Travel Log 14 - Uganda

Bus ride from Nairobi to Kampala
17/06/08
We made the decision to upgrade our tickets from ‘executive’ to ‘royal’ for a fiver, which was relatively luxurious with the semi-paved roads and everything very Britishly punctual.

The hiccup came at the border where an official, whose bulbous chin followed the movements of his head unenthusiastically, stamped our three month visas and wrote on them in biro, informing us that we could stay in Uganda for two weeks. When asked why, he replied that we needed to go to the immigration office in Kampala. He seemed a little confused between cause and consequence.

From the smeared bus windows we noticed the mobile phone adverts dominating the street scenes as if they were rival political parties. We were told about the alleged backhanders government officials in Kenya received from Vodaphone’s Safaricom network. The African elite are buying into these companies in a big way. Almost everyone has a mobile: Africans like to talk. Now it is possible to move money using mobile phones. Credit can be sent from one phone to another and the credit can then be exchanged for cash. Most people do not have bank accounts and many live out of easy reach of a bank. People can get their wages by phone and can send money to their families. The mobile’s power is also being tapped into by the politicians who spend vast sums of money sending voice and SMS messages to voters. These are the same voters who can be mobilised into a riot in a matter of hours in the same way.

Kampala
18/06/08 – 22/06/08
We came into the city in style: riding pillion on bodabodas – a taxi motorbike.

Enterprising Ugandans taking advantage of Kampala’s bizarre road system, the heart of which is a minibus park which crawled, beeping, up the hill into town and from town into the country. The motorbike ruled the gridlocked city; on the wrong side of the road, on the pavement, over potholes, in front of buses. Before even making the commitment to cross the road, engaging with Kampala’s traffic is an extreme act. Animals, men pushing / pulling huge carts and wheelbarrows, pedestrians with preposterous loads balanced on their heads (handbags and wheelie luggage being some of the most curious looking, but by no means the largest), motorbikes, minibuses, coaches and lorries all push each other around the pavement and road.


When we stopped to ask a man for directions he confirmed the wild generalisation made of Ugandans – very friendly. He phoned his friend because he did not know the place we were talking about and negotiated a good price for us with a bodaboda.

The metropolitan skyline of Nairobi was pared down in Kampala. There were still the high rise buildings but not on the same scale and they are mainly 70’s dinosaurs. Many of the streets were in a state of disrepair, but somehow it had the air of somewhere less foreign. Perhaps it is because the violence against Ugandans at the hands of Idi Amin was far enough in the past (as opposed to the continuing post-election violence of Kenya). We spent one morning with a Swede on a wild goose chase, searching for an underground train station built by Amin, which never saw a train; it may have been a myth.

We stayed in a Lonely Planet recommendation, the Red Chilli Hideaway - annoying accents, high-tech trousers and boring stories about the ‘ultimate’ experience and getting an ‘amazing’ price and having an ‘incredible’ time that is far from credible, and the privileged NGO oiks with little real desire to understand the world - before relocating ourselves to the centre of town where they don’t triple the cost that everything should be.

During an evening we went to one of Kampala’s more salubrious night clubs: Ange Noir. We paid the extra pound for the privilege of going to the VIP area. The UV light was not kind to the shirts we were wearing. We had washed them ourselves and evidently not done a particularly good job. The dance floor was slightly lowered and enclosed by a metal rail upon which extras from a budget hip hop video nodded in agreement.

Kenyan and Ethiopian dancing had been risqué but this looked like a tribal fertility dance. On the TV screens around the club they played Ultimate Fighting footage. The VIP veneer was cracked only by the prostitute who clearly had some horrendous story to tell, poorly masked by a fixed grin and a series of robotic chat up lines. What was striking was that she was another Ugandan to have the very specific speech impediment that we had noticed elsewhere. ‘L’ as ‘W’ as in ‘Pwese buy me drink’. We were told later by a man called Livingston that there is an eastern Ugandan tribe without the letter ‘L’. It was reminiscent of Good Morning Vietnam.

We were lucky enough to meet Yunasi again, at Kampala’s first international music festival, which they were headlining in the absence of the Congolese superstar Papa Wemba. The performers throughout the evening were all fairly unmemorable, some plaintive acoustic guitar sing-alongs about saving the world, an awkward fashion show and so on. Before Yunasi came onto the stage, there was only one stand out group who somehow fused frantic African dance music with prog-rock breaks. There was a theme of bizarre abstraction – the speeches they gave and their onstage demeanours were learnt and strangely accentuated in a panto fashion and were as such, very entertaining.

