Crypto coincidence

Have you heard of OneCoin? It's an online currency like Bitcoin except (except?) that it's a scam - possibly the biggest cryptocurrency fraud in the world so far. Launched in 2014 and still up and running, it has attracted hopeful investors from all around the world who are, to put it mildly, dismayed to be just learning now that their hard-earned money has disappeared into the ether.

Well, not disappeared - it's actually been banked (presumably, and ironically, in a conventional off-shore account) by the scheme's founder: glamorous, red-lipsticked, Bavarian-born intellectual Dr Ruja Ignatova. Dr Ruja is the one who's disappeared and, as I've been squatting on a steep bank in my garden here on Waiheke, cutting steps out of the clay and sweating profusely in the spring sunshine, I've been listening to a gripping 8-episode podcast all about it: The Missing Cryptoqueen by technology journalist Jamie Bartlett and his BBC producer Georgia Catt. 

The last episode has just been uploaded - being real life, there's no neat tying-up of the loose ends, or even a well-deserved comeuppance for Dr Ruja. Instead, there are more false trails and heart-breaking interviews with people who thought their financial problems were all over, sucked into the hype of getting in on the ground floor with this new money-making scheme. Jamie talked to people who had persuaded their family members to invest huge sums of money - tens of thousands of pounds - and who now were faced with having to tell them that their life savings were gone. Or not tell them - one sad young man simply couldn't bring himself to confess to his mother that he had lost her money, and was desperately stringing her along in the hope that - somehow - the worst might not actually have happened.

And it was at this stage that this blog post's hook revealed itself: Jamie and Georgia had followed the trail of investors to Uganda, and had gone to a small town there to speak to this young man in front of his mother who, fortunately for her peace of mind, didn't understand English and had no idea that her life's savings were lost. And this random town, in the middle of Africa, where this particular victim, out of 50,000 investors in the country, was chosen by chance by Jamie and Georgia? Mbarara, which I passed through twice on my Intrepid Basix journey to visit Rwanda's mountain gorillas in 2017 - just about the time that Dr Ruja dropped out of sight.

I remembered the newspapers stapled shut on the newsstand in the shop where we bought drinks, the motorbike traffic with its sunshades and huge loads of goods and/or people (up to 4 men), a teeming market; and, on our return journey, camping in the bird-busy grounds of what by then seemed to us a fancy hotel, where I drank Nile beer in the garden bar and was quietly thrilled to hear Toto's 'Africa' being played. That was Day 12 of our dawn-to-dusk camping tour in a rattly bus with inadequate upholstery, passing through a never-ending roadside parade of lives lived on the margins. We were all looking forward to getting to journey's end in the sophistication of Nairobi and the subsequent return to our soft and comfortable lives. It had been an education, to see how hard these people's lives were - and, now, it's an outrage and a tragedy to know how much harder it is for some of them, all thanks to a clever woman with no conscience.

Intrepid Travel Gorillas & Game Parks - Day 12

We were back to Intrepid-normal with a vengeance this morning: up at 4.30am for a 6am departure. We wound our way up out of the valley and down the other side, leaving the volcanoes behind. Ed warned those of us “afraid of long drops” not to sit on the left. By now we’re all pretty inured to the horrors of the long drop – but of course he meant the steep hillsides that, even so, were intensively cultivated with all sorts of luxuriant crops.

Everyone was going to work, or already at it: the woman plodding up a steep track with a baby on her back, a load on her head and a mattock in her hand; the men sawing a log lengthwise the old-fashioned way, one above and one below; or washing their motorbikes in a stream; or hacking at a rock face and scraping off minerals to shovel into heaps; or builders standing on precarious wooden scaffolding.

There was less work happening in the immigration office, when we got to the border, and a long line outside it, but we were eventually recorded and stamped, and set off again switching back to drive on the left. We had a photo stop – only about the third in the whole trip – with a long view down to Lake Bunyoni over more terraces, as well as some goats and now, again, the long-horned cattle they prize here.

