I get DVDs every now and then from a shop in town called “Image Movies”. Not the greatest start to a blog post about Africa eh? Well this shop happens to be the best DVD shop I’ve ever been in. You walk in and grab a DVD “Menu” from the shelf. All the menus are divided up into genres – Horror, Comedy, Romance, Action, TV Series etc etc. They also give you an envelope. So you flick through the menus and write down whatever movies you want onto the envelope. Once you’ve written down whatever you want, you hand the envelope to the person at the counter, and they burn the list of movies “while U wait”. I usually go for a pint (@ only 1.20e I might add) in the “Jazz Bar” right across the road while I wait for the movies. After about 20 minutes I collect all the movies which are now inside the envelope I had originally written on, and pay them 50shillings per disc, which is about 43 euro cent per disc.

Most people in Ireland would probably download whatever they want and not bother paying 50cent per disc, but internet access in Kenyan homes is still a bit of a luxury, so these shops do great business, and they are all over the city. Movie piracy is a big business here and it is out in the open, these aren’t dodgy alley-way shops. The police walk past these places every day. You can even get great quality movies (not camera copy) before they come out in the cinema here, which probably explains why every time I go the cinema here there are usually only about 5 people in the whole screen.

Even if I did have super high speed internet access, I would still use these shops as you can get whole seasons for 43 cent. So for example, you can buy “24” season 1-5 for about 2euro in 20 minutes, instead of downloading the whole lot over a few days and having your housemates complaining that you’re taking over the whole feckin WiFi. I’d love to open a business like this back home but unfortunately I’d be arrested by the time I burn the first disc.

I was sitting on a big coach waiting for it to get going. Almost every time a bus stops in Africa, tons of people run up to the windows selling all sorts, fruit, chips, clothes, watches, toothbrushes… everything. As I was waiting for the bus to pull off, some street hawker knocked on my window. This guy was selling vests. So after he knocked on my window and got my attention, he pointed to the picture on the vest packet, which was a white guy wearing a vest, and he said “Look look! It is your brother!” I’m still trying to figure out what would happen if I did that to a random black lad in Ireland. Imagine being in Xtra Vision, pointing at a picture of Denzel Washington and telling a random black customer “It’s your brother lah” Anyways, I had a laugh. The bus pulled off eventually, and I was sitting at a window seat, and in front of me was a girl who wasn’t looking too well, she had her head hanging out the window for most of the journey, and she was turning kind of green. I didn’t know black people could turn green. Anyways, I should have seen it coming. I should have closed my window. I should have ducked out of the way at least. She puked green yellowy 80s horror movie goo out of the speeding bus, and a good blob of it was sucked back in through my window and onto my face! I had to use a spare t-shirt to wipe it off, I smelled like a tramp for the next few hours of the journey. It was a miracle it didn’t get into my mouth. Imagine if I was snoozing with my mouth open… jaysus.

***

There are no crows in Kampala, well I’ve never seen one. Instead they have these absolutely huge storks, called Marabou Storks, which can reach a height of 5ft, and if you stand face to face with them they could (and would, the dirty feckers) pick your eye out. Some of them actually walk around the streets in town among all the people. When you see them walking around it looks like a man in a bird suit. The wingspan is 3.5 meters. They have these massive things hanging off their beaks that look exactly like scrotums (scroti?). They’re ugly, dirty, poisonous to eat, walk really slow as if they own the place, they have epic battles on treetops in the city center, they thrive in urban centers where they eat any sort of crap, including actual crap, and they airstrike the sidewalks with huge dribbly shites the size of pancakes. I’m guessing they ate all the crows. (Actually I just checked the wikipedia for these guys and it says that they do in fact eat other birds including flamingos!)

***

There are a lot of crazy people in Africa but one guy comes instantly to mind. Handerchief man from Kampala. He stands on a small traffic island in the middle of a busy junction and jumps around in circles and waves a load of hankies around, he’s about 50, he has the front half of his head shaved, he has no teeth, and any time I ever passed him I could never understand what he was saying. I guessed he was selling the hankies, but I wasn’t sure. One day I was up town with a mate Dan. It was a really hot day and we were both sweating like mzungus. Here in Africa folks just bring hankies around to wipe sweat off their faces. We decided that we needed some hankies, and I told Dan that I knew just the place, it was nearby. So just outside the cafe we were in and down the road a bit was the junction, and crazy hankie man was there. We stood on the footpath for a while just staring at him, jumping around with his hankies. “Ask him is he sellin those hankies there” I said to Dan. “No way! It was your idea! He could be dangerous…” Dan was a crazy fecker himself so I knew it wouldn’t take much more get him to do it. “Ah go on” I said. “Ok” said Dan. So we went over and just stood beside him and looked at him for a few seconds. He didn’t even stop dancing, he just looked at us and waved his hankies around some more. Dan said “Hello, are you selling hankies?”. Crazy hankie man continued to dance and said “He’s coming!”, then danced some more, did an aul spin, and waved the hankies around. “No no” said Dan, ” I mean are you selling those hankies that you have there?” Once again crazy hankie man said “He’s coming!”. Dan asked him “Who’s coming?” “JESUS!” crazy hankie man said, “Jesus is coming! He is coming!” He was dancing on the spot, staring at us, saying “Soon he is coming, soon he is coming, he is coming, Jesus is coming….” probably waiting for some sort of reply or more questions. He gave up waiting and went back to dancing around in circles waving his hankies around. We just stood on the traffic island for another while and watched him dance. Dunno where he gets the energy from, every day I’m in town, he’s there, dancing non stop in the midday heat.

***

One day I was passing through the hostel and noticed two new folks at the pool table. They were both dressed in black shirts, black pants and black shiny shoes. They were playing pool with special gloves, jumping around the table like Jackie Chan. I asked them their story, they told me that they represent Uganda in pool tournaments, and proudly told me that they’re going to London in a month. I asked could I play the winner, “sure” they said. So I played the winner, an Arab guy, born and bred in Uganda, and bet him. I played his team mate next, a Ugandan, and I also bet him. They told me that the table wasn’t that good, and they didn’t have their special cues…. the humidity was probably too high as well.

***

You meet a lot of cool people when traveling. Zac Partain comes to mind as a cool guy that I’ll always remember. He’s a truckdriver from Boston. His grandmother is Irish, but he didn’t know which part of Ireland she was from! What the hell??!! All normal Americans could trace their Irish ancestry back to the Dinosaurs… but Zac wasn’t really a normal American. I asked him one day about his bicycle that was parked up in the camp. “Cycling around Uganda are you?” He told me that he had actually just cycled from Kinshasa in the DRC to Kampala, arriving only a few days ago. Look at a map and check where Kinshasa is in relation to Kampala. He cycled across the Congo. It took him three months. Three months of camping in the bush, cycling on the tiniest of forest paths, on his own. Well he wasn’t really on his own, he had chimps and elephants to keep him company.

The best part was when he used to come across communities and villages. Can you imagine a white man on a bike, with a small Congolese flag on the handlebars, emerging from the bush and just rolling into a village, where they probably haven’t seen a white man before. They absolutely loved him. They would let him camp, relax, eat and bathe for a few days, then the time would come to move on. Those few days when the crazy mzungu on a bike came to their tiny village was probably the most exciting thing that had happened there in a long long time.

I asked him what kind of dangers he faced on the three month journey through DRC. “Military and police bribes” he said. That’s it?? No machetes or rebels or wars or fighting?? “Nope”. He said that the regular people of DRC are so nice. The only problems he had were from “officials” asking for bribes. Which was extremely risky. There are obviously no ATMs or banks in the bush, so he had to bring a few thousand dollars cash with him. The scariest moments he had were when the military would search him and his belongings. If they found the US dollars he was fucked. He told me that one time they asked him to empty his bag, and he remembered that he had forgotten to hide his wad of cash in his secret stash area – the cash was just lying around with his clothes. So he opened the bag as the military were watching him and started to empty his items one by one, until all that was left was the wad of cash. He put his hand inside the bag and grabbed the cash while pretending to scoop around the bottom looking for stragglers. Then with the wad of cash hidden in hand he grabbed the bag and turned it upside down and shook it. The military believed that he had nothing to hide, and let him go…

He had no contact with the outside world during his journey through the bush, his friends and family didn’t even know if he was still alive. One day he came across an Italian NGO worker in a village, who had satellite internet, so he took this opportunity to contact home. The connection was very unstable, so instead of writing a full email, he just wrote in the subject line “Alive and well” and sent the message to his sister. He eventually arrived in Kampala, where he decided he would relax and fatten up for a month or so. He showed me his Congo map, with the trail marked out. There was one village circled in red – that was where he was able to buy Coca-Cola, his favorite drink. As a long haul truckdriver in the states, that was the only thing that kept him awake at night.”So where next?” I asked him. “I’m going to cycle back to Kinshasa!” This time he would take a different unkown route. Crazy motherfucker is all I can say. He made it home though, and now he’s back trukin’ from coast to coast, pondering his next adventure.

***

Another cool dude I met was a 40 year old Mexican journalist by the name of Temoris Grecko. I used to see him around the hostel, silently working away on his laptop, and I knew straight away that he was Mexican just by the look of him. He’s the most Mexican person I’ve ever seen, black curly mullet, dark skin, dark eyes, dodgy golden ear ring in the left ear and he was an extreme ladies man. One night I was outside the hostel, with a litre bottle of Uganda Waragi drinking away with a friend at about 3am when we saw him walking down the path towards us. He went up to the hostel door and looked inside. “Guys do you know where I can get a drink or something?” he asked us. I held my bottle of Waragi aloft. That was the start of an epic one month long drinking session. Temoris writes for National Geographic and Esquire as a freelance journalist, and just travels around the world looking for stories. He calls head office and says “Hey, I think there might be a great story in such and such a place, what do you think?” and if they are interested they pay him to do it. He was using Uganda as HQ to research a story on mountain gorillas in neighboring DRC, but got stuck in Uganda due to sessionage. We went out nearly every night to wreak havoc around town.

We hit the town on New Years Eve. At exactly 12am we were on a boda boda making our way through the thick of the celebrations in the city center. The sky was full of firework displays from three different venues in the city, the streets were so packed with people I’m pretty sure we drove over a few toes, people were standing on top of buses and cars dancing to music and cheering and Temoris and myself were dealing out high fives left right and center. And we were in bits. Best new years eve ever. We were supposed to meet up with friends in a park in town for the bringing in of the new year but I’m glad we were late.