The relatively small crowd had been unresponsive other than a lone Rasta on a tricycle riding in circles, tooting his bicycle pump-operated fog horn. Yunasi had everyone by the stage and dancing in no time. They were so obviously happy and charismatic it was very easy to get carried along by them. During their performance they invited audience members to come onstage for a dance-off. One of the group rushed into the crowd and pulled Toby onstage to partake in a well-intentioned act of ritual humiliation in order to confirm the muzungu’s inability to ‘shake their booty’. The winner was chosen by the cheers of the crowd. Toby came in a very respectable second. It was mainly a sympathy vote but the Rasta was so impressed he offered to dreadlock Toby’s hair.

‘Backstage’ or more accurately, behind some scaffolding we congratulated them on their performance.

We spent our days exploring Kampala’s sweaty crevices. As it is perched upon several hills the rewards of walking downhill are always short lived, but as they are topped with strange Bahai and Jain temples it makes a reasonable skyline.

After passing through a vegetable market towards a ticking hum we came upon the haberdashers. They sat upon a stage-like platform in rows under the high shade of corrugated iron. Around them lay women on piles of material, scraps and rolls. Everything looked perfectly enough placed for one of them to burst into song and for them to jump onto their Singers and dance in synchrony.

We ate lunch in a one table café looking out onto the hat sellers. Mashed plantain (matoke) was earthy, like swede and tangy, like banana and it sat in the stomach like concrete, which is an advantage when you do not know when your next meal is coming.

Crater Lakes
23/06/08 – 24/06/08
Four hours on the bus from Kampala brought us to the science-fiction inspired Fort Portal in the west of the country.

Unfortunately it did not offer other worlds, an air conditioned supermarket would have been enough, rather it was the same mess of shops displaying the precisely painted names of rival mobile phone companies as any homogenous Ugandan or Kenyan town does.


In Fort Portal we met the pastor who ran the campsite we planned to visit. He drove us down to Lake Nkuruba Community campsite on the same grounds as the orphanage that it funded, on the lip of Lake Nkuruba. We were told by a friend that it was infected with bilharzias so we did not swim, but sitting on the rocks on its shore in the early evening as the monkeys shook the branches of the thick jungle all around and the light gently played on the undersides of the leaves of an avocado tree was a salve to city sores. The Colobus monkeys seemed unthreatened by our presence and cast surly glances down at us as we competed skimming stones across the glassy surface of the lake with two boys who had come there to watch. Thirteen was the record.


The following day we took a walk with Livingstone, a staff member from the campsite down to a waterfall. We took to the road at the same time of the morning that children from all around were making their way to school. Livingstone’s insistence that one particular group who followed us for quite some distance would be late if they continued to follow at our pace was not heeded. They seemed willing to suffer a clip round the ear in order for the opportunity to listen to our mysterious monotone mumblings.


We passed through a hilly landscape interspersed with sheer sided lakes all covered by lush jungle. Its green all the more green with the flamboyant flowers and birds dotting it. We came to a banana plantation and strolled past the neatly kept villages without views of the horizon, just endless banana palms. We took a Livingstonian ‘power shower’ under the waterfall with butterflies like bright leaves in a playful wind and vines creeping down from the past in the crisp, wet air. We chafed our way back to the campsite to be served beer, and food with too much salt in it.

Murchison Falls
30/06/08 – 2/07/08
We stayed in safari tents, ate good food, were warned about feeding the warthogs and the dangers of hippos in the night, blah blah blah.

That was the less inspiring side of Murchison Falls in the north of the country. The prospect of spending three days with fellow tortoises did not appeal greatly but we were lucky enough to be sharing our time with a group of Austrians on their way to their friends wedding (to a Ugandan) and a Brit working in a school outside Kampala.


So, the good bit: standing in the open-topped minibus speeding along the dirt track, stopping to watch the seemingly carefully arranged zoo animals. As we passed other vehicles our driver swapped animal knowledge with the other drivers in Lugandan and so we came upon a family of elephants which was striking, but not an image as indelible as seeing them from the boat. We also saw many other animals although the park’s lions eluded us.


