Greetings from Uganda! Having been here now for the best part of three weeks, I’m feeling slightly guilty for a lack of blogging. The guilt is slightly assuaged by the fact that internet connectivity is patchy at best - I have tried to blog once but was stymied by a power cut! (It’s probably worth noting that I’m still able to tweet quite regularly, so if for some reason you’re aware of this blog but not my Twitter feed, have a look at http://twitter.com/willancs for more regular updates.)

There is, though, a huge amount to blog about, and once I’ve had time to plan a few posts I’ll get writing - we’ve already had a whole load of pretty interesting experiences: traveling through the country, small town life, what we’ve seen at school, and perhaps something about the rather overwhelming religion that they’ve got going on here.

Myself and Joe (who you can find at theuniverseislaughing.tumblr.com) are settling in quite well now to Ibanda life - we’ve moved out of the school and rented our own house - a nice place, although distinctly non-Western in terms of bathroom arrangements. We’re also now getting into our timetable; we’re actually visiting four separate schools during each week, so it’s taken us up to now to get engaged with all of them, find out what we’ll be doing and develop a routine. We’ve been teaching, playing games and generally just trying to get involved - and as we go we’ll learn what’s helpful and what’s not.

So apologies for the slightly “filler” nature of this post - there are some more interesting ones to come, I promise!

PS: The title, “Agandi”, is the standard greeting in Runyankore, the local language. It literally means “how are you?” and the correct answer (should you ever need it) is “Ndiaho”.

As you may recall, I spent February in Finnish Lapland working at Hetta Huskies. Here are a couple of videos made by James, one of the other guides, a couple of weeks after I left, to give you a taste of life on the farm.

The second video is aimed at potential guides to illustrate what it’s like to do the job - this is well worth a watch as well. I was lucky enough to work with everyone interviewed in this video - all great people and watching this back makes me miss them and the farm!

So if your only means of keeping up with me was via this blog, then you could be forgiven for thinking that somewhere around my 3^rd week in Finland I’d become lost in the Lappish wilderness and been eaten by a pack of Arctic wolves. If you follow me on Twitter, though, you’d know that wasn’t in fact the case – but sorry for the blogging absence.

If you’re a particularly attentive Twitter follower, you might even know something about the subject of this blog, which is pretty much “What’s happened since Finland?” and “What’s happening next?”. So, summary time.

I’ve just got back from 8 days’ skiing in the resort of Tignes, in the French Alps. I would put up a picture for this, but since none of my three mates have managed to get themselves sufficiently organised, and since I didn’t take a camera (because they did), there are none available to me. So you’ll just have to take my word for it. We had a cracking week though, made better by the fact that we spent most of it skiing with a couple of seasonnaires – my friends knew one of them. Great skiers and they knew all the best places to go, so that was a pretty good bit of luck.

On to the future: I’m going to Greece on Wednesday! That was a bit of a last minute plan, with my mate Ed (AKA Pooley) – so it’s not very organised. The idea is pretty much to rock up in Athens, have a look at the Acropolis, then spend a week on the mainland going round various places (mostly in the Peloponnese). After that we’ll head out into the islands – I think we’ll mainly be in the Cyclades, those nearest to Athens, where a big chunk of the archaeological sites are to be found.

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It’ll be a combination of camping with the odd hostel, but nothing’s booked, so we’ll have the freedom to just go wherever we feel like at the time – should be a great trip.

This is what it looks like driving a dog team. You may notice the team is one dog short – one of the swing (middle) dogs is absent. That’s because we were training – running a team of five experienced dogs with one new or difficult dog. I was driving, and we stopped to swap out one training dog for another, so I thought I should grab a quick picture! (Click to enlarge)

This is a Kota, which is the traditional dwelling for the Sami people – the indigenous reindeer herding people of Lapland. There are two of them on the farm, in which there are fires and hot drinks to keep the tourists warm before they go out on the sleighs. I’m quite pleased that I managed to get the moon in the picture – although I’m sure it looked bigger than that at the time! (Click to enlarge)

There’s a lot of it. This is what a pretty standard day looks like:

It lends an interesting dimension to the experience. In general, though, I’ve been pretty happy with how my kit has handled it – with the exception of fingers and toes, I’ve by and large been warm enough. I’ve managed to avoid getting frostbite so far as well - people do, although generally not seriously. It’s usually a snowmobiling thing, because they create a massive wind-chill effect, so you’ll occasionally see a bit of exposed skin turn white – but it’s always fine when it gets warmed back up! As long as you’re careful, the cold’s not dangerous – but it can sometimes be pretty uncomfortable. Here’s my Lapland thermometer:

> -5°C – Don’t be silly.

-10°C – This never happens either.

-15°C – Complain about the heat. Contemplate working in a t-shirt.

