Thursday, May 18, 2006

accepted everywhere......but here

We ran into a little trouble in Kisoro. The banking world seemed to have forgotten this little town and there is absolutly no way of accessing a credit card or atm. The closest atm is a 5 hour drive. We realized this about 20min after making arrangements to go see the gorillas for the next morning. To see the gorillas costs money and we were pretty much screwed, if not completely stuck in rural Uganda.

We went to the western union, they were just about to close and any transfer takes at least an hour. I pleaded with the manager to stay open but he said "it is impossible". Apparantly they use the single Internet connection into the town for all transactions and it is controlled by the Internet cafe accross the street. Nothing is impossible in Africa. So I said "what if I gave you a million dollars, would you be able to stay open then?" this caught their attention. Somehow we managed to convince both companies to stay open late enough to allow the transfer to happen. Sarah's mom saved the day and sent us some cash, thanks Debbie.

When the transfer finally came through I was without my ID and sarah had to take a motorcycle (boda-boda) to the hotel to get it. Let me tell you, this was a stressful day, but somehow pretty funny. It would really make a great commercial for Western Union as the end result was that we were able to go trekking to see mountain gorillas in the Congo.

We have made it to Kigali, Rwanda after a couple of stressful days, I will put a new post up later with details when I am able to upload some pics.

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