Our boat chugged up the Nile to a few metres away from the point of impact between Murchison Falls and its river, while the captain chatted on his mobile. Three metre crocodiles basked open mouthed in the sun of the dry banks, all heaped on top of each other and very un-lifelike. Lumbering hippos, mysterious and powerful with eyes, ears and nostrils protruding from the water announced their presence with a fine spray of water into the air. When they heaved themselves up through the reeds and onto the riverbank to swing their heads at the grass like a blunt hoe, they became at once flabby and preposterous, making it far easier to imagine them enacting their hierarchical ritual of spraying their own excrement onto the heads of those hippos of greater import. A press cutting at the campsite warned of the dangers of Africa’s deadliest animal, showing a man being chased down the road like Buster Keaton by one at full pelt.


Then we saw a family of elephants drinking at the water’s edge. Two bulls, one cow, two calves and one immature male mucked around like they were on holiday. The dominant male was impossibly regal. All his features were individually ludicrous but together handsome and dignified. In this setting, perched between the bars of the moving blue of the Victoria Nile and the living green of the lilies, papyrus, then wet meadowland and into dense jungle then out into the serene yellows of the grasslands - they looked like a royal family.


Return to Kampala
10/07/08
We returned to Kampala to make our way to Banda Island on Lake Victoria, south of Kampala and to go to the Austrian bride’s hen party.

During the journey the British lady on the bus told us about the circumcision gangs that roam Kampala, carrying out the act they believe should have been done in childhood, forcibly and on the street. This was either the product of a very twisted imagination or terrifying.

We met the Austrian hen party in Fat Boyz in a classier part of town and were assigned, by the bridesmaids we met in Murchison, the task of putting a vase of flowers and poster in the men’s toilets. The poster instructed those who washed their hands that Patricia in the photo was to be married and they should give her one of the flowers.

Her table had been drinking shots like Eastern Europeans and they were beginning to show the sexual decorum of builders, whooping with excitement as a stream of mock-suitors handed the bride-to-be flowers. The Austrian sing-alongs were good and rousing but the African animal charades were perhaps a little too European. At the end of the evening the mother of the bride invited us to the wedding.

This was the first opportunity we had to put on our ties and a clear case of mother knows best. The general sense of ludicrousness as we took a bodaboda to the Papaya Palm was heightened by the fact that we were both wearing worn out jeans, trainers, blue shirt and blue tie, purely because these were the smart clothes we both happened to pack. Luckily it was a very laissez-faire affair. The Austrian traffic planner / musician with the Thundercats symbol tattooed on his calf filmed us as we stood like lemons, with a grin on his face. Men were wearing earrings and undone waistcoats on top of t-shirts and women in trousers. It was all very progressive.

After two hours they gave up waiting for many of the Ugandan guests to turn up and the procession walked to the steps of the garden to the sound of a Scottish girl playing the violin and a Ugandan man playing the piano. The priest ranted fire and brimstone about divorce, then it was time to eat. The Ugandans piled vast portions on their plates and everyone nattered away.

Next were the speeches which were tearful and did not go on too long. One of the bridesmaids told a fairy story which stole the show. The father of the bride’s speech focused upon a bowl he made from the wood of a tree by a river in Austria. The DJ’s attempts to find a musical compromise for his audience resulted in a bizarre mix of Mozart, The Birdie Song (which is Austrian apparently), 70’s disco and frantic East African dance music, but everyone danced like they should, with the bride’s newly adopted daughters demanding piggybacks from the guests. We were invited to paint on a communal canvas for the happy couple and given blank postcards to make designs on and send on specific dates throughout the year. It was good to get the opportunity to sit with the father of the bride and be in the presence of someone with such a pure sense of pride. What united the Austrian and Ugandan cultures was their unsuppressible sense of hospitality and it all worked to act as a definite end of a chapter in our travels. Tomorrow we would be on Banda Island and it was hard to imagine what we would find there.


Banda Island
14/07/08 – 17/07/08
Maybe King Dom was a sexist, sadistic racist. It was difficult to know what was real on Banda Island.

It was difficult to know where fantasy ended and the truth began with the habitual recreational drug-using, semi-alcoholic ‘Keenyan’. As he held court at the ritualistic concrete slab table looking out onto his beach and the vast expanse of Lake Victoria beyond he made wild and terrifying claims about his childhood with his own personal African army, his years as a Benedictine monk, being a scab during the Thatcherite miner strikes and smuggling diamonds from Congo.

A friend had lived on Banda Island and recommended that we visit the place, and gave us Dom’s number. It was sold to us like Garland’s Beach.

