11 hours on a night bus to Arua is like torture

Arua is a really long away from Kampala. If you have never checked, it is a driving distance of 499.7 from Kampala and it takes an average bus a total of about 12 hours to complete the journey. Eleven hours in a crumpled bus seat, with no legroom, in between two strangers, at night is not a great idea for a memorable trip. Plus those bus seats are harder than a church pew and straighter than the execution chair.

Bus Pulse

We set off at around 7:30 PM from a neat bus park in Old Kampala on a Sunday evening. The traffic was light on the streets of Kampala, which meant that there was no feeling of frustration with long hold-ups at junctions.

"Again, this bus is going at a good speed," your neighbor says with joy as you leave Nankulabye behind, which you agree with, except you can't, for the life of you, understand why he starts the first sentence that comes out of his mouth with the word, 'again'. It was smooth sailing as we drove past Kawempe into Matugga and into Luwero.

It helps when you are reading a good book on an e-reader because on top of being easy to hold in the limited reading space, all the drama around you gets swallowed up by the drama in the written word.

But you can't read for long under that boring din of the bus engine coupled with inane conversations from your fellow passengers. You get bored and you want to look out the window, you know, to catch a break before getting back to the book. Except when you look out of the window you see darkness, good old boring darkness. So after two and a half hours, sleep sets in.

You wake up at midnight as the bus makes a toilet stop in Kigumba, some 200 KM from Kampala. You think you have reached Arua because your brain has lied to you that you have been sleeping for a lot longer. You soon realize the journey is still on as everyone gets back on the bus and it gets back on the highway. The only issue is that you could swear the bus is going back to Kampala, because you are disoriented from the sleep and from the fact that you can't see anything.

"How far Karuma falls from here?" you ask your neighbor.

"Again, Karuma is still very far," he replies.

You try to read but your brain is on vacation. So sleep takes you again. There is this flatness that starts in Nakasongola and goes on forever until Karuma falls. So flat is the road that your sleepy body knows that you have reached Karuma. The slope towards the bridge is such an anomaly after such a long flat drive that your body just knows without you waking up.

But nothing prepares you for how long or how treacherous the stretch between Karuma and Pakwach is. There is a time not so long ago when that stretch of road could have been voted the best in the country. Today, it is a road to hell.

We reached Pakwach at 3 am and in my mind, we were a short distance from Arua. You judge me because you think I should have used my phone to know how far I was. You forget that I was disoriented and tired and frustrated by being imprisoned between two strange men. I was not thinking straight.

"How far is Arua from here?" I asked my neighbor.

"Again, Arua is like three hours away," he said.

Arua market Pulse

We arrived in Arua town at 6 am and I promised myself that I would never travel such long bus journeys at night. This disorientation was unbearable, the distance, like torture. I had been to Arua once before but that time, I was with friends and that changed everything.