Wanale hill, the spectacle of the east

By Kyle Duncan Kushaba

I love writing, that’s for sure.Writing this piece gives me some deserved gratification, not that you have bought data to read this piece but I being able to share a little part of my audacious lifestyle that took me to Mbale to climb the Wanale hill, one of the hills that make the Elgon ranges and mountains. The journey is worth writing about and I advise you to save a little and head east to do some calf workout. You won’t regret.

It was just a few weeks ago as we hang out as boys, most of the boys being the team that makes the Kampala Amateur Volleyball Club, yeah I play volleyball too. So we were just messing around and one of the elders of the crew who happens to be a veteran on the team felt like the whole crew should have a weekend away from the hustle and topsy-turvy make of Kampala. We agreed in unison since everything was on him, makes you adore rich guys and pray they live forever.

Next destination

Mbale town, three hours away east of Kampala. Beautiful town though not as clean as the Mbale we used to see on Television. Journey started at 9:00am and checked in at about 12:15pm on a Saturday afternoon. Only two things were on the menu – Visit Wanale Hills and Sipi Falls in Kapchorwa.  So the debate was on where we go first.

Since Sipi Falls was a bit far from Mbale, we went there first. It was a spectacle, which I will give you soon as well but the real spectacle was on Sunday morning when they got my tired lazy self out of a sweet- white –sheeted bed in a hotel room I shared with Urban TV’s super producer Daniel Owor, a guy who snores like a hippo out of Queen Elizabeth that I could hardly get any sleep all night.

The boys enjoying  the waterfall on top of Wanale Hill

Grudgingly, I got out of bed not knowing that I was going for a real workout which I definitely did not need given my lazy morphology. We had our breakfast in the lobby of the hotel and within minutes, we were on out tour bus which took us right to the foothills of Wanale Hills where it parked at a decrepit primary school.

The trekking began

I was excited for some reason and somehow the laziness had eluded my now fervent body and since we had been told that there were falls at the peak of the hill, I was just waiting to dip myself in that water after a long climb.

Looking at it in a distance, the hill seemed so cheap and easy to climb that you would imagine yourself at the hill top in less than an hour. You will never guess how long it took to get there!

 Anyhow, the journey started at about 8:30am and up we went, imagine a bunch of unruly guys, almost 30 in number just waking up and deciding to climb a mountain without thinking of hiring walking sticks and not enough water! It was inestimably difficult to maneuver the tapering paths we were following in different groups.

The sight from the top is incredible

 
Some groups were fast, others were awfully slow. Bothersome enough was the veteran player who brought his girlfriend. She was as dawdling as snail in clay. It was exasperating watching her drag the whole team behind groaning in bits. I truly did not understand why she came. Her group reached after almost an hour behind the second last group. Things we do for women!

I was in the first group all fired up as I ran through the lower slopes. Dan Okwee, a good friend of mine warned me not to use all my gas but I nonchalantly geared on. By the time we got to about 200 metres up the hill, I was as bushed as a chicken losing in a gamecock fight.

I sat down and stupidly gulped all the water I had left in my bottle. I almost slumbered off when the group behind me tapped me to get up or just walk back down the hill to the bus. I wasn’t ready to do that. I soldiered on.

 
On my way up, I noticed the locals digging in a maize garden as high as 1000 metres above the ground. I wondered how God created his people. I was awed at the people who walked down and up that hill every day to fend for their families- elderly women even! It increased my fear of having children. 

I felt lucky though and thanked God for having made me the way I am. I did not want to be one of the guys in the garden. You could see the sweat pacing down their elbows as they swung hoe for hoe. And you wonder why government ignores these people to cultivate let alone live in these hills when landslides are a popular phenomenon in this part of the world.

The further we went up, the more gardens I saw, healthy gardens. There are amazing banana plantations on that hill and all I wondered was how a human could possibly slope that steep slope with a banana bunch on their head. Couldn’t they trip and fall? My head wandered to so many places and how amazing God made his people. But that is not all that almost took my breath; they are actually people who have built up in those hills! What? I pondered some more. I asked a nearby friend who told me that that land was acquired freely since it belonged to the Government way back in the Idi Amin era.

When I inquired whether such people living in the hills ever dreamt about driving a car, one of the guys ahead of me who actually is a Mbale born informed me of a road that was constructed by Idi Amin on the other side of the hill that is easily accessible to the rest of Mbale town and that people actually drove cars uphill. 

Then and only then did I know that even all these gardens I came by belonged to these hill people. In my heart I believed that these people were born in the hills and they too would be amazed to see how we, the rest of the people live on flat lands. They probably wouldn’t inhale our kind of air. I told myself. And maybe I was right, maybe it was the little naïve untraveled child in me talking.

We got to a point where I almost lost my breath and sat down for a few minutes. That’s when I realised I really need to go to back to the gym. I was very unfit, felt unfit. It made me sad.

There is a point we got to and had to climb some tree branches to be able to get the top most peak of the hill since there was no other way around it and here I found a white chubby girl sweating out all her American plasma.

I wondered how long these tree branches have been there and how strong they could be and just convinced myself that if a chubby American girl could get this far, then surely I could do better. The superman in me awakened and even I helped Miss America maneuver to the top. It felt nice. Fat guy helping chubby American girl. It was a magical love story made in dreamland.  The journey took us, (guys in my group) a whopping three hours and 17 minutes. Something I thought would be an hour tops.

The writer after conquering the Wanale hill

 
At the peak, it looked normal as it now got flat and I saw real life- just like on the flat land. People going on about their work and onion gardens thriving all over. We bumped into other American girls who had left behind my chubby Miss America and there I dropped my love interest as I rushed to meet the rest of the crew at the source of the falls to dip all the salty sweat I tasted off my already frail body.

The source of the strong falls running down the Wanale Hill is nothing spectacular from afar. It is small in distance but just get in the water, you will tell all your generation about it.

The water is so strong that you have to hold on to some rocks or else it will throw you aside. I was already knackered and nobody could tell me about the strength of the waterfall source.

Fortunately, I managed to hold on and enjoy the freshness of the land on top of the hill.

Wanale, I just wanna lay now. Will you let me be?

You just have to go and see this for yourself!   Incredible stuff.


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