When Dom’s carpenter misunderstood his instructions on how to cut the Congolese hardwood to construct a boat, Dom told us that he was going to break all the man’s fingers. If he did, it was after we left. It is clear there was something amiss as we found out that apparently he runs an orphanage (but he does not like to tell people about that).

Banda is one of the Sesse Islands dotted around a lake that is a third of the UK in size. There was a child-like glee in the fact that he clearly had what he wanted – he was living in a castle he had built, on a tropical island he owned.

Part of the kitchen garden was a pineapple plantation set up by Dom’s Minister for Internal Affairs – a slightly too skinny German with photosensitive glasses that always remained slightly too dark. His logic produced fruit that made the mouth wet itself uncontrollably. Dom’s other resident was a Swiss alcoholic who sneaked off with bottles of ‘Bananarama’: a banana based hooch, the alcohol content of which was demonstrated to us by setting it alight and it producing a purplish flame which, apparently, meant it was just about safe. When the Swiss man blinked he tended to re-open his eyes a little too wide. He was one of many old, lonely ex-pats who enter into a second spring before their final winter, and fall energetically in love with an African teenager who is definitely different from all the rest.

We came to the island from the frantic, stinking port of Kasenyi where we were hoisted onto the shoulders of men who waded out into the water and dumped us into a fifteen metre wooden boat full of people and produce which chugged through the water with the babies crying.

We arrived on the island at dark to the sight of a dramatic bonfire on the beach where Dom and his dogs sat waiting for us. We handed over the supplies he asked us to get in Kampala and we sat down to eat with the British couple who took the trip with us and were the island’s only other guests. Throughout our stay we ate like foreign dignitaries at court. It was hard to imagine how Dom’s enterprise was sustainable as it was so cheap. Dom had brilliant stories to tell and without Dom’s presence the Swiss man’s story-telling would have been far more impressive. He told us about the renegade monkey with a drink habit who terrorised guests on a neighbouring island. His descriptions of his attempts to kill it with a giant catapult were made all the more enthralling by his curious grammar.

As we stood in the clear waters (which Dom told us at a later date were probably bilharzias infected) there was nothing to do but watch an army helicopter circle overhead. Apparently they were looking for the Norwegian sunbathers who were there a few weeks ago. We were told that the islands are fairly lawless. There are two policemen on Kalangalabut, their stationing there is penance for them as there are only two grotty nightclubs to choose from and for many Ugandans the water does not act as a lure, as many cannot swim. This includes the majority of the fishermen. They spend their days staring down the end of a beer bottle.

During the night a motorway of lights appeared, made up of hundreds of small boats attracting flying insects with lights. The insects then fell into the water and attracted fish which could be scooped up with fishing nets. Dom claimed this ‘environmental rape’ did not occur within his waters because he threw explosives at their boats from his shore.

Sailing away from the island the ‘Keenyan’, German, Swede and the dogs and their six or seven staff in the distance, milling about the kitchen, looked like a dysfunctional family.

We took the bus back to Kampala and the following morning got on a coach for Kabale in the South-West near the border with Rwanda.

After five monotonous hours on a bus it was a case of find some food then jump on the back of a bicycle taxi to our hotel.


Kabale
18/07/08 – 19/07/08
The following morning we hired a bodaboda and its driver for the day.

Luckily our driver was on his holidays from studying tourism and his bike was just about powerful enough to carry our combined weight up the hills. He was a good guide and repeated verbatim his textbook spiel on Lake Bunyoni. There was the Punishment Island where unfaithful women were left to starve to death (which looked to be only a few hundred metres away from the shore). There was the bamboo forest where the Pygmies hide. There were caves in which blacksmiths forge pangas (machetes). There was a village of renowned witchdoctors frequented by the Ugandan elite.

The lush, steep sides of the lake were terraced and its islands’ plucky hills were invariably topped with a disproportionately large church further adding to the air of gentle fiction.


Our driver stopped a small man without shoes, wearing a sun bleached suit several sizes too large for him who was herding goats across the road. ‘He is Pygmy’ our driver announced and the Pygmy smiled enthusiastically. Pygmies are the original tribe of large parts of East Africa but are a generally subjugated people. They are often a minority and their practices (living in the forest, tribal dances, refusal to plant crops, hunting for meat) often earn them contempt.

That afternoon we took the short shared taxi ride to the Rwandan border where we filled in yet more useless trivia about ourselves and took another shared taxi to the Rwandan capital – Kigali.