The Flip Side of the Coin

I am writing this in the Honeymoon Suite of the Haven Lodge, one of our favourite places to stay in Uganda. Yesterday we talked ourselves into a free room upgrade, on account of our being such good customers. (We’ve been here five times now.) The view from my laptop is superb – rolling green hills, crashing Nile waves, eagles, darters, kites and weavers swooping noisily outside our banda.

We’re taking a brief but well-earned breather from all the excitement of recent weeks. Grania’s last day at IHK was on Friday, and most of last week was spent Saying Goodbye at Farewell meals, drinks, and meetings. On Saturday we hosted our own Leaving Party, a chaotic but fun finale to our year.

On Sunday we packed up and moved out of our apartment, and have been on the road ever since. We’re currently tying up all the loose ends of our lives in Uganda before we leave the country on Friday – shipping things home, selling the things we can’t ship home, and giving away the rest. Settling such a logistical challenge has taken us all week, and we’ve still not finished. The end is hopefully in sight, however…

Many people have asked us where we plan to spend the next three months before our wedding back home in March. Well, in short the answer is: Back On the Road. Over the last year, we’ve spent many nights watching the sun set from our balcony, discussing where we will visit once our year ends. Our original plan involved spending four and a half months traveling overland to Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Ethiopia, Egypt and the Middle East. However, after the plunge in the value of sterling and the dreaded “Credit Crunch” of the last few months, we’ve had to reassess such grandiose schemes. What has emerged is a sleeker, leaner, shorter and above all cheaper three months:

On Friday we fly from Entebbe to Zanzibar (an island off the east coast of Tanzania). We’ll spend ten days analyzing the claim that Zanzibar has the best beaches in the world, and will report back with our findings in due course.

On 30th November we will fly from Dar es Salaam to Addis Abbaba, capital city of Ethiopia. Grania is in charge of this leg of our journey – we will spend a month in Ethiopia and I’m told will be taking in a grand circuit of the west and north, ending up back in Addis for Xmas

Late on Boxing Day, we fly from Addis to Delhi in northern India, where we’ll meet up for New Year’s celebrations with two VSO volunteers from Kampala – Elena and Marcel. We then hope to spend the next two months traveling around Rajasthan, and Gujurat, either ending up in Mumbai, Bangalore or Chennai before flying home on or around the 25th February 2009

So there you have it. We promise we’ll try to keep the Flip Side up-to-date with our adventures…

Goodbye Uganda, Hello World!