Kabalagala was our favourite nightspot, a street full of clubs, pubs, blasting music, street food vendors, dodgy characters, hookers, bruisers, cruisers, ceanns and drug dealing rastas, and the best time to go is about 1am. Once you enter Kabalagala you usually don’t leave till breakfast time. The latest I got back to the hostel was about half 10 in the morning. I went up to the counter in the hostel and ordered breakfast. Everybody thought I had just woken up. Our favorite spot in Kabalagala was a place called Capital Pub, it had great Afrobeat music, heaps of pooltables, too much beer, and lots and lots of hookers. Me and Temoris were like rockstars walking around the place with ten women in tow. After about the third time of us being there the hookers realized that we didn’t want their services, we just wanted to have the craic. So we eventually made friends with them, and they knew our names. We’d end up heading to Capital and seeking out the hookers we had befriended to play pool and drink and arse around. When Capital Pub gets a bit quiet at about 5 or 6, people head to a place called Al’s Bar, which stays open 24/7. The place is usually full of reggae music, rastas, ganjasmoke, and whatever hooker didn’t make business in Capital Pub. Once the hookers get to Al’s Bar they start getting desperate and try whatever they can to get you home. It’s fun, but there’s no way I’m having anything to do with an AIDS-riddled African prostitute. I’d wake up every day in the hostel and head out the the lounge to see Temoris sipping a beer. “Heading out tonight?” he’d ask. I’d be like “aggghhhh jaysus chriiiist my head is in bits no never again no more Kabalagala…” but by 11pm that night I’d be rearing to go after a full day of Temoris saying “Hey come on I thought the Irish were the best drinkers in the world! What are you a fucking leprechaun or something?” There was something about Kabalagala that drew us nearly every night. Temoris vowed to quit Kabalagala after spending a night in a police cell with 30 dodgy guys. “Never again, no more…” Guess where we were a few nights later? When he finally left for Kenya I was racked with emotion. Where would I ever find another drinking buddy like Temoris? I’m still searching. We vowed to continue the session – sometime in Mexico…

***

Bret was another character at Backpackers Hostel Kampala. An old aussie, about 45 years old but looked about 80. He had a huge beard, big scraggly hair, smoked about 40 strong African cigarettes a day, drank non stop, wore the same raggedy sun-bleached vest and shorts every day, and lived in a tiny tent outside… for about 5 months. I’d often find him in a daze, staring into space probably trying to remember what it was like to live in a house. He was also king of the pool table. Bret was in Africa looking for mining work, – prospecting work to be exact – and was having a hard time getting through the red tape. But he didn’t seem to be doing much other than drinking and smoking and playing pool. He was also in the Congo for 3 months for the same reason, but the red tape involved way too much bribes to make it worth the hassle. He was also kicked out of the country for being a suspected murderer. A taxi driver was found shot dead in his car, and the last passengers he was seen with were some white guys with scraggly hair and beards. He paid a bribe of about $2000 to the cops even though he was totally innocent and it was actually two Norwegian guys who committed the murder, they were found soon after and sentenced to death. So he decided to try his luck in Uganda. He was a right aul character. He wasn’t a mad fella or anything, he was just a character due to the fact that he used to sit down and drink all day on his own in the corner and play pool for 5 months in a row. Everybody was like “who is that guy?? what is he?? a tourist or something?” Sometime before I arrived, they managed to get him to put on a girls dress and dance up on the bar. He must have been really drunk. They say that photos exist from that night, the ones that Bret didn’t manage to destroy…

I remember he spent a few days just sitting in the garden, reading the english dictionary cover to cover.

During the Kampala riots of September 2009 which lasted three days and cost 50 lives, Bret
was around. He was actually in town. He told me the story. He said that he was walking about when the riots kicked off. People were throwing things around, shouting, singing, setting fire to everything, stoning cars and buses, looting, it was your average African city riot. Anyways, Bret told me that he tried to get into Shoprite, a big supermarket in town, but they had locked everything down. I asked him “What, were you trying to hide from the rioters?” “No” he explained with his thick Aussie accent “I was tryin’a do me bloody shoppin.” He gave up looking for food and got a boda boda through the chaos back to the hostel.

One day Bret said “I’m off to Nairobi, need to get a police clearance from the Australian embassy. I should be back in a week”. That was a few months ago. I’ve recently met people who talk of a strange scraggly and beardy Australian man in the backpackers hostel in Nairobi, who just drinks and smokes all day…. I’m going to confirm these reports soon.

***

One day I was walking to a camera shop on a street, the name of which I don’t remember but I’m going to call it Camera Street. The whole street is full of camera shops and photo studios. It’s insane, I don’t know how they make business with so many shops selling the same thing. Every shop is “Camera Corner” or “XL Photo Studio”. Anyways, I had one favorite camera shop owned by a nice lady, who sold genuine Canon stuff, not knock-offs like the rest of the shops. As I was walking up the street I came across a crowd of people laughing and shouting and jumping around. It looked like they were having fun. I moved a bit closer to see what was going on. There was a guy in the center of the crowd, on the ground in bits, getting the head kicked off him and one lad was whipping him with a bit of rope or a belt or something. This was in broad daylight and there were people with their cameras and phones out taking videos and laughing. Security guards were standing around having a gawk too. To get to my camera shop I would have to walk through the beating. Some shopkeeper who was standing at his doorstep calmly watching the beating saw me and said “It’s a thief. They caught him trying to steal something out of a car.” Ah, just as I suspected. Mob justice. This can often end in death so I just left the area. I went the other way around the block to get to the shop, and by that time the beating had finished. I asked the lady in the camera shop what happened to the guy, she said they let him go. He was one lucky dude. A guy I was talking to saw a kid getting necklaced for stealing some fruit. And I read a story in the paper about a guy getting decapitated for stealing a chicken…

***

The Ugandan presidential elections are to be held early 2011, and there is already tension in the air here in Uganda. Threats of a revolution have been uttered by one opposition candidate. The current president, Yoweri Museveni, has been in power for about 25 years. He rigged the last election, but for the safety and security of the country, the supreme court decided not to go through with an investigation or prosecution. Museveni commanded a rebel group known as the National Resistance Movement, (NRM) who stormed Kampala in the 80s and overthrew the then president Milton Obote. To this day Musevenis political party is still called NRM!

After 25 years of power, the Ugandans want a change. The level of corruption in Uganda is actually unbelievable. It’s part of the culture and pervades the full spectrum from a lowly policeman straight up to the president himself. I’ve often traveled in overloaded buses which were stopped at police roadblocks. The driver would get out with a wad of cash in his hand, give it to the cop, and continue the journey as if nothing happened. You can even buy your university lecturers. Need some good results for your Civil Engineering degree? Just give your lecturer a few bob and everything will be sorted. Or pay a proper civil engineer to write your thesis for you. People are wondering why buildings are either collapsing or going to collapse (tower of Pisa style). It’s because the “engineer” just bought his way through University.

A huge corruption scandal has been running in the papers for the last three years about the alleged “misuse” of a 500Billion shilling fund that was meant to go towards hosting the international Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Kampala. 500Billion shillings is a LOT by anyones standards, especially in Uganda, where your average cleaning ladies get 80,000 (20e) a month. The average joe is getting sick of Museveni. There are young men and women who for their whole life have lived under one president. The average Joe is getting sick of this situation. Come 2011, Kampala will be a warzone if there is any suspicion of a rigged election. Many Ugandans have told me that they are going to stay in a neighboring country during this period as they are sure something will kick off. I don’t think it will be too bad, as the USA has appointed Hillary Clinton to keep a close eye on things. I’m not sure why Obama has expressed interest in the security of this nation out of the 53 in all of Africa, but I my little hypothesis is that it could have something to do with the recent find of huge oil reserves in the northwest….

The thought of traveling to Burundi excited me, for the same reason the Karamoja trip excited me – the travel advice for both places was this: don’t go there, but ever since I found the obscure little country in my Lonely Planet book I was intrigued. The country had recently come out of a civil war and the tourism industry (in fact industry in general) is just getting back on it’s feet, I decided to give it a helping hand.

When I was in Kampala I asked each and every tourist if they had been to Burundi. In three months I found two people. One was a German man, about 60 years old. He was pretty cool for an old guy. He wasn’t a hippie or anything, he was just a regular old guy you’d see in a pub, grey hair, fake teeth, he even had an old-man “oh jaysus me hip is gone” walk, and he was staying in the backpackers hostel in Kampala. He was a taxi driver from Frankfurt, and instead of taking holidays to the regular old-folk destinations, he goes to further flung places like Asia, Russia or Africa. He told me he had been to Burundi for a week and said it wasn’t too bad, there wasn’t much to see, but he collects crafts from different countries so he wanted to see what Burundi had to offer. Well if an OAP like that guy could do Burundi then a whipper snapper like me should have no problem.

I got talking to another guy in Kampala called Stephen who was on his way from London to South Africa – OVERLAND – through Europe, the Middle East and all the way down through Africa. He was also a really good photographer. After traveling for nearly two years, he said he was going to skip Burundi because he heard that it was too dangerous. He even spent two weeks traveling around the Congo, but wouldn’t go to Burundi.

The second person I met who had actually been to Burundi was a Belgian girl named Anna. She was working in the capital as a midwife with an NGO called Doctors Without Borders. She told me there’s nothing really worth seeing – tourism breathed it’s last dying breath just before the civil war, and the tourist sites are now un-manned. She said if I decided to head there, she would give me a tour around the city and maybe even offer me a free couch to sleep on!

“So is it dangerous?” I asked her, “You must have seen some dodgy situations in your time there…”.

“Yeah, just last week there was a bunch of people protesting on my street holding grenades aloft.” she said, so calmly it was as if she was telling me about some drizzly weather last Sunday. “The rival political parties hand out grenades to their youth wings, it’s normal. Also, if you want to see Burundi, go now before it gets worse, presidential elections are just around the corner and things are getting tense”

She also told me about the emergency backup plan her company had in case anything serious happened – evacuation to the Congo! If the Congo was seen as a safe-haven from Burundi I really didn’t know what to expect…

I checked out Burundi on some tourism sites. One of my favorite sites is Wikitravel.org, and on their Burundi page I found the following warning:

On the Australian Governments travel advisory website I found the following information:

• We strongly advise you not to travel to Burundi at this time, with the exception of the capital Bujumbura, because of high levels of serious crime, possible civil unrest and risk of terrorist attack. While the security situation has stabilised across the country, the risk of armed violence, banditry, kidnapping and cross-border attacks by rebels remains high.

• If you are in Burundi you should consider leaving unless you have compelling reasons to stay.

• If you do decide to travel outside of the capital, we advise you to contact the United Nations office in Burundi for the latest security advice prior to travel.

• We advise you to reconsider your need to travel to the capital Bujumbura at this time due to the unpredictable security situation. If you do decide to travel to Bujumbura, you should exercise extreme caution.

Lovely, but these warnings all seemed a bit too sensational and paranoid, a total contradiction of what I just saw in Kampala – the German OAP with the wobbly hip who “survived” a week in Burundi.

Here are some facts about the country:

It’s a tiny landlocked country, sandwiched between the Congo, Tanzania and Rwanda

The capital city has a cool exotic name: Bujumbura

It’s the 2nd poorest country in the world

It has just come out of a civil war in which about 300,000 people died

It has the same Hutu/Tutsi problem as Rwanda

The president is an ex rebel leader

The last rebel group laid down arms only two years ago

As part of the peace process, the rebels were integrated into the police and military

Grenades can be bought for as little as $1.

