Wednesday 23 January 2013

Tyre problems

Leaving the Primate Lodge, we were presented with our bar bill - pretty reasonable for a few beers, glasses of wine and softies.  I then asked for the bill for all the food we had eaten, to be informed that the $120us we had paid for 3 nights in the tree house, also included full board.  Even a packed lunch to take away with us.

This seems incredibly good value for money and I can only assume that the lodge had made a mistake.  I pointed this out to them, but they insisted that I owed nothing more.

An hour up the road took us into Fort Portal - a pretty little colonial town, with a bustling main street.  We needed fuel, so pulled into a petrol station.  As we did so, a scruffy man tapped on the window and said, "muzungu - your tyre is flat, your tyre is flat". Suspecting some kind of scam, I got out for a look only to find the tyre was looking a bit on the flat side.

The scruffy man just happened to one of the tyre repair guys with a business right by the filling station - had he just stuck something in the tyre?  we'll never know.  However he soon had the tyre off and filled 3 holes, before a much more menacing guy came over to demand some money.  After I gave him some he demanded some more "for the labour" so I gave him another small note.  All in all about $10 to fix the puncture - were we scammed?

We shopped in Fort Portal at the Andrews supermarket on the main street, plenty of stuff for eating in there and reasonably cheap.  But the best buy was from a small boy outside in the street who was selling bags of freshly shelled peas at 10p a go.

No comments:

Post a Comment