9/5/21: the walk to Lake Victoria

One of the many pleasures of living here is being within walking distance of Lake Victoria, according to Wikipedia the third largest in the world after the Caspian Sea and Lake Superior. As can be seen in the map below the shores are in Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya with Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo not far away:

And the walk is mostly along a train line! Particularly from visiting my parents when they lived in Ilfracombe, North Devon, I’m well used to beautiful walks along trainlines. However, in the UK this means former train lines with the tracks removed. Here you really are walking along the trainline:

Which connects up Lake Victoria to the centre of Kampala. The train line is in regular use – I hear the whistle being blown about twice a day from about 10 minutes’ walk away, very glad that I’m no closer for the sake of my ear drums, although lots of people live and work right along the tracks, nearest picture I have showing this is below:

The scenery along the walk is pretty spectacular, not sure the pictures below really do it justice:

It was walking along the tracks that I discovered an ingenious method of sharpening knives:

I don’t know how clear this is from the picture, the bike is back to front with what is supposed to be the back wheel in front and lifted up, so as the cyclist turns the wheel there is a connection to spin the sharpening wheel. Clever stuff, huh?

At the end of the work I come to the village of Port Bell, the sheer size of Lake Victoria means that it’s not surprising that it feels as if you’re on the sea shore:

I’ve fallen into the habit of timing my walks to Lake Victoria to arrive in time for lunch, fish and chips Ugandan style!

I could then walk back, since there’s no clear alternative route I normally then take a boda.

It is possible to take boat rides onto the lake, I did that over the Christmas period when I didn’t have a phone with me to take pictures – but I’ll do it again if you’d like to see them in a future blog post, just let me know, a sacrifice I’m very happy to make! Really! Thank you for reading, I’ll be back again soon.