The police leave the streets after dark, giving way to thieves locally known as “les petits bandits”

The official languages are Kirundi and French – English is not widely spoken

It has no ATMs.

….Sounds nice eh?

Anyways where was I…. oh yeah, still in Rwanda. So I bought my bus ticket to Burundi, departing at 8am – only a seven hour journey – and packed my bags.

The journey to Burundi was enjoyable on the Rwandan side, lush green hills, tea plantations, the obligatory small village children waving at the bus. The countryside got more and more sparse the closer we got to the border. The bus eventually stopped at a few drab concrete buildings in the middle of absolute nowhere. The border between Uganda and Rwanda was like a small town, with lots of heavy traffic, shops, hustle, bustle, to and fro, police, and even a bank. This border crossing was like a deserted outpost. We all queued up at the Rwandan side to stamp ourselves out and then proceeded to the Burundian side. The Burundian immigration office was manned by two guys: one guy checked and stamped passports while another guy just stood behind him and stared at you as if he wanted to eat your children. I swear he looked as if he had just come back from slaughtering a village… there was something about his eyes. I really wanted to take a portrait photo of him but I was afraid he’d stab me in the face.

We hopped back onto the bus and off we sped into Burundi. The road to Bujumbura was in great condition, perfectly tarmacked and naer a pothole – I’m guessing due to the almost non-existent traffic. Between the border and the capital I remember seeing only one town with electricity, the rest was just mudhut & corrugated steel territory. After a while the landscape got a bit greener and eventually started looking exactly like Rwanda – very green with a ridiculous amounts of hills. After all, I was told in Rwanda that Burundi means “another Rwanda” in one of the native languages.

The bus made a long winding descent out of the hills and into a huge green valley where in the center I could see Bujumbura. For the first night or so I was going to stay in the best hotel in the city just to get my bearings and be extra safe – Hotel Amaharo. Amaharo is Kirundi for “peace”, and it’s where all the UN staff and diplomats stay when in town. It was still only 40euro per night! I would move to a cheaper place once I got more comfortable with the city. There are no budget/backpacker style tourist hotels in Burundi, because there are no tourists, so I’d just have to look for some cheap but safe African shtyle hotel.

It was my first time being in a dodgy African city. Kampala was a breeze, as was Kigali. When the bus pulled into it’s “station” in Bujumbura city – just an alleyway between a couple of shoddy buildings – I stood around wondering what to do, how to find a hotel, how to get a taxi. I couldn’t remember any French from school and I didn’t even know how to say “Hello” in Kirundi. I sat down on my bag, ate some biscuits and just watched the people unload their bags from the bus and walk off down the road. I wasn’t even sure if it was safe for me to be walking around during the day. All of a sudden this guy walked up to me, shook his keys and said “Taxi?” He looked like a normal nice guy so I followed him out to the front where he pointed to his car. It had official looking taxi symbols and we seemed to be close to the city center, so I hopped in. His taxi looked good from the outside, but once we got driving I realized that it was in dire need of a service. Actually it needed to be scrapped. The clattering and spluttering coming out of it was unreal, I’d say it had about three hours left in it.

After discovering that the only hotel recommended to me had been shut down, the taxi driver dropped me at Hotel Amaharo, which looked pretty posh and was located right next to the Central Bank of Burundi. I was a strange sight in the air-conditioned lobby with my sweaty armpits, scraggly hair and dirty backpack. I checked in and got myself a nice en-suite room with a double bed, fan, phone, TV, and free wireless internet. This was one of the best hotels Burundi had to offer, so I felt fierce VIP altogether.

Bujumbura is at a lower altitude than Kigali or Kampala, so it was hot, 30degrees the day I got there, and since it is located on the shores of Lake Tanganyika it was humid as f**k. I took a lovely cold shower (well I had no choice as the electric water heater in my room didn’t work) and went to sleep for a few hours….

I woke up at about 7pm and it was dark, so I decided to leave the walk through the city for another day because according to the guidebook, “les petits bandits” take to the streets once the sun goes down. I called Ann, the Belgian girl, to tell her I was in town. We decided to meet in the bar downstairs and I got myself a nice cold beer and watched some crappy Nigerian movie they were showing on the tellyvision. Ann eventually arrived at the hotel and told me to hop into her jeep. Due to safety concerns her employer doesn’t allow her to take public transport, including taxis, after 6pm, so she had the company driver bring us around the town. I hopped into the jeep, and before we drove off she radioed HQ to tell them her current location, where she was going and how long she expected to stay there. She took me to the Congolese part of town to a pretty nice restaurant/bar where we got a good feeding of chips and beer.

Ann was one crazy young lady, she hadn’t been home in about three years and she only works in countries that are known for their wars, genocides, rebels, child-soldiers etc. She’s like an adrenaline junkie, except instead of bungee jumping or parachuting, she delivers babies in war-zones and rebel controlled territories like the Congo and Central African Republic. Once her contract expires in Burundi she wants to go to Afghanistan. I don’t know what she’s going to do after that to top the list. I’m guessing Mogadishu. She said Central African Republic was the most dangerous place she had been. One night she was woken up by rebels shooting around the camp, and the staff rushed into her room to tell her to “hurry hurry get the hell out!” She was like “yeah yeah I’m coming keep your panty hoes on” and groggily put on her slippers to head to the safe room. The situation was pretty much routine for her.

We had to finish up in the bar early enough as Ann had some work to do in the morning, but she said I arrived just in time – one of her colleagues was leaving for good in a few days and they were throwing a going away party in town on Saturday night. Good stuff, I judge a country not only on it’s climate and security, but also on it’s ability to host a good session. She said she’d pick me up in the evening. I got a free lift home in the company car and fell asleep with the fan on full blast to keep away the heat and the mosquitos.

The next day I just walked around town and soaked in the sights, which were few and far between. One travel book I read before coming here had a “low-down” on almost every country in the world. In the Burundi section, under “Economy” it said “all but decimated due to the civil war”…

I didn’t get mugged or stabbed, but there were a lot of filthy dodgy feckers around, so high on god knows what that they didn’t even notice me. The city was full of idlers, people just sitting around in the shade doing nothing. Life is simple here, all they need is a bit of cash to get two good meals a day, which doesn’t take much, sell a few brik a brack here and there, or maybe carry a couch from the furniture shop to somebodys house, and you have enough for rice and beans for another day.

I sat outside a cafe and ordered a coffee. I couldn’t do my usual routine of drinking coffee and reading the newspaper as I couldn’t find any English language newspapers, so I just people-watched. There was no real buzz in the town, no hustle or bustle. I was told about a big outdoor market somewhere in the city but I didn’t think that it would be safe enough. I saw some guys walking around the street selling clothes which were just draped around their shoulders, and then noticed how the locals “tried on” the pants and jeans. They would just wrap the waist of the pants around their neck, and if the two ends met at the back of the neck, that meant that the pants would fit. I tried that trick later on in the hotel and it does actually work, the two sides of my pants met with literally zero overlap. Coincidence? I’m not sure, why don’t you try it?

Anyways, after a while a huge skin head guy with a dodgy moustache and no neck came and sat beside me outside the cafe. He started chatting and asking me where I was from and what am I doing here and how do I like it etc etc. He told me he was security. For this nice little cafe. I didn’t really believe him. He told me he was from the Congo, which made him a bit more dodgy. “I’m hungry” he suddenly said, “buy me something”. I wasn’t going to argue with this guy, I didn’t know if he had one of them $1 grenades I heard about, so I told the waiter to get him a samosa. “Two samosas” he told the waiter, “with milk”. Ha! This lad was well cheeky, but he was built like Mr.T and he was Congolese… plus he had a dodgy moustache, so I wasn’t going to argue. I paid the waiter for his grub, which only amounted to about a euro, and wandered off.

I went to find an internet cafe where I could search for cheaper accommodation in Bujumbura. I found some info about a cheap guest lodge about 20 minutes walk from the city center, and it had good reviews from a backpacker who posted about it on a travel forum, so I decided to head back to the hotel, grab my stuff and move to the new place. On my way back to the hotel, a passing pickup truck packed full of guys with AK47s, (police I’m guessing, I couldn’t really tell as they don’t seem to have a standard uniform in Burundi) did a quick U-turn and screeched off in the opposite direction. Some of the guys had three clips in their AK47s, one loaded and two extras duct-taped onto the side. As I said, the police force is full of ex-rebels, so they are definitely not a trustworthy bunch – and they actually still looked like a band of dodgy rebels. In case of emergency, DO NOT dial 999…

I moved into my new place, which was actually a nice spot, with a security guard, big gate, and free brekkie in the morning. The area itself seemed to be nice enough too, Concern had an office just a few minutes walk down the road.

I also found a nice bar & restaurant nearby that sold really good western mzungu style food. I had dinner there, had beers at the bar, chatted to the English speaking barman as we watched a game of footy on de telly, but before I knew it it was almost 9 o clock. The biggest pain in the arse in Africa is that the sun goes down really quickly, one minute it’ nice and bright and the next it’s pitch black, which is not so bad in places like Kampala but in dodgy cities where you need to be careful after dark it can be a problem. My hotel was only about 3 minutes walk but I still asked the barman about walking back. He told me it’s fine… yeah if you’re black I’m sure. I finished my beer and walked back anyways and got to the hotel safe and sound. I knocked on the gate, the guard slid open his little slidey peek hole to check me out, then let me in.

On Saturday I decided to check out the famous Lake Tanganyika, which allegedly has the most beautiful inland beaches in Africa, and a nice aul concentration of crocs for you to swim with.

I headed into town and got a taxi to bring me to a beach bar I heard about called Saga Plage, about 15 minutes drive out of town, and it didn’t disappoint, it was a really nice place, with a well-stocked bar on a makeshift rickety boat a few meters out into the lake. I hung out there for a while and wrote some poetry as I listened to the soothing sound of the waves. Only messing I grabbed a few beers and read a book called The Zanzibar Chest, a really good autobiography of a crazy journalist who worked in Mogadishu and other dodgy hell holes.

The lake is so big it actually has surfable waves, and I watched some locals surfing away, obviously not giving a feck about the threat of crocodiles. I was talking to an American guy recently who also ventured out to the lake, and he went for a swim. Within a few minutes the locals called him back to shore to tell him that he was going to be eaten by crocodiles. He promptly towelled himself off and walked/ran back to the bar.

