Border crossing Kenya/Uganda in Malaba.

Arriving at the Malaba border post was quite an experience: in less time than it takes to write about it we were surrounded by a crowd of people, shouting to us not to speak to anyone, showing us badges and telling us to follow them… We eventually realised that these guys were “facilitating agents” and were there to guide us through the border’s formalities. It was rather amusing/annoying: we had been crossing borders for the past 5 months without any help. Eventually we realised that we wouldn’t have peace less we chose one of them to be our guide. And so, Moses became our “agent”. We weren’t to regret his help in parting the sea.

Exiting Kenya went quite easily, except that we almost got heavily fined for not having paid road tax (20 USD) when we entered the country. It took us some time to explain that we had come from Lake Turkana, where there is no border post, and that no-one had told us about road tax in Nairobi when we went to Times Tower to have our Carnet de Passage stamped. We were quite happy to pay the road tax but felt we shouldn’t pay the fine. Fortunately we remembered the name of the customs boss we had dealt with in Nairobi, and fortunately the border officials were nice to us and ended up letting us go. No doubt Moses’s polite patience in dealing with them helped a lot.

Knowing that we would have to pay the Ugandan road tax in Ugandan shillings, we changed the Kenyan shillings we still had. The exchange rate offered t us by the agents was fair . We got USh26 for KSh1.

Moses then took us to the Ugandan side of the border, where we easily got a 2 month visa for USD50 each.

Getting the carne stamped was another story: First we had to get to a copy machine to get a copy of an official form. Moses paid for the copy. Then we had to fill the form and take it to some official who was to confirm the amount entered on the form. The official wasn’t in his office, but Moses had his phone number and managed to find him at the front gate. With that we then had to go to the bank (there is one at the border) to pay the tax and get a receipt. It was a whole complex process, probably to prevent corruption. Without Moses we would have been lost. Eventually we went through Customs, passed the queue (again with Moses help) and had our CDP stamped. We were finally and officially in Uganda.

Moses had made it clear that he was working as an independent agent. We gave him USh10,000 for his help. He seemed happy with that.