Like this:

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….