In the restaurant they had a chimp and a baboon in cages, so I hung out with them for a while, sharing my beer with the chimp, called Joe, who was sophisticated enough to have his own bottle, which he held out for me to top up every now and then. The baboon wan’t a fan of the beer but he did devout a chocolate bar I gave him. One of the workers came over for a chat, and asked me for a scholarship to Ireland… young guys in Africa are always asking me for scholarships, what do they think I am, the Minister of Education? Look at the cut of me, my toes are poking out of holes in me shoes! The guy gave Joe the chimp a cigarette, who did fairly well in smoking it, but about a quarter of the way down he just bit the butt off and threw the rest away… we’ll learn him yet! I asked if I could touch him and the guy said no bother, so I tickled Joe in the armpits, which he loved, and whenever I stopped he’d point at his armpits to tell me that he wanted more. He also liked to be tickled around the neck, he was just like a kid, he even laughed when I played with him. The poor baboon wasn’t getting any attention so I decided to play with him for a while. He wasn’t too receptive to tickles, but he was interested in my shoes. He untied my shoelaces, pulled down my socks and exposed my legs… I was like what the hell is this lad at, is he trying to mug me? But then he just started grooming my legs, picking mosquito bites off and checking each hair for nits and whatnot. Then he started to groom my hand. Basically I got a free manicure and pedicure from a baboon.

That night was the big going away party that Ann invited me to, and I was picked up by the company jeep from my hotel and brought to the pub, where I met all her colleagues from all over the world, each one as crazy as the last. It was a nice bar and I finally got to interact with the locals in a safe and friendly environment. After the party, myself and Ann weren’t satisfied with out levels of drunkenness so we decided to hit some more spots in town. So off we drove, and she brought me to a nice bar called Havana just in the city center, a place for ex-pats and rich locals. After a few drinks there, she asked if I’d like to check out the Congolese club, called 5/5… I said sure why not? Her driver was away running some errands so we had to get one of the taxis from outside… I said to Ann “Wait a sec, you can’t use taxis after 6pm! You could be fired!” She didn’t care, she uses taxis every now and then on the sly, she even walked home alone one night at after the club at about 2am… as I said, she likes living life on the edge. Actually to be more precise, she likes to be over the edge and hanging on to a twig half way down the cliff.

So we stumbled out of the bar into the streets. We crossed the road and I didn’t see the stupid thin almost invisible wires they use to separate the sides of the street and tripped over one and clatthered onto the road like a feckin gombeen. I just made us look like fresh “sitting duck” tourists who hadn’t a clue about Burundi and were wandering around the streets lost and drunk at night… which was partly true. And still fresh in my mind was one sentence from the “Drinks and Entetainment” section of Lonely Planet Burundi – “be careful outside the clubs as you never know who is lurking in the dark…”

We found a taxi shortly after the silly mzungu incident though and made our way to the Congolese club where we drank and danced the rest of the night away with the locals. We were the only mzungus there, they must have thought we were a bit nuts, dancing to all the crazy Congolese music, which is all plinky and plonky with twangy guitars and dodgy keyboard riffs, but it was great fun and I didn’t even get one machete to the face, just friendly smiles.

The next day kind of spoiled my new optimistic view on Burundi. After waking up with a lethal hangover, I exited the gate to make my walk into town. I had just stepped one foot out of the gate when I heard shouting and chanting from somewhere up the street… I poked my head around and saw a big group of lads in camo pants and raggedy t-shirts marching in my direction. I guessed that this was one of the grenade-wielding youth wings that Ann was telling me about, and I was just starting to feel the political tension I had read about. The elections were just around the corner… I slowly walked backwards into the gate and closed it, then opened the little slidey peephole door a bit to have a look at the guys. They didn’t have grenades, but they still looked a bit dodgy. I waited until they all marched past and the shouting and chanting receded into the distance… then I stepped out when the coast was clear. I decided to get a boda boda into town as I didn’t want to encounter these guys on foot.

After a bit of time in a nice cafe reading a book I went for lunch, then went to a bar to watch some tv, then went to the internet cafe… just a regular aul day. After finishing with the internet I decided to go for another walk around town and maybe finally venture to the market. I walked about two minutes and turned the corner to find a big crowd standing around something on the street, it looked like a few bags of rubbish. Lonely Planet says that one should always avoid large gatherings in Africa as things can turn violent in a split second… well I carefully inched a bit closer to see what the fuss was about, it didn’t seem as if there was a fight or anything particularly dangerous going on and it was still an hour or so from sunset. Then I finally saw what was going on as a police pickup arrived at the scene. They all moved out of the way for the truck, giving me a view of what was on the ground – two dead people just by the sidewalk, with streams of blood running down the street. The police didn’t even get off the back of the pickup, they just had a gawk at the dead bodies and then drove away. I’ve seen a dead body before, on display in a coffin, well dressed complete with make up, that was sick enough, but I’ve never seen a freshly killed human being, and here I was looking at not one but two of them, battered and bloody. I finally decided to heed Lonely Planets advice and make myself scarce, so I flagged a passing taxi and asked him to bring me to my hotel. I was hoping that he would drive in the opposite direction but the fecker drove past the bodies nice and slow so he could have his own little gawk. I turned the other way as we got closer, I didn’t want to see any brains or guts, or have the locals see me staring at the bodies. I asked the driver if they were shot, and made a gun shape with my fingers and went POW POW! He said yes, they were shot, they were husband and wife.

He dropped me to the restaurant by my hotel as I was starving. I noticed that there was a football match being played across the road, I think it was Uganda against Burundi, and they road was packed with people climbing on top of signposts and random scaffolding to get a good view over the high wall. Lots of dodgy drunk feckers were also stumbling around, obviously too wasted to climb the scaffolding. While eating dinner I got a call from my Mexican friend Temoris, who was in Nairobi and wondering when I would be arriving. Just as I was telling him that I saw two dead people on the street that day, I heard a few gunshots in the distance. He told me that I was the unluckiest person he’s ever met, in Kampala I happened upon a mob justice beat-down on a backstreet, when I arrived in Kigali they were throwing grenades around, and now in Bujumbura there are dead bodies and dodgy youth militias on the streets and gunshots echoing through the night. It just gets worse and worse. What next? A full-blown street shoot out? (yes I did end up seeing a street shoot out, but that’s another story…) He told me that if I survived Burundi I was to meet him in Nairobi ASAP for some serious partying before his flight back home, I said not a bother boss. I then called Ann to tell her about the shooting and ask her what the situation was, she said she’d get back to me. The next day she said that she heard they were killed in a motorbike accident… Seemed a bit bloody for a motorbike accident I didn’t know who to believe but anyways I decided to leave Burundi sooner than later.

After dinner in the restaurant it had become dark already, and the walk back to the hotel was pretty dodgy as all the football crowd were still around the street, I couldn’t see them as there were no streetlights but I could hear them having drunken arguments and laughing and shouting somewhere in the dark. I breathed a sigh of relief when I got to the hotel. I knocked on the gate, the guard slid open his little slidey peek hole to check me out, then let me in. What a feckin day. I decided to head on to Tanzania as I was pretty much finished with Burundi, it was dodgy, there were no other travelers to hang out with, and talking to the locals was difficult because of the language barrier, and if I got into an accident or any sort of trouble I was fucked – how do you explain to a thick headed ex-rebel cop who doesn’t know English and never went to school that you want to speak to your embassy? I suppose I did have a really valuable contact – Ann – who could sort me out in medical emergencies, but in the end I decided that Burundi still had a bit of developing to do before I could stay there for a longer period of time and enjoy it properly.

So the plan was to cross the Tanzanian border at the southern tip of Burundi, head to the town of Kigoma, where I could get a train (with comfy beds and a bar & restaurant) that would take me all the way across the country to the capital, Dar es Salaam, where I would stay for a few days before heading northwards to Nairobi in Kenya. So the next day I was googling some information just to make sure I knew exactly what I was doing, and found out some depressing news – the railway line that I was supposed to use to cross Tanzania was out of order due to recent flood damage, some important part of it, a bridge or something, was recently swept away. The only other way to cross Tanzania was by a back breaking busride, which would take a few days. Even 10 hours on a bus in Africa is a nightmare, 2 days in a bus would be the end of me, I’d arrive in Dar es Salaam an old, crippled, shell of a man. Then I found out that the visa for entry into Tanzania would cost me $100… a hundred dollars! Just to walk into Tanzania. Are they trying to scare tourists away or what? The Uganda visa is free, Rwanda is $50, Burundi $40, Kenya $25… and Tanzania $100. Well if their plan with the high visa fees is to scare tourists away, it works. I gave Tanzania the middle finger and decided to head back north, and make my way to Nairobi via Uganda. Cheeky Tanzanian feckers. I booked a bus to Rwanda for the next day and said my goodbyes to Ann.

The next day as I was getting stamped out of Burundi, the immigration officer asked me how my trip was. “Grand yeah”, I said, “Lake Tanganyika was nice…” I didn’t mention the dead bodies or streams of blood or gunshots or dodgy military guys or the political climate so tense you could bate it with a hurley. I got stamped into Rwanda and made my way to Kigali for a night and met up with the old crew for a few drinks.

Soon after I was on my merry way to Kampala Uganda, my home away from home at this stage. As I was getting stamped out of Rwanda, Mr. Immigration raised his eyebrow and noticed something about my passport. “You didn’t pay to get into Rwanda?” he asked. I said “No, the immigration guy just gave me the stamp at the border… is there a problem?” “Yes,” he said, “you should have paid to enter Rwanda, there is no evidence of payment received here. You must give me $60 to leave.” “But your guys at the border just let me in, didn’t ask me for any money. It’s the Rwandese government that made the mistake, it’s not my fault!” He was having none of it though. The thing was, I didn’t have $60 to give him, but thankfully there was a bank nearby where I saw VisaCard stickers on the window. I called in and asked them if they could sort me out. “Sorry, the VisaCard service is not working today.” Things rarely happen the way you want them to here in Africa, and it’s pointless to complain about it, everybody just says T.I.A. which stands for This Is Africa. So this was a perfect T.I.A. moment. I saw that there was also a Western Union sticker on the window, so I was thinking I could call somebody in Ireland to wire over $60 to me. I asked them about it. “Sorry, we don’t actually do Western Union yet, we’ll have it in a few weeks.” Wow, two T.I.A.s in under 5 seconds!!! I went back to the immigration officer at the border and told him the story. We spent a few minutes going through all my options and he conferred with his colleagues in hushed tones, then he finally said “Ok, how about this, I’ll let you leave, but you have to go to the next town in Uganda, get the $60, and bring it back here.” I said not a bother. We looked eachother in the eyes, and we both knew that there was no way I was coming back to give him those crisp dollar notes. I don’t know why he let me go like that, he could have told me to go back to Kigali to get the money, but maybe he got some good sex from his wife before coming to work that day and was feeling extra jolly. He stamped me out, I got stamped into Uganda, and hopped on the bus to Kampala.

So what ever happened to Burundi?

