God, but I hope I can find my passport!

Trip planning is taking up much of my time right now. My ticket is booked and paid for, I'm leaving on September. 21, flying through London and Dubai to arrive at Entebbe Airport, Uganda on September. 23. It took some doing to get a flight that arrived in daytime hours, important because the road to Nkozi is not so safe at night.

The medical stuff is expensive and time consuming. I've been to the travel clinic twice now (Debbie the nurse there is super nice!) and I've been vacinated for hep a/b, tetanus, measles, and yellow fever. I also had to drink this raspberry flavored stuff that protects against cholera and E. coli. Kind of gross, but with some OJ and a splash of vodka it wouldn't be bad. one more drink of the raspberry stuff next week, plus needles for typhoid and meningitis I'll be clear to go nearly anywhere in the world.

And I found out today that 7 months of malaria drugs is going to cost me nearly a thousand dollars!!! But I suppose the money is really nothing compared to a lifetime of malaria. If I had the money, that is.

The moral of this post is that travel to Africa is really, REALLY expensive and takes a ton of planning. And the pre-trip advance that I'm getting doesn't cover everything.

Among the stuff I still need to decide is whether I should purchase Plan B and HIV prophylactics, which the clinic recommends, just in case I get raped. Yup you read that right, and if your mouth is hanging open in shock, that this is common enough to be recommended, and wondering what the hell I am getting myself into, that's about the reaction I had. Of course, if I don't need it (which I won't, I'm going to be super careful, never walk at night anywhere, always travel in groups, maybe someone could teach me to kill a man six different ways with my bare hands before I go?) then I can leave the HIV drugs at a clinic there when I leave. Other stuff that I will leave behind in Africa includes the old glasses that I'm taking as a backup, antibiotics, and any malaria meds that I don't end up needing. Apparently even extra bandaids and polysporin from my first aid kit will be helpful down there, so at least I know when I'm buying supplies that even if I don't use everything, it won't be wasted.

And my passport is still missing. I know that I have one, I know that it's somewhere in my apartment, I just don't know where. You see, I put it "somewhere safe." So if you were my passport, where would you be?