Travel, Music, and Drugs

The transformative power of music makes a nervous environment easier to cope.

On the bus to Kampala, worrying about other transport, accommodation, thieves, and possessions, plugging into my iPod levitates my mind to a divine state. It drowns out my thoughts with each beat turning the passing landscape into a slide show of bananas and mangoes, cassava and jack fruit, stores and billboards. The colors are distinct as we crawl through the traffic and blur together as we speed up. Laughs are exchanged with fellow passengers as I take pictures of this foreign yet all too familiar scene; disgruntled passengers in a traffic jam. Then as the sun sets over Kampala we roll into our hostel exclaiming that everything is fine. Fine just as it would be any other day, but with my music, my drug, the bus from Jinja to Kampala is that much more.