As Burundi moved closer to its presidential elections, things started to get a bit crazier. The good advice I got in Kampala about going before it’s too late was just that: good advice. The number of grenade attacks in the country rose rapidly, in two weeks there were something like 30 grenade attacks in the Bujumbura, and the rebels were not only targeting government buildings, they were randomly throwing them into bars and restaurants. Opposition candidates were being intimidated, with one candidate actually fleeing to the neighboring Congo (it’s speculated that he’s trying to round up a new rebel force to stage a coup d’etat). One presidential candidate after the other boycotted the election until only one remained – the already president Pierre Nkunduriza. He had practically won the election before voting day. The whole thing was a very dodgy affair. In the last week or so, mutilated bodys, 14 in total, and four of them positively identified as members of an old rebel group, have begun washing up on the banks of a river west of the capital, and there have been sightings of large groups, dressed in camoflage gear and heavily armed, moving around the countryside. I smell trouble, but we’ll wait and see what happens…

So I finally made it out of Uganda. I was getting a night bus with a company called Jaguar, and my ticket said “Executive Class”. I couldn’t wait to see how non-executive it was. My bus was at 1am but the check-in time was 12.30am. At 12.15am I said my goodbyes to the folk at the hostel, exited the gates and flagged a passing boda boda.

After “checking in” at the bus station, the manager came up to me to have a friendly chat. He told me to be careful of the Rwandan ladies. I asked him why. “Because they are the most beautiful in Africa!” I had heard this so many times before and couldn’t wait to find out if it was true. How can the women just become the most beautiful in Africa after crossing an imaginary line on a map? The manager also told me that they don’t wash. That’s grand, neither do I, I’m a sweaty backpacker who makes lots of farts. He introduced me to all the staff that would be on my bus. The driver, the conductor, the mechanic and the general go-get-stuff guy. The conductor took my bag and brought it onto the bus and put it by my seat. I was really thirsty and needed some water but didn’t have any Ugandan shillings left, just Rwandan francs, so the manager went and bought me a bottle of water out of his own pocket.

For the full half an hour I was waiting around, the bus’ engine was running. They do this a lot in Africa – just leave the engine running for whatever length of time. They even leave it running when they’re filling up the tanks at the petrol station. I’m guessing it’s because the engines are in such a bad condition that if they turn it off, they may not be able to turn it on again. Ever. Anyways I got on the bus and off we sped into the night.

I love leaving African cities at night to some far-flung place, the buildings get smaller and smaller then suddenly you’re in the deep countryside flanked by silhouettes of banana plantations and tiny villages lit by candle light. I was also very excited about my first ever land border crossing – dodgy officials inspecting your passport which has a crisp $20 note stuck between the pages, being brought into the back room for interrogation, negotiating the bribe, escaping over the mountains under a hail of gunfire…. well that’s what the movies teach us, it was time to find out if it was true. Flying into a country is simple as the main airport is usually by the capital city and the customs check is more civilized and formal. Land borders are a bit more remote and rural.

The bus was nowhere near executive class by the way. The seats were harder than the finesht burren shtone.

My plan was to sleep on the bus from 1am until we reached the border at about 7am. I didn’t sleep a fecking wink, the roads were the worst ever, even worse than the ones that were the worst ever in my Kidepo story. I was lying across three seats, the seat belt didn’t work on any of them. The road got so bumpy that I was lifted about a foot into the air a few times. I thought my spine was going to snap in two every time I landed back down onto the rock hard “Executive” seats. About half the journey was actually spent in mid air. My three second power-naps probably added up to three minutes total sleep time in the six hours. It didn’t help either that the bus driver thought he was driving a Formula 1 car. The bus did have some serious power though, I thought I was drivin up the backroads in Twinnys glanzy there for a second.

After my three minutes sleep we eventually reached the border at about 7am, twas a gray, cold and drizzly morning. They told me that this is the region of Uganda where they grow their “Irish Potatoes” as it’s the only part of Uganda which has the most suitable climate where the Irish spuds can grow. Grey, wet, drizzly and cold with lots of nice green fertile land. It did actually feel a bit like home, it was the first time I had been cold and wet in a few months.

This was my first border crossing and I didn’t have a clue what to do so I was kind of nervous. I knew that you have to stamp yourself out on the Ugandan side, then walk a bit through no mans land to the Rwandan side and stamp yourself in. I decided that the best thing to do was to follow the other passengers.

So the bus stopped and everybody got out. I followed a big group through the drizzle over to a small building. Must be the immigration office I thought to myself. Nope, turned out it was the toilets. I walked around like a lost mzungu sheep for a while just wondering what to do when I heard somebody whistling and shouting “hey hey!!!” I looked around to see the driver standing by the bus and holding his hood against the rain. “You go this way!” he shouted and pointed to another building. I ran over, filled out a little form about where I was going and what I was going to do, and got my passport stamped with an exit-stamp… and that was it. No bribes or dodgyness like I was expecting! Now it was time for the Rwandan side… and time to investigate the hypothesis that once you cross the Rwandan border the women will instantly become the most beautiful in Africa.

Once again I didn’t know where to go and I was being hassled by the black market currency changer dudes that mill around every border. After I said “No I don’t need to change my money!” about a hundred times, a random money changer came over with an umbrella and brought me through no mans land to the Rwandan side – good samaritan shtyle.

So, Rwanda…… Genocide. It’s the first thing that comes to mind when you say Rwanda. Especially after the countries history being Hollywood-ized in “Hotel Rwanda”. Hundreds of thousands of people (some say around 900,000) hacked to death in 100 days while the rest of the world sat back and drank their morning coffee, reading stories in the papers about a million people being hacked to death. “Oh jaysus isn’t that terrible… hey Biddy where’s me tay??” I suppose it had nothing to do with us Irish but it would have been nice to send over a few boyos to help sort it out.

The majority Hutu tribe massacred the minority Tutsi tribe. The whole thing began after a plane carrying the presidents of both Rwanda and Burundi was shot down just as it was preparing to land in Kigali airport. I’m not going to go through the gruesome history, this is a jolly blog, and anyways, you should know the general jist of what went on here.

Atheism Time!

The Genocide is also one of the many many cases against the existence of god. How could a loving and caring god let a million of his people get hacked to death as they prayed to him constantly for help? Because he’s not there obviously! If he does exist he’s an arsehole of the highest order not worthy of an ounce of worship, and anyone who does worship him might as well be worshiping the devil. A lot of people were actually killed in churches, where they all piled in for prayer and sanctuary. While praying, the doors would be locked from the outside (sometimes by the priests themselves) and the church would be set ablaze with hundreds of people screaming to get out. Grenades would also be thrown in the windows, blowing innocent kids to smithereens. Some of these churches are still around Rwanda as memorials, still bearing the damage from grenade shrapnel and splatters of blood on the walls…. what was god doing during the genocide? Having a cup of camomile tea? I actually asked a christian missionary about this, and she told me matter of factly that “you know, god was actually crying with them… he also felt their pain…” Me bollix.

Those lives could have been saved if they weren’t christians, they would have hopped straight over the border to safe haven instead of going to the churches for a bit of a pray.

Anyways back to the story.

I queued up to get stamped in, and as I was waiting I just had a gander to my left to see if there were any Rwandan women around, and through the drizzle I could see a Rwandan policewoman standing guard…. and she was fecking savage. It’s a scientific fact that policewomen are usually butch, fat, and ugly, so seeing this angel in a police uniform added to the bus station managers theory.

I got stamped in at the office – once again no dodginess or secret brown envelopes under the table or arse-rape in the backroom – and made my way to the bus, but we couldn’t board just yet. The border police had taken all the bags off the bus and were going through every bit of luggage – sweaty boxers n all. They were searching for…. plastic shopping bags! They’re banned in Rwanda. The whole border crossing took about an hour and a half. By about 8.30am we were on our way to the capital – Kigali.

The tourism slogan for Rwanda is “Land of a thousand hills”. I’d say it’s closer to 6 million hills. It’s absolutely ridiculous how many hills there are, and the countryside is greener than than a leprechauns hat. The road did not straighten on the way to Kigali either, it was a constant series of bends and bumps and ups and downs. The condition of the roads were excellent though, a hundred times better than Uganda. And the driving behavior was a big improvement too.

Tea Planation in the Rwandan countryside

Looking out the window on the journey to Kigali it was hard not to think about the genocide. I had just finished reading one of the best books on the genocide, “Shake Hands with the Devil”, a first hand report written by none other than the UN Commander of Operations in Rwanda. He witnessed the genocide from start to finish, and his book was full of details which were still fresh in my mind. Maybe it was from sleep deprivation or maybe I’m just a sick motherfucker, but any river we crossed I imagined it being full of bloated dead bodies, or any village we drove through I imagined a pure bloodbath, which is exactly how it was 15 years ago. The weapon of choice was the machete. 900,000 in 100 days. In reality I saw nothing but lush green rolling hills, nice tranquil aul villages and friendly kids waving at the bus as it passed through the towns.

We got to Kigali at about 11am and I was bollixed. I had read in the news that there had been a few grenade attacks in the city a week before I arrived, three were killed and 30 injured. They say it was the Interahamwe, “those who fight together”. The Interahamwe were the guys who conducted the genocide in 1994. With these grenade attacks they were trying to instill fear in the capital before the upcoming presidential elections, which are in August. One of the grenade attacks was at the bus station that I was pulling into… I looked out the window. The city looked like it was business as usual, back to normal. Or so it seemed….

I hopped off the bus and grabbed a boda boda to a cheap hotel that my friend recommended to me. The bodas in Kigali drive very well. They all wear helmets, wear green reflective jackets with a license number on the back, and they all have to carry a spare helmet for their passenger. And it’s only one passenger per bike unlike Uganda where only a few nights ago I hopped onto a boda with two other people for a 15 minute ride home from the club at 7am, and the driver was practically sitting on the handlebars, karma sutra style.

I got off at my hotel, called “Auberge la Caverne”. It seemed like a pretty nice spot, the manager was standing at the front door watching the day go by. He smiled and said “Karibu” to me, which is Swahili for welcome. I smiled back and said “Hi”, then he hocked up a massive phlegm but didn’t spit it out, he just swallied it back down as if he was knocking back a shot. From that day on I could always tell if the manager was around – just listen out for the sound of serious phlegmmage. It sounded like a mix between a terminal lung cancer cough, an AIDS patients last dying puke and explosive leper diarrhea.

Out the back of the bar was a big courtyard with all the rooms. After having a good sleep in the hotel I had a leisurely stroll up town to check it out. The city is built on many many hills and when you go for a walk up town, you really walk UP. The city center is actually on top of one of the hills. Looking at a map of Kigali you think to yourself “Ah, the shop isn’t too far away, shouldn’t be hard to get to”, but what the map doesn’t show is topography. You are constantly either walking uphill or downhill.

Kigali city center, on top of a hill.

I took this picture from a hill of a school on a hill and there are more hills behind it.

Even the roundabout in the city center is on a slope

 

There wasn’t much going on in the center, as in it wasn’t very “African”. It was a big change from Kampala. It was very European. People were speaking French. I went into a cafe and got a cappuccino and a croissant. The streets were spotless and had cats eyes. In Kampala people walk on the roads and j-walk all over the place. Here in Kigali they kept to the paths, and only crossed at zebra crossings, which the traffic obeyed. The traffic lights worked, unlike Kampala. There were bins everywhere, unlike Kampala where the bin is any free space on the ground. There was no smog, cars were in good condition. It seemed like they had some sort of NCT going. Any bit of greenery was well maintained, bushes were nicely trimmed. In the center of the main roundabout in town there was nice big fountain ringed with flowers and grass. Every second Sunday, Rwanda has a mandatory community service programme, where the citizens have to rise early and hit the streets to clean up, cut bushes, hedges, grass, sweep the paths, collect rubbish, paint this that or the other. In every shop they had a framed picture of President Kagame up on the wall. He was the leader of the rebel group RPF (revolutionary peoples front I think…) that rescued Rwanda from the genocide. Since 1994, Kagame seems to have done a very good job of getting his country back on track.

