When I was eleven years old, I took a holiday with my mother on Lake Victoria. It was a sort of cruise, although the ship, the SS Usoga, was not, by any stretch of imagination, a cruise liner; it was a smelly, oily merchant ship on an endless tour around the lake. It did, however, have two passenger cabins. My mother and I had one. The other was occupied by a honeymooning couple from Ireland called Lynam. According to the East African Railways website - on Sundays the Usoga sailed clockwise from Kisumu: on Wednesdays, anti-clockwise. The overnight passage from Kisumu to Port Bell took twelve hours. After a two to three hour stop for cargo handling, the ship left Port Bell for the two hour passage to Entebbe. Entebbe was a short (one hour) stop, and from there it was an eight and a half hour passage to Bukoba in Tanzania. From Bukoba the ship sailed overnight to Mwanza where it arrived around dawn. Leaving Mwanza at 1030, Musoma was reached at 1900 from where, after a two hour stop, the final night passage brought the ship back to Kisumu at 0700. We must have sailed on a Sunday because we set sail from Kisumu and sailed the other way around.
In a perfect world Lake Victoria
would be one of the great holiday destinations on the planet. The PR men would
need no imagination. It’s a huge body of freshwater - the size of Ireland. When
you’re sailing you spend much of the time out of sight of land. It’s an ocean
really; a freshwater ocean. It heaves and groans like an ocean. Yet all around
are the dark mysterious hills and jungles of Livingstone’s
Halfway through the cruise, my mother fell ill. She was pregnant at the time (with my sister,
Sally). When we got to Bukoba she was taken off the Usoga to a hospital in the
town. I wasn’t allowed to go along. But I escaped the ship. I scrambled down a
mooring rope and found my way to the hospital. I still feel quite proud of this
feat, all these years later.
I wrote about this trip in my first published novel, ‘The
Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder.’ In the novel, Max and his friend Adam,
travel on the Usoga with Max’s mother O. In Bukoba O falls ill and is taken to
hospital. Max escapes the Usoga by sliding down a mooring rope, concealed
within a cloud of lake flies.
I have no photographs of the trip. The photos are of my visit with my son
Jon at the dockside in Ggaba near Kampala in 2011. The What3words will take you here.
What3words: kite.amphibian.liquids
what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location
Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com
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