That was the most intense stressful airport departure of my life times ten – and I’ve missed two flights.

If I had to guess, based off the reactions I got, no one has ever bicycled to Kampala’s international airport, then taken apart the bicycle at the security check point, placed the pieces on the scanner bed, then made a box out of scrap cardboard, tape and plastic wrap and somehow gotten the bike on the plane without paying the prescribed fee.

Also I was running really late so they had me skip all the lines, security, customs and immigration. Intense day. Also it rained on the 40k ride in so I’m drenched in water and sweat with a good amount of bike grease mixed in.

But I still have mobile internet, i.e. it’s all good. I have a couple day layover in Cairo then home!

South-eastern Uganda. A hundred mile bike ride sounds like a long one – unless you’ve been biking for thousands. To Kampala I rode mostly on a dirt track. It was the largest road within 20 miles. It was surprisingly poor, tightly packed with people. (Hard to find quiet places to pee – a good measure of population density!) There was no electrification. I saw three secondary schools.

We are creatures of habit. Most often our decisions are less than tremendous – they’re exercises in functional efficiency, habituated patterns of modest resistance. I face an actual decision. A literal fork in the road. It’s unsettling.

Last week we discovered that Ethiopia has changed its immigration policy. They are no longer issuing tourist visas, except at the airport in Addis Ababa and to residents in their home country. Online, people reported month long turnarounds from the Ethiopian embassy in Washington. The only way for us to make it into Addis would be to fly in. Difficult and expensive as we have bicycles.

We’re cornered. We came from the south. We don’t want to go west. The Congo is struggling after decades of war that killed millions. And they don’t speak English. To go east is to enter Kenya and then end our journey early in Nairobi. That’s an option. Maybe the wisest. But there’s another option, to go north.

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Spending a night in the maternity ward to a rural African clinic, you gain perspective. There was no soap, no clean linens, no running water, no electricity. And yet, they were so kind to us. Ben asked if there was a way to boil water, so we could make our rice. The clinic had a stove. They clearly hadn’t used it much before. Gas spilled out onto the floor. A pregnant woman came in to give birth. The flames shot up three feet high. Ben and I thought the stove was going to explode and everyone was going to die. And yet it was still a heart warming experience. They gave us a pineapple. Even insisted we sleep on blood stained beds. (Awkward!) They were so kind.

Except for the drunk cop who made us buy him a shot of liquor, sleeping in the garage to this African hospital was largely uneventful.