Since Rwanda recently joined the Commonwealth, President Kagame is trying to introduce English as an official language, so everybody comes up and tries out their English with Mr. Mzungu. All around Uganda and Rwanda they have street vendors of “airtime” – phone credit. There was one aritime vendor stationed outside Nakumatt, a 24-hour shopping center, who came up for a chat. I needed to find Ecobank, which had the only ATM in Rwanda that could accept international cards. I asked the airtime vendor where it was, and instead of giving me directions he brought me there, a good ten minute walk. Sound out. After another hour or so of wandering around town I went back to the hotel to get some grub where there was a sort of dinner buffet set up. Chips, potatoes, vegetables, meat and whatnot. I walked past the buffet and went to the bar to order a beer first, and the manager asked me “You don’t like food?” He probably meant to say “Don’t you want to eat?”

As I was walking to my room there was a couple sitting outside having a few sips. We greeted and chatted for a while. Actually that’s a lie we didn’t really greet, the girl jumped up and tried to grab my hair and said “I want your hair!!” then we started to chat. Their names were Jean Louis and Latifah. Jean Louis was half Rwandan and half Belgian, and lived in Belgium. He was on a business trip in Rwanda trying to start up a new tourism company, and Latifa was his girlfriend, from Burundi. They invited me out to the pub. I said I’d join them in a while after surfing the net and unpacking my bags so they gave me directions to where they would be.

After my dinner and the net and a few beers I decided to hit the road. I asked the receptionist if it was safe to walk to town, as it was about midnight. He said “Yeah it is safe to walk, nobody can touch you.” Mzungus seem to have a sort of immunity here. The people will pick-pocket you, or maybe mug you, but they can never kill you as that would cause way too much trouble for the country. I have never heard of any recent reports of tourists being killed in Uganda or Rwanda. So I sauntered up towards the pub which was called Garden something or other. Inside I met Jean Louis and Latifa and some of their mates, including a really really gay lad called Patrique. It was the first African gay I had seen. It’s illegal to be gay in Rwanda (and it’s really illegal to be gay in Uganda – a government minister recently rallied to have gays sentenced to death), and you’re supposed to report them to the police, but I decided to leave him off for the time being. Latifa went to the toilet and left her handbag on the table, which Patrique looted for some lipstick and threw it on. It was funny watching Patrique, they’re the exact same as the ones at home. There really must be some sort of specific gene. Jean Louis was sitting between me and Patrique and he pointed to Patrique and said “Did you know that Patrique is a faggot?” really loudly. Patrique didn’t seem to mind. We sessioned away in the pub for a few hours. The bottles of beer in Rwanda are about the size of wine bottles. It feels strange to hold them and sip from them at first but you eventually get used to it. I was on a beer called Turbo King, a 720Ml bottle of dark ale, 6.5%, tasted like Guinness. Latifa was really coming onto me even though her boyfriend Jean Louis was right beside me. And he didn’t seem to mind at all, which made me think that maybe she was a prostitute. She didn’t have any job, she told me that she was a student but later on I found out that she was lying. Jean Louis was always telling me to take her to the club “Go on, have fun!”

The average size of a beer bottle in Rwanda is about the same as a wine bottle.

Seriously strong stuff... brewed in the Congo!

 

In the bar with Jean Louis, Latifah and some randomers.

Latifah, Patrique, and Sofi

 

Anyways, we finished up in the pub and made our way to a club called Planet. By jaysus, I thought that the prostitutes in Kampala were bad. This club was riddled with prostitutes, and instead of coming up to you and greeting first, like the ones in Kampala do, these ones just walk up and kiss you! I was playing a game of pool, chalking my cue getting ready for the next shot, when I notice somebody standing beside me. I turn around and get a tongue into the mouth from this dirty yoke. She could have had black sack in her mouth three minutes before so I take a gulp of beer to wash away any traces of balls. This place was absolutely crawling with hookers. And crawling with mzungus also looking for hookers. Another one of the nights I was in Planet I saw a 60 year old mzungu with a girl that couldn’t have been older than 20. Twas a bit sick. After a few games of pool and some dancing and general sessioning we get a taxi back to the hotel together, and the taxi driver had a huge joint hanging out of his mouth! I eventually fell into bed at about 5.30am, pretty satisfied with my first night in Kigali.

The next day I went to the Genocide Memorial Museum. It was a pretty impressive museum, well organized, clean and modern, but the subject matter was fierce depressing. They even had about 50 skulls on display, many of which where cracked & broken, had bullet holes in them, had clear machete marks on them, and pretty much all of them were missing their teeth. There was a room which had huge life-size family photos of children, and underneath each photo was a plaque telling us a few details about their life, including the cause of death. For example:

Photography was prohibited in the museum, took this sneaky one james bond style...

 

Other horrible causes of death were “Smashed against a wall” and “Grenade thrown into shower”. The fact that the museum was built over mass graves drove the seriousness home. Was I reading Ariane’s obituary over her very body? These thoughts were really too heavy to ponder.

 

I bumped into two guys I met before in the backpackers hostel in Kampala and we started chatting away and having a bit of a laugh, then we remembered where we were and silently moved on…s

One room had a display of clothes taken from the victims, still stained with blood. Another room just had hundreds and hundreds of family photos of people who were killed. Outside the museum were a few mass graves. All of this was way too depressing, but at the same time I couldn’t stop thinking about the beautiful receptionist upstairs. I was trying to decide if this was the right place to have a friendly aul chat with her. I decided I better not. Am I sick or what? Anyways, I didn’t come to Rwanda to hear about the genocide. I’ve seen, read and heard enough about it. I wasn’t a “Genocide Tourist”. I asked many people in Uganda about good things to do in Rwanda and they were all like “Oh you have to check out the genocide museum, and the genocide churches, and the mass graves and the skulls and the blood and the bodies and everything!” Feck that. I was supposed to visit the two memorial churches just outside the city after the museum, but I was too depressed and decided to cross anything to do with the genocide off my list. I came to see the new Rwanda, not the old one. The museum was free, but tips are appreciated. I gave them about 5 dollars and a few coins, then got a boda boda back to town.

After wandering around town and having a gander at the internet I met up with Jean Louis and Latifa and we had beers in the hotel bar for the rest of the night.

The next week was just spent hanging out with Jean Louis and Latifa, going out, having fun, going to nice restraunts, just generally being an unemployed person with lots of money. I went to visit the Hotel des Milles Collines – Hotel Rwanda for those who don’t know. Everybody’s seen the movie so I don’t really need to explain much. It had a very nice pool by the bar, but it cost $10 for a swim, so I just sat by the pool and had some beer whilst reading me book.

The pool in "Hotel Rwanda"

One day I got a call from Latifa saying she was at some hotel in town swimming in the pool with friends, she wanted me to come for a few beers and hang out. I got a boda to the hotel, entered the doors and followed the sound of frolicking girls. Latifa and three of her friends were there in the pool – frolicking away, scantily clad. I sat at the bar by the pool and they came over in their bikinis for a beer. I felt like a pimp.

Sylvi and Latifah by the pool, now clothed. Sorry guys.

I got up one morning and did my daily routine, grab a coffee from the bar and head to the local shop to get the paper. I read that there were three more grenade attacks in the city. One at the Genocide Memorial Museum, one at some area I can’t remember, and the third was at the cinema in Naymirambo, but luckily that one didn’t go off. Security was stepped up that day and I was no longer allowed stand outside the shopping center and sip a coke, as it was deemed as suspicious behavior – even though I was a white Irish lad and had nothing to do with any of the problems in Africa… Bags were now also checked going into the shopping center. Police and military presence was increased, and they started checking ID on the street. That day as I was walking around town I was just waiting for an explosion, or for a grenade to just silently roll up to my feet.

The next day I decided to go to the lakeside village of Kibuye, two hours from Kigali through ridiculously hilly terrain. Kibuye is stuck right on the shore of Lake Kivu, which is also part of the Congo, and it’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. They call it “Africa’s Switzerland”. I don’t have a clue what Switzerland looks like but going by that description I’m guessing Switzerland is very green and hilly and sunny with beautiful blue lakes and has black people living by those lakes. Kibuye is a really tiny village, with not much going for it except Lake Kivu. It’s the perfect place to relax and do sweet eff all for a few days.

The dining table outside my guesthouse... there was a mad scramble for it ever evening.

Lake Kibuye, fair tranquil boy.

Memorial Church just by the lake.

I think this was some sort of mass grave.

Kibye village. Not sure what the roundabout is for as there is zero traffic…

For three days I swam in the lake, drank some beer, ate some food, relaxed, swam a bit more, drank some beer, swam again, came back to the shore for beer, then relaxed a bit, then swam… no wait I had dinner, then swam, relaxed….. etc. etc.

Since I was basically within swimming distance of the Congo, I thought about heading there via the Rwandan town of Gisenyi. Gisenyi is also on lake Kivu, just a few hours drive northwards along the shore, and is literally next door to the Congolese town of Goma. You leave the town of Gisenyi, 5 minutes later you are in the Congo. You can sit in a bar in Rwanda while sipping a beer and actually see Goma town in Congo. Goma was recently destroyed by a volcanic eruption and the lava that destroyed the town is still there on the streets to this day. Instead of removing the lava, they rebuilt a lot of the town on top of the volcanic rock, sometimes using the volcanic rock itself to build walls and houses. I asked around in Kibuye if there was anything to do in Goma. Somebody told me that I can go see the gorillas, but I already did that, and I wouldn’t go see the gorillas in the Congo anyways. Unlike Uganda, the gorilla trips in the Congo are basically private-run. The park rangers are due a few years wages, so they do the tours on the sly, pocket the cash, and basically don’t care what happens to the gorillas. In Uganda where the parks are fairly well regulated by the government, if the rangers hear so much as a sneeze from you, you can’t visit the gorillas as human diseases can easily be passed on to them which could pretty much wipe out whole communities – like when Columbus brought the flu to the native Americans. In the Congo they’d let you in with a flu, leprosy, farmers lung and the black plague combined as long as you have the cash. They’d probably even let you take a young’n home in your backpack.

One NGO worker in Kibuye said that her company actually wouldn’t let her go to Goma so she didn’t know much about it, but what she had heard from other people was that there was nothing to do, it’s basically just a huge UN depot, a drop off point for aid to the rest of the region. And when the UN are in town, the prices go sky-high.

