Africa as much as I did, only without the mosquito bites that I still have.

Jillian, Elise and I stayed the night in Mukono and woke up early to narrowly catch the shuttle bus to Jinja – rafting the Nile…again, that’s twice that I’ve rafted the Nile, for those who are counting, HA! Anyways, I’ve bragged this into the ground enough already, so I’ll let Jillian tell you about it this time – she bought a video.

Sunday we kicked it with the new friends we made: Germans, Brits, Americans, and a Brazilian. Jillian decided to head to the safari with the Germans because of a combination of logistics and timing so she stayed with me while Elise took the shuttle heading back towards her village near Masaka. Elise and I said our goodbyes and the rest of us headed into town to see the local flavor. We did this after swimming one more time in the freakin’ longest river in the world, the Mighty Mighty Nile! (oh sorry, I mean after swimming lazily around in nowhere in particular). Since I hadn’t wanted to cart around any gifts for a month, I bought pretty much every gift today in Jinja. If you didn’t get one, sorry, I only had a small backpack and I’m coming home so that should be gift enough! We ended up walking to the “Source of the Nile”, which is where Lake Victoria ends and the river begins. Well, honestly we didn’t get to the waterfall where supposedly the real source is but we got to a really narrow section of the lake and called it good, we had to catch a bus. A couple hours later Jillian and I got off in Mukono where she was collecting her belongings from the guesthouse and heading off to Kampala and I was returning to Ntenjeru. We were very thankful to have shared this time together in Uganda because honestly we didn’t expect to really see each other at all. We parted and took our respective taxis in opposite directions.