-20°C – Meh.

-25°C – Starting to get a bit chilly. Not so bad if you keep moving, but if you stay still for too long your hands and feet will start to go numb.

-30°C – Ouch. Say goodbye to your toes. Ice forms on face, especially eyelashes. Get really annoyed about having to handle metal objects.

-35°C – Catch 22: if you blink, your eyelashes will freeze together. If you don’t, your eyes will freeze instead. Even the dogs aren’t entirely happy with this temperature.

-40°C – Horrific. Feet and hands gone within minutes, and won’t come back until the end of the day. Body starts to get pretty cold as well as the extremities.

< - 45°C – This hasn’t happened yet. And frankly, I don’t want to be here if it does.

This seems to be the closest Finland gets to a sausage. Depressing, really.

I thought I might write something about where the dogs live and sleep.

The majority live on what we call running circles – the picture above shows some of them. They basically consist of a chain fixed to a swivelling pole that allows the dog to run around and get some exercise; some of them have trees and other objects within the circles so there’s something of interest for the dogs there.

The kennels in the running circles are actually quite fancy – they’ve got decent roofing to protect them from the wet in the summer and ensure the weight of snow doesn’t damage them in winter, and they also have thick double layer walls with insulating foam in between to keep the dogs nice and toasty!

There’s actually a fair bit of science to the layout of the running circles – they’re designed to make things as easy as possible for us, and to keep the dogs happy. So the arrangement ensures that neighbouring dogs are ones that get on well with each other, and in some cases where dogs are particularly friendly the circles are actually set up to allow them to play with each other. The other factor to consider is the ease of making teams – so dogs which often run in similar positions are placed near to each other, meaning you can fetch two dogs at the same time to harness up to the sleds.

For some of the skinnier or younger dogs, though, the running circles just aren’t warm enough in the cold conditions. For those guys, we have a couple of rows of cages, where two or three dogs who get on well can live together and sleep in a single kennel to keep warm. They still get the same insulated kennels, too, so it’s really impossible for any dog to get cold.

The puppies have their own special cage as well, called the Kindergarten – seven pups live in there, and they’re always playing, unless they’re sleeping in one big pile in the kennel. It makes going in to do a job a bit challenging, because as soon as you go through the door you’re hit by what seems like one huge ball of writhing fur! They’re great fun though, and there should be some good sled dogs in that lot.

On some of the longer trips, the clients stop for a break at a little log cabin, known in Finnish as a Mokki. One of our jobs is to go out there in advance by snowmobile to warm the place up. It’s next to a frozen lake, and this is the view. (Click to enlarge)

Seeing as they’re the reason for my being here, I thought I should probably write something about the dogs themselves! There’s a whole load of information about them, so I’ll divide it up into a few posts to avoid too much of a brain dump. The first thing to say is that it’s not easy to generalise about them – there’s a huge amount of variety in character and in looks. A lot of them you’d pass in the street and never realise they were a sled dog – while others look exactly like the classic husky in the films.

The reason for the variety is that there are actually two types of husky: Alaskan and Siberian. The Siberian is the typical husky you’d imagine – nice and fluffy – and Mercury (below) is a good example.

On the other hand, the Alaskan husky is more of a mixture, and looks more like a normal dog. They do have Siberian husky blood in them, but cross-bred with other breeds to get desired characteristics. Their endurance isn’t so good as the Siberian, but they’re quicker over short distances, and don’t get bored so easily; so they’re ideal for the tourist trade!

As well as looks, the dogs vary hugely in behaviour. Despite being relatively wild animals with (in some cases) a fair bit of wolf in them, some of them are actually very shy, and will back off and cower when approached. That tends to be the older dogs, as they were bought in rather than raised here in Hetta, and in their previous lives they had much less interaction with humans. It’s important to approach these dogs in the least threatening way possible – down low, with hands upturned so they know you won’t hit them. Even so, they can be very tricky to catch – unless you have a harness, in which case their desire to run trumps their fear!

But some of the others couldn’t be more different – typically the younger dogs, they will come bounding up to you when you approach, and jump up to get a stroke and a cuddle. Ironically though, with these guys carrying a harness can make them harder to get hold of – because they get so beside themselves with excitement that they won’t stand still!

Surprisingly, the one thing these dogs do almost all have in common is that they are incredibly good natured. It’s not what you’d expect from big strong working dogs, but they will almost never act aggressively towards a person. Since I’ve been here, I can only remember being growled at once, and the only way people manage to get bitten here is by approaching a shy dog from behind and surprising them. Even when you go to break up a fight, however vicious the dogs are being with each other, there’s actually very little risk to you – they will actually be very careful not to hurt a person.

So all in all, the dogs are a pleasure to work with – and a good thing too, with a hundred of them to feed, poop and harness every day!