In the end I decided not to go. It would have been nice to get a cool Congo stamp on my passport but I decided to wait a few years time for the political climate to stabilize and actually enjoy my stay there. 3 million people were killed there in the most recent civil war, enough to pretty much empty Ireland, and I’ve heard lots dodgy stories from other tourists who were brave (or stupid) enough to venture there. One Hungarian guy told me about a motorbike ride between towns where he passed a refugee camp and they all tried to slash him with machetes as he and the driver sped past. One guy I met in Kampala who ventured to Goma showed me one photo that summed up the place. It was like a scene from a post apocalyptic movie, something like Mad Max.

Goma city, like a scene out of Mad Max. Photo courtesy of Shane Ahern from Co. Clare boy! Can't believe a culchie like him survived there.

But in the end, Goma isn’t really the Congo. It was a short walk from Rwanda. My friend Zac who cycled from Kinshasa to Kampala was really and truly in the Congo. Check Kinshasa on the map and just imagine cycling from there to Kampala by yourself. The Congo is larger than Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal and the UK combined. It took him three months, cycling alone through the jungle. Being in Goma for a day, a town that takes up 0.000000000001% of the Congo, is not really being in the Congo. Zac actually used to complain about tourists who hop into the town for the day then hopback to Rwanda just to collect the visa stamp, then go home to tell everybody they’ve been to the Congo and “survived”. His visa stamp took him three months of sweat, blood, malaria, filth and endless other pains in the arses, and I was going to get the same stamp as him for just walking around a single town for a few hours. I decided not to go, I couldn’t go back home and say I’ve been to the Congo when I know a guy who actually cycled all the way across it alone. I felt I would be cheating. It’s like saying I’ve been to Dubai since I had an 8 hour stopover there…

A scanned pic of Zac. He was featured in the Spanish version of National Geographic Taveler, he was interviewed for this article in Kampala backpackers.

Kinshasa to Kampala is about 2000km, and took about 3 months for Zac to cycle.

One day in Kibuye as I was walking out of the internet cafe two lads approached me for a chat. It was the usual “hey what are you doing here tourism is it? How do you like it etc. etc. etc.” These guys were Congolese refugees and were just waiting for their bus back to the refugee camp. I decided to go for a beer with them in a nearby bar as I had nothing better to do. We had some beers, a game of pool and a bit of a laugh – except for when they told me some dodgy Congo stories. They even invited me to their refugee camp…. at 6pm…. and it was getting dark. It gets dark very quickly here in East Africa. (Those of you who are handy at the aul physics can figure out why) Hmmm…. should I take a trip to a Congolese refugee camp with two refugees….. at night? “Come on, come visit us in the camp!” ……I politely declined. “I’ll go the next day!” I told them.

I prrrrrrobably would have survived but didn’t want to take any chances.

Back at the lodge I called Latifa to see if they were still throwing grenades around Kigali. She said all was quiet, so I hopped on a bus back to the capital the next day.

I spent about another week in Kigali hanging out with Jean-Louis and Latifa and co, and finally went for a swim in Hotel Rwanda. It was kind of worth the $10 since you could stay in there all day and nip over to the bar for beers and food.

I met a Dutch girl at my hotel who had just arrived from the Congo for a short break in Kigali. She was basically on mandatory leave from work as her job in the Congo was too stressful and it was affecting her psychologically. As we were chatting away about this and that, nice and relaxed in peaceful ‘ol Kigali, somebody in the bar popped open a bottle of champagne and she jumped out of her seat thinking it was a gunshot… “that’s what the Congo will do to you” she said…. any loud noise that night gave her a bit of a jump. I don’t know what the feck this timid girl was doing in the Congo, the funny thing is, these NGO workers apply for jobs in the dodgiest places in the world, she’s not forced to work in the Congo, she can go home anytime she wants. They enjoy it in an adrenaline-rush sort of way… and of course because they want to “save the world”, but I can’t see how building a single school or bridge in a country as big as the Congo will make a difference. From my expert political point of view, the Congo is forever bollixed, at least in my lifetime.

Latifa brought me to a sheebeen one night in a slummy area of Kigali. We were walking along the road when she told me to follow her through a load of dodgy alleyways that stank of piss. The people we passed were staring at me, they were probably… actually definitely wondering what the hell this mzungu was doing wandering around these parts. We eventually emerged onto a small street and crossed it towards a load of lads playing pool on a pooltable just thrown outside in the open with a small bit of galvanized shteel over it as a roof. Once again I got the head stared off me. I heard a kids voice shouting ‘MZUUUUUNGU!” and a young lad of about 3 years old came running over to me and gave me a big hug. “Come on!” Latifa said and disappeared into some more alleyways.

Stinking off piss...

In an area known as "The 12 thieves" ... or was it two thieves? Can't remember, there's thieves involved anyways.

We eventually made it to the sheebeen, run by Patriques mother. They had the cheapest beers in town. I was the first mzungu to ever step foot into this sheebeen and people seemed happy to see me.

We were drinking out at the “bar” when Patrique came and told us to come out the back to the livin room. Wow, VIP treatment. Little did I know that any customer was free to wander around the house. Out the back was Patriques sister and brother, a girl called Sara that I had met before in club Planet, and some other random dude. The random dude instantly latched onto me and told me non-stop that I was welcome to Rwanda. “You are welcome here! Feel secure! Kigali is very safe! People are friendly! Look at my ID I am a supervisor at the airport! You can trust me! Welcome to Kigali!” He was pissed as a fart, but friendly. He kept on telling me how welcome I was to Rwanda and how trustworthy and not dodgy he was. He eventually got up to leave. He was stumbling all over the place. “I am going home now, bye bye” and got his car keys out of his pocket. I was like “What? You’re driving??” “Yes,” he said, “it is only half an hour drive, it’s Ok” and fell out the door.

The backroom of the sheebeen

The younglad who souted MZUNGUU at me and followed us into the sheebeen with naer a mother in sight.

At about midnight myself and Latifa made our way back to the hotel. After a while I needed to take a slash so went to find a suitable place to do it. I went around the side of a building. As I was doing my business I heard a “ksss kssss”. It’s what Africans do to get your attention, like “pssst”… except with a K. So I was looking around in the dark for the source of this “ksss ksss” when I eventually focused on this big dude with a shotgun walking towards me. If I hadn’t already pissed I probably would have done it right there on the spot. He started speaking Kinyarwanda to me and I was just replying “ehhh ammm ehmm…. what? I dunno… eh… piss? Pee pee?” Then Latifa who was waiting by the corner shouted at me “Come on I can’t wait all night!”. I told her that there was a strange guy with a shotgun talking to me. She exchanged words with him and told me that it’s just a security guard guarding the building that I was pissing behind…. and he was wondering what a mzungu was doing stumbling around the building at midnight. It must have been a strange sight to the guard, I don’t blame him. But it was pretty scary, the thing is that the security guards here can wear anything. They have a basic uniform, but they can throw anything they want over it – a big puffy FIFA hoody and a balaclava and fingerless gloves – plus Ak47s and pump action shotguns. They look like pure dodgy scumbags, especially at night. I thanked the security guard for not blasting me to smithereens and we made our way back to the hotel.

One day I was walking out of the supermarket when I passed a mzungu…. a mzungu I recognized. And I could tell that he recognized me too. I passed him, both of us giving eachother strange looks. We stopped, turned around and pointed at eachother. “Do I know you?” “Yeah I think so” “Where have I seen you?” “I dunno…. Kampala maybe?” Then it clicked. I met him in the Kampala back-packers for like 5 minutes. He was a strange German guy with glasses who always talked about Guatemala… for the whole 5 minutes I knew him. I was having a conversation in the hostel with somebody about something, anything, when this German guy just butts in and says “Yeah… it’s like that time I was in Guatemala….” So me and my friend would converse some more and then the guy would pipe up again ”Yeah…… just like Guatemala…” We’d look over and see this strange German guy standing there with thick glasses on. It’s as if the only things that have ever happened to him were in the only country that he has ever been in, which is Guatemala, even though he’s from Germany. I’m going to call his condition Guatemala Syndrome, and since I don’t remember his name I’m going to call him German guy.

Anyways, back to the supermarket in Kigali. After we both realized where we had met each other, German guy asked me if I knew of any nice places to go for a beer or food or whatever, he had just arrived in town and didn’t know what to do. Since I had nothing better to do I decided to go for a pint with the lad and find out if he had anything to say that wasn’t Guatemala related. Since it was his first day in Rwanda I decided to be a bit of a tourguide so I brought him to Hotel Rwanda for a few pints. Turns out he was a decent normal friendly chap and he didn’t mention Guatemala even once. What was supposed to be just a few sips turned into a bit of a pub crawl and we ended up in this place called Sunny Bar or something. Some Rasta dude called Nanu came up to us for a chat and ended up becoming part of the crew – The Deadly Biyez Crew. He introduced me to his cousin, Dr. Cloud, allegedly the most famous musician in Rwanda, has his own music videos on TV and everything, nice chap. After getting a bit drunk and comfortable in eachothers presence we started talking about the genocide to Nanu. We asked him what was the difference between the Hutus and Tutsis, how can you tell them apart on the street? “Simple” said Nanu, who was a Tutsi himself. “Hutus are stupid…. and ugly”

Nanu the rasta

The bar eventually closed and we were shooed out onto the streets at about 1am. I asked Nanu if there were any good clubs he knew of that would be open of a Monday night, he said he knew just the place. Sky Lounge it was called. So we trekked through the city to find the place. We eventually got there after a half hour walk. It looked pretty seedy, it was underground – literally. You had to walk down a ramp as if you were going into an underground carpark, the bassy music getting louder the lower you descended into the darkness, then pay entrance through a tiny hole in a metal door. All you’d see were two black hands taking your money through the hole. Then the door would clatter open. Once inside it seemed alright. They had cool seats at the bar, they were like bucket seats with reclining backs. The place was full of prostitutes and one instantly latched onto me and German guy cos as we all know by now, white man = fat wallet. I knew that my one was a prostitute but German guy thought that he was in love with a nice decent girl and that she was “the one”. I pulled him aside and told him the situation, that he didn’t get lucky and that most of these girls were probably prostitutes. This was his first time in an African club after all. He ignored my advice anyways and continued to flirt and dance with the girl all night. My one went her own way after a short while of being ignored, she wasn’t even pretty and I think she may have been some sort of transvestite because she kept on ramming her crotch into me as if she had a cock. My leg actually got a bit sore after a while. Another girl asked me if she could suck my “duck”, I got a laugh out of it, at least she’s trying to learn English.