We had an audience of only three boys and four cattle at our lunch stop, so, hardly awkward at all. We really shuddered at the litter all around though, so noticeable again after the neatness of Rwanda. Such a shame.

Then we carried on, the roadshow continuing: bricks and blocks being moulded by hand, stacked in the sun to dry, and fired inside tomb-like kilns; villages all with the same set of windowless stores, selling food and vegetables, plastic goods, wooden beds, padded chairs, metal doors, and workshops repairing bicycles and motorbikes, welding things, making wooden doors. Oh, and pubs with pool tables under thatched shelters.

We passed back through Mbarara and after 250km and more than 9 hours from departure got to our accommodation for the night. It's a pretty fancy hotel with rooms that anyone would be happy to stay in, and in which, apparently and in our recent experience unusually, everything seems to work as it should. Not for us hard-core campers, though, eschewing the upgrade and pitching our tents on an appealingly soft and tidy lawn. The main shower, some distance away, had flies and beetles crawling all around the basin; and the other unisex ones in a line nearby didn’t have any sort of door or curtain. They eventually found some to hang up – but they didn’t sort out the hot water. Still, the day was sticky enough for that not to matter.

And so we ended the day in the usual manner: a beer in the bar until dinner was ready, which we ate under a big pergola while Ed gave us tomorrow’s briefing. It’s a 7am departure tomorrow. Cushy.

Intrepid Travel Gorillas & Game Parks - Day 5

French toast for breakfast was small compensation for having to rise at 5am after a night disturbed anyway by a thunderstorm. Lightning was still flashing on the horizon as we ate. Then we lurched away along the rutted track from the resort, and along roads already busy with people setting up their stalls for the day, taking neatly-uniformed children to school, sweeping the verge with twig besoms.

We had a welcome (and unusual) coffee stop at the point where the Equator runs through Uganda, with the usual marker and souvenir shops, and the obligatory photos. It was all a bit ramshackle: Ecuador does a more professional job, I have to say.

Then we carried on through the non-stop roadshow, with always something new to spot: like the small boy doing the time-old hoop and stick thing, but modernised using a wheelbarrow tyre propelled with a plastic bottle cut to shape. Or the two men on a motorbike with a live goat draped over it between them. Or the butcher’s with a carcass hanging outside, a marabou stork pecking at it.

Our lunch stop was beside the road in a rural area that nevertheless produced a small audience within minutes: mostly little kids in ragged clothes, watching with interest and no expectation as we ate our salad sandwiches in the shade of a tree under their intent gaze. Awkward. We gave them nothing (it would have been bad training) and they appeared to wave us off cheerfully and with no resentment.

We carried on past endless banana plantations and fields of maize and stopped in the town of Mbarara for groceries, snacks and ATM visits (though Edwin neglected to remind us that we needed to have enough cash for tomorrow’s chimpanzee expedition, tch). 

The town was buzzing, especially with motorbike traffic. There was one with four men on, lots with three, with women on the back sitting sidesaddle (some on their phones), with sunshades/umbrellas, with huge loads strapped on. There’s no sneaking free looks inside newspapers here, by the way: they’re all stapled shut before being put on the stands.

Finally, we arrived at our camp for the night, candidly - and accurately - described in the trip notes as ‘basic’. No lie! The tent area was rough grass, the loos were smelly sit-upons flushed with water from a barrel and no light inside, the shower was a concrete cell with a single pipe for the water. 

The people who pitched their tents under the big tree discovered that enviably massive round avocados fell from it periodically with a huge crash – night and day. Baboons emerged from the surrounding jungle to scavenge what they could. The road alongside was busy with big trucks. But we had beer – Nile Special, in 500ml bottles, 5.6% - and that made everything better. Plus OT approved of my post-dinner pot-scrubbing. So that was all right.