Dispatch from Buja!!

Chillaxing is the main theme of my existence, so unlike Bond, my licence is to chill…..! The adventures found me chillin in the ballistic valley of Buja aka Bujumbura in the past few days, which explains to all the ARDENT readers of these here pages, yes, ALL the 3 of you, why the nonsense hasen’t been flowin’

Burundi is still one of the few African countries, oh sori, one of the many African countries where buggers believe they will shoot themselves into agreement, the agreement being that the guys with the bigger and better guns shall be in power, while the chaps they claim to be fighting for shall lose limbs stepping on land mines and being caught up in the crossfire, which is why after 7 pm, if you haven’t yet reached the capital and are still driving around, you are forced to stay in some town, as if Karuma falls during the LRA hey days, till morn.

They say Rwanda is the land of 1000 hills, Burundi is the land of 6000 hills, and tens of thousands of bazooka rocket launchers hiding in those very hills. It’s not that bad however, as there is some calm these days. Business is booming and we opportunists couldn’t miss the chance to go see what’s up, just in case some chap wanted a laptop or two, so we could charge the bugger in the thousands of dollars, reap from their ignorance and dash back to the comforts of Just Kickin to drink the extra dimes.

However, the dimes weren’t seen.

Chaps down there drink pints like there’s no tomorrow, and that’s not a sayin, coz these chaps maybe thinkin’ “fuck it, I may step on a landmine and lose my throat, get me a pint now!” Enter a bar at 2 pm, and you won’t be disappointed, unlike these Kla buggers who start filling up their fridges at 4pm, as if we don’t want a pint! The French culture of “pose”, that was highly practiced in Rwanda before Ugandan businessmen fell in and showed them the way, is highly revered in this ballistic place. Businesses close at exactly 1pm, everyone goes either home or to the bar, only to return at 4 pm. Heck, even bank tellers don’t give a monkey’s blue behind who the heck you think you are, step in at 1.01 pm, and they’ll be like “turi gu pose (we are on pose goddamit)!!”

The most fascinating thing was a telecom company called U-Com, these guys have the exact symbol of UTL, that smiling thingy with two dots on a u. Their airtime is called “Mango Juice” and they have the same ads UTL used to run when that motor mouthed bugger was in charge of marketing, oba he is called Anfield. Talk about trend setting!
The beaches however, are as ballistic as the Hawaii sands, chaps should shoot their videos down there if they want to really pose. Half of Buja is on Lake Tanganyika. That beach resort “Bora Bora” looks like the Jay Z “Big Pimpin” video, for reals, complete with some yummy brown browns seated under some umbrellas waitin for some white chap to buy them a pint, us non-french buggers be jealous as the guys be on that “comma sava” bullshit! Next time, al move with a dictionary.

In terms of sanity, Buja is as chaotic as Kampala. Chaps outside their main post office, located right in the city center, engage in fruit-selling, so one has to walk carefully lest he slides off a banana peel, and falls like a cartoon character in the center of town. Cleanliness?? For what?? That shit is only for Rwanda. There’s 2 roundabouts in a city of about a million cars, so traffic police do the honors of directin traffic, and at their border post, just give the bugger yo passport, and watch as he writes yo details in a counter book, you be as if you are at the gate of the Warid head office, and the askari is asking you to sign off yo details. Forms?? What for??

After the June elections however, when chaps are sure of some sanity or outright gun battle, shall we opportunists drag our asses back down there, not even the ballistic brown browns or the 1000 bars shall convince us otherwise!