After a few more beers and a bit of dancing, German guy came over to me with a big excited look on his face “Hey man she’s coming home with me tonight! How awesome is that?! Let’s go get a taxi now!” Wow, this guy was a real stud, he managed to “pull” a prostitute. I told him one last time that this girl was going to ask him for money after the job was done but he was like “whatever man!”. So we shared a taxi back to town, I got off at my hotel, Nanu went his own way, and German guy sped off into the night with his great catch. I fell into bed and drifted off to sleep…

I was awoken the next morning by somebody banging on the window and shouting my name. I looked at my watch, it was like 8am and I was fierce hungover. I pulled open the curtains to see who the feck was smashing my window in. It was German guy and he had a worried look on his face. “Sean man, thank god you’re here, let me in, I think I have AIDS!!!” I let him in and he explained the whole story. Once he got back to his hostel, which was actually a missionary church with some cheap guest lodging, the security guard wouldn’t let him bring the girl in, he knew well that she was a prostitute, and you can’t be bringing those types back to a christian guesthouse, so he had to bribe his way in. His wallet was already getting a bit lighter and he hadn’t even seen a single boob yet. Once in the room he started worrying about the situation, pacing the room thinking he was going to get kicked out first thing in the morning, realizing that I was right, that this girl was going to cost him money, she might have any number of STDs… he decided to kick her out. So he turned around to tell her to leave, but she was already naked on his bed. “Oh well” he thought, and got stuck into it. Soon after that, the condom broke. He shat a brick and told her to leave, but she said she wanted 20,000 Francs first, which is about 35euro. He gave it to her and off she went, mission complete.

So here we was chain smoking in my room telling he has every STD under the sun. I managed to calm him down a bit. If you go to the doctor and get the necessary medication within the first week your chances of contracting HIV are something like one in a million, so I told him to get his ass to the doctor pronto. He decided to go to the Genocide museum instead. “Fair enough” I said and told him I’d see him later. I didn’t hear from him again until a week later when he sent me a message on facebook telling me he went back to Uganda the day after the incident. He had the medication and hopefully everything would be alright….

I also decided to leave. I set out a rough plan. Head south to Burundi, check it out for a while, then south again to Tanzania to the town of Kigoma, where I could get a 40 hour epic train ride across the whole country to the capital, Dar es Salaam, just on the Indian Ocean. I heard that the train has proper cabins and beds, and also has a bar and restaurant. I couldn’t wait. After that, up to Kenya then back to Uganda, full circle around Lake Victoria – Michael Palin shtyle.

DAY 9 – KOTIDO

The start to another lazy day in Kotido, I wake up at noon and saunter down to the Botanic Hotel where the staff now call me Jesus, for a breakfast of bananas, beef, sauce, a pancake and some coca cola. Once again it’s absolutely roasting, so I try stick to the shade – the bar is usually your best bet. I head to a bar that I haven’t tried – something “wine cellar”. I didn’t expect them to have wine, as there is no advertising standards authority in uganda (Luxury toilet paper is made out of granite, orange juice is not orange juice it’s diluted ribena, fresh dairy milk is actually UHT , every internet cafe says “fastest connection” – the list goes on….) but yes, they did sell wine. In Kotido! But I settled for the usual Nile beer.

Afterwards, I called over to the UWA office to hand in the things I bought for Christine the day before. A UWA truck had come into town again today, and the office was full of rangers who were absolutely pissed out if their heads. One ranger who was sitting on the couch with his AK47 was so drunk and his eyes were so battered that I thought he was crying. He shtumbled up out of the chair to shake my hand and welcome me. Judith came in and I gave her the radio and playing cards and I asked her to deliver them to Christine. “No problem, these rangers will take it to the park for you.” So I had to entrust the gifts to these rangers, pissed out of their heads on Waragi probably, but it was my only choice, as these random vehicles that come through town are as close to a postal service this region has.

I went to a craft shop that I spotted the day before, but it was closed. I asked somebody outside if it was going to open today and they told me that the owners friend was shot last night here in town, she took the day off. Hmm, ok. I was in Kaabong the day before and somebody was shot, now I’m in Kotido and there’s been another shooting. Maybe the travel advice about Karamoja was correct… but I haven’t really felt any danger yet except for hearing the lions roar that morning I was walking through Kidepo Park. So as usual, I sauntered off to another pub, this time the bar in my lodge with the local paper.

I’m sitting down in the bar reading the paper away and two young girls who are walking past the door spot me and come running in with big pretty smiles. They shake my hand and do a little bow, as all children in Uganda do to show respect for adults. They didn’t seem to be able to speak English, they were just giggling and talking to eachother for a while and laughing. I started making faces and they started imitating me. I’d push my nose up like a pig and stick my tongue out and they’d do the same, then I’d make a farting sounds with my tongue while crossing my eyes and they’d do the same. Even though we didn’t speak the same language we were having the craic. Anyways all of a sudden the sweetness went away and they said

DAY 4 – Kotido to Kidepo

I got up at about 8am and went to “wash up”. There was no running water. I told some random guy about the situation and he said welcome to Karamoja. He told me that the taps were installed in the bathrooms in anticipation of a water supply system. Maybe they’ll have one by the year 2067???

I met Christine for breakfast. She brought me to a Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) office just down from the lodge where she said I could store my bag. In the office I met the local officer called Judith, a friendly, tall, middle aged lady with nice straight hair, and a hairlip. (Did I really have to mention that she had a hairlip? I dunno. Does it add to the story? Dunno. You tell me. I don’t know how to describe characters.)

Anyway, she offered to store my bag in her house, I said wow, that’s really nice of you thanks. So she opened a door in the office and put my bag in a room which contained a mattress and some scattered clothes. That was her house. Once again I was amazed how the government treated their staff. She was getting paid 200,000 per month (about 60euro) to run the only UWA office in Northern Uganda. I suppose it’s enough to get by on, but with the amount of money that the mzungus are giving to the Ugandan tourist authority ( for example 330euros to spend one hour with the gorillas) I would have thought that at least she would have her own house – but alas – c’est Uganda. By the way I was the second tourist she had met all year. She receives on average one tourist per month. That’s how remote her office is.

So myself and Christine the ranger went for breakfast to a restaurant called Botanic Hotel. I don’t know why they called it a hotel as it’s not a hotel it’s just a restaurant. Anyways, we got some breakfast – the only option on the menu – beef and bananas with meat sauce. It was actually delicious, I’m taking that recipe back to Ireland! I also asked for some tea. The waitress asked “would you like wet tea or dry tea?”…… I was like “HA?” She explained that wet tea comes with milk, dry tea has no milk, just hot water. Right…..

Lots of kids were coming over to the restaurant to have a look at the only mzungu in town. I felt like a zoo animal.

I asked Christine about transport to the Kidepo Park. She said that we can walk around town after breakfast and try and find a truck that’s heading north. These private trucks wouldn’t be able to bring us to the park, but it would at least get us closer, furgther norgth.

After breakfast we went back to the UWA office where we found some great news. Judith told us “word on the street is that there is a UWA pickup coming to town today!!!” The park accountant had to do a few things in Kotido town, then head back. Christine told me that we can hop on the back of the pickup and go straight to the park – for free! Awesome. I was envisaging a five month journey on the back of a camel or something. I really felt as if the leprechauns were watching over me. First of all, Lonely Planet said I was going to get shot in Karamoja, but I was still alive. Second, a guy on a bus said that if I wanted to get to the park I was fucked for transport, most tourists fly, but lo and behold a UWA truck is coming to town for a few hours! Thirdly, I happened to bump into Christine the Kidepo Ranger, which made everything that much easier to organize. If I had decided to begin this journey one day earlier or later, I’d probably have ended up getting lost in the desert and being rared by wild dogs Mowgli style.

Karamoja is the wild north-eastern region of Uganda, infamous for it’s instability. Lonely planet says that AK47s are as common as walking sticks there, and advises against using certain roads due to the threat of ambushes. The indigenous people are “cattle rustlers” … the Karamijong believe that every cow in the land was given to them by their god, so they conduct regular cattle raids where cows are stolen thousands at a time, in the belief that what they are doing is their divine right. This had lead the Ka’jong to take up arms to protect their livestock. A land of tribes where cattle is king and cash is but a scrap of paper… or so they say.

The fco.gov.uk website says:

“We advise against all travel to Karamoja – Kotido, Moroto, Nakapiripirit, Katakwi, Kaabong, Abim, Kapchorwa and Bukwa Districts – in the north east with the exception of trips to Kidepo Valley National Park, which should be made by air… (I went thru and spent nights in those towns to get to the park) Lawlessness there is endemic (eg road ambushes). Tribal clashes are frequent and unpredictable. Small arms are widespread and deaths or injury from gun shot wounds occur regularly.”

Sounded like a bit of craic anyways.

I was partying too much in Kampala, hangovers were starting to become soothing, alcohol was my new water. I needed a break. I had heard about this Karamoja area. Any Ugandan I asked said that they haven’t been there, but it was safe for travel. The last ambush on public transport was more than a year ago. The army are disarming the tribes and now protect the farms for them. The UN is at work up there dishing out aid programs. A few days before I was going to leave, I read a newspaper article about a recent military operation in Karamoja which included gunships… In this operation the military successfully retrieved 3,000 cows from the Jie tribe which were stolen from the Dodoth tribe. Remember that bit of info as later on I have a short encounter with the Dodoth in a village called Kaabong.

DAY 1. Kampala – Mbale

I put together a small plan of action. My main aim was to move north and town-hop around Karamoja. There is also a remote National Park called Kidepo at the very north of Uganda just a few kilometers from the Sudanese border. Making it to that national park would be the cherry on top, but there is no public transport past the village of Kaabong. Most tourists fly to the parks private airstrip, but I’m not a rich fat american, and I also want to check out the vast area between Kampala and Kidepo, not just fly over it and point at the villages below. I heard that there are random pickups that travel around the region which you can hop onto for a bargained price, but I was told

The Ugandan’s have the best teeth I’ve ever seen. Walking through the towns, all you see are bright shining smiles. They may be poor, they may not be able to afford school for themselves even though they are 30 years old, but they do make sure to take care of their teeth. Shame on the western world! I’ve seen much more bad teeth in Ireland than I have here. Can ye buy some Colgate or something?

They are also the best dancers I’ve ever seen. Going to a pub or club is like going to a dance show. You can just buy a beer and watch people dancing for the whole night, you’ll have great fun. They move their knees, asses, hips, shoulders, elbows, anything but their feet, the feet stay pretty much stay still. Compared to back home it’s the opposite, I think of the clubs back home and I can see people stamping their feet or jumping around, stabbing the air with their hands. There’s no shtyle. They’re also the sexiest dancers I’ve ever seen. Any time I head out with Mzungus, a good chunk of the time is spent just standing around watching the women dance. And when you dance with them that’s where the fun begins, they have booty and they know how to use it. Weapons of ass destruction. Here all the women have proper boobs and booty. Their side profile is like an S shape. In Ireland you notice the girls who have boobs and booty, here you’re eyes are drawn to the few girls in town who have NO boobs and booty, you’re like “what the hell is that??!!”

The people in general are very friendly. They love tourists. I can’t walk a day through town without some random person coming up for a chat. You get at least one chat, and many many greetings. “Hey how are you?” … “Hey America!” … “Mzungu HOW IS YOU???” The kids especially like tourists. You could be sitting in a shop or internet cafe or something and a little kid will come in, walk up to you, shake your hand, bow, then