I just finished my freebie trip around Uganda, generously donated to my by Abacus Vacations. While the tour part of it was great and it was awesome to chat to Robert, the tour company owner who happens to also be an SEO guru, my final thoughts on this organised tour business is that they’re hard work!
Our guides were professional, amazing drivers and were full of information on everything we asked them about from cultural Uganda-related stuff to specific info about animals. We saw some beautiful parts of the country, stayed in some great accommodation and got to see plenty of beasties from lions to gorillas to chimps and all the usual safari stuff. We crammed a lot into our eight days and my eyes have been opened to what Uganda has on offer. I have no complaints about the tour or the stuff we saw… the hard work part comes with the people I was on tour with, particularly one psycho from Texas.
I’ve met lots of people as I’ve travelled, most pretty cool, some amazing and some not so nice. I don’t seem to meet too many completely crazy people though. There are a few I can think of but the guy on my Uganda tour has got to take the cake. I got a strange vibe when I met him originally and was turned off immediately by his telling of unfunny jokes and insistence on talking about his time in the US military which, along with cars and fashion, is a topic of conversation that will put me to sleep.
On the second night I found myself sitting beside him at the end of the table. He’d already talked a lot about military stuff but, as I’m completely uninterested, I was never really a part of any of the conversations. But this time I was stuck beside him when someone asked about his most dangerous mission. He told some story about infiltrating a jungle, killing some guy (I think he was a sniper but not a military one, a contract killer type… or so the story goes), and then having to survive for a month in the jungle as he escaped from 500 people chasing him. Or something like that. Me, being the shit-stirrer that I am, asked him if he killed a good guy or a bad guy. He said it wasn’t really clear. I asked him how he felt about that and he launched into scary mode.
He sort of went into a speech about defending people who aren’t able to defend themselves and how his mantra in life was to protect people’s right to free will. He then, for some reason, decided to tell me that he could kill me before I had a chance to put my hands on the table. Then he went on to say that he had the ability to torture me to get me to say anything he wanted me to. This is about when I told him that I didn’t want to talk to him anymore. He sort of talked to himself for awhile while I drank a stiff drink and tuned him out.
His bizarro outburst was witnessed by a few people who were shooting me ‘is he crazy?’ looks (yes, as it turns out, he is). The conversation wasn’t as threatening as it might sound, he was calm and it was as though he was explaining facts, not making threats. I didn’t take it as a threat, just as a very strange thing to say to a person. I’ve got to say that anyone who talks about killing people as casually as he does isn’t someone I want to have a conversation with so I decided to keep my distance.
Things really started to get strange a couple days later. Up until that point everyone was ok with him… he just seemed like a harmless, fairly jolly, old guy who had a lot of crazy stories to tell. After an amazing morning of chimp tracking, crazy guy arrived late to lunch in a huff and slammed down his plate and let out a huge sigh as he sat down. I got up and left because I didn’t want to deal with him but it turns out that he was pissed off because he thought he’d have more time at lunch to pack. Not a big deal but he made a big deal out of it and this was the start of his downward spiral to craziness.
The next place we stayed was where his true colours surfaced. His room didn’t have hot water, he couldn’t get a cold beer, and his food order was screwed up repeatedly. The place we stayed actually had terrible service but we all just sucked it up. He shouted at the staff, loudly laughed in the face of a waitress a bunch of times when she made small mistakes, and then cornered and shouted at another member of our tour over some minor misunderstanding. At this point he was firmly public enemy number one.
Gorilla trekking was a classic moment for many of us. As we ate breakfast he managed to make one lady on the tour cry. I forget what their initial exchange was about but it evolved into him saying that, if she were to be threatened by the gorillas, he wouldn’t come to her rescue. As we got ready to leave, he decided that he didn’t need food and went into a story about surviving in the jungle, blah blah blah. He was kitted out in a ridiculous safari-style outfit complete with a huge knife that he was asked to leave behind because it made us all uneasy. He, again, went into a ‘you guys are all on your own’ speech and vowed not to save us when the evil gorillas attacked.
On arrival to the gorilla orientation centre, he nearly stacked it on the gently sloping grass (the guy is old, overweight and apparently not too coordinated these days) but he still opted to go in one of the groups that had a longer, harder trek to the gorillas. I was, thankfully, in another group and didn’t see him until later that day as we hiked up to a pigmy village (our gorilla trek was over in a couple of hours and we went to visit the pigmies afterwards). We passed some of the guys on our tour who were on the way down from their trek, but there was no sign of crazy guy who was lagging behind, having apparently face-planted quite a few times.
Twenty minutes later crazy guy eventually shuffled past us, covered in cuts, mud, blood and truly looking like he’d been through a battle. It might be mean to say, but there was something strangely satisfying about that moment. Crazy guy had apparently admitted to the guys on our tour that he’d been arrogant but then retracted the comment and blamed his lack of trekking performance on wearing the wrong gear and so on.
But the shit really hit the fan on the morning of our last day. We had two safari trucks for our tour and everyone had stuck to the same seats the entire time. Crazy guy decided on the last morning that he wanted to sit in the front seat of our car but we had other ideas. Nobody wanted him in our car and there was a huge fight between him, the guy whose seat he took and the rest of us. I shouted the occasional insult at him from the back of the truck but I mostly just watched the fireworks. He challenged one of the guys to a fight at one point, threatened pretty much everyone, pushed the tour owner, for some reason went on about how much money he tipped the hotel staff, and just went nuts in a strangely calm, controlled way.
When our driver asked him to sit in the other car he did. He seems to think he had some sort of bond with the drivers and all of the staff he came across. He tried to be super nice but came across as patronizing. But, regardless, it seems like our driver is the only person he respected and he moved to the other car… but he made sure to come back to tell us that the only reason he moved is because he was asked, not because we wanted him to. It was like we were in primary school! Kind of entertaining in a slightly scary way.
The guy is living in an alternate universe where he’s still a scary military man, not a sad, old guy who’s living in the past. I really think he’s actually crazy, not just a jerk. I felt sorry for him at times but then he’d threaten someone else and I’d wish that he was still lost in gorillaland. My main buddy on the tour was rooming with the crazy guy which made for some fun stories. I guess you get all types on tours and this Uganda trip was certainly proof of that. It was painful at times but the stuff I saw was great and I guess it gives me some stories to tell.
On the upside, the stuff we saw was pretty amazing. I didn’t realise Uganda had so many cool things crammed into a relatively small country. Some of the drives were long but the scenery was unreal with green hills and valleys, tea plantations, great views and plenty of baboons and things along the road. Gorilla trekking was the obvious highlight but I was also really impressed with the chimp tracking as we got to see them on the ground for most of the time, rather that trying to spot them up in the trees while avoiding falling chimp pee and poo (although that would have added a certain element of danger!) We were also lucky to spot tree-climbing lions up close.
Have you ever encountered crazies on your travels? Have you ever been trapped on a tour with one? This was certainly an experience and not one I want to repeat anytime soon. I’d love to hear other stories of travel encounters of the crazy kind. Oh, and merry belated Xmas!
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