It is difficult to think of a worse time for the alarm to be set for than 2am, but this was the moment I had been looking forward to since mid-November when the plans for the trip came together and we bought our tickets.
I was really excited about my first trip to Africa, and about using photography to try to capture something about the lives of our sister Diocese in Uganda, but mixed in was also some concern - all the horror stories people had loved sharing with me about getting sick or reacting to the anti-malarials I needed.
I had also been working on a more minimalist approach to packing in recent years, whereas on this occasion the luxury of an enormous baggage allowance and the unknown nature of what awaited meant I was taking a lot of items "just in case".
Additionally, I had been reducing the amount of photography kit I was intending to carry, and then had second thoughts and added some last minute extras. My preference when photographing alone is to have all I need in one backpack that I can carry, whereas this time we would have the relative luxury of vehicles, so there would be little in the way of having to carry everything.
As we gathered at the airport concourse I was pleased to see that I still had less stuff than some of my co-travellers, and once we had checked the bags in we were able to go and await the first leg of our journey.
At Brussels we had time for coffee and a pastry before venturing off to the rather remote T Terminal from which the flights for Africa departed. 8.5 hours later we arrived in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. There was a delay before we took off again for Entebbe, as an unclaimed bag was found in the overhead lockers. Eventually, its owner was located - he had wandered off to talk to friends at the back of the plane - and so we headed north east for an hour to Entebbe. We landed in darkness and I found myself being questioned at the X-ray machine - they thought I might have a drone in my camera bag, but they were happy with my saying I hadn't.
The vehicles were in the car park to take us to our first night's lodgings. We were underway.
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