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.

***

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….

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 and has some great pics online . He had been traveling for nearly two years, and 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 in Burundi, 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, bordering 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 had 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 the border – 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 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 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” – just an alleyway between a couple of shoddy buildings – I stood around wondering what to do, how to get to the 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 and ate some biscuits and just watched the people unpack 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 and 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.

He 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 and 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 the best hotel 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 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.

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 town 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. I 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.

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…

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 very good 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 almost 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 is 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”. 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…

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.

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.

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 “Give me one thousand!!!” with their hands out. Ah!!! I told them to skidaddle, and off they went.

Later as I was reading the paper a young-ish guy walked in and asked for a Waragi – Ugandan gin. I said “isn’t it a bit early for that stuff?” and he said some Swahili word, which after he explained to me I understood to mean “would you go away out of it!” His name was Andy, about 30, and the reason he was hitting the gin so early was that his colleague and good friend was shot and killed the night before. I said “ah, the girl who owned the craft shop is closed up for the day because of that shooting right? I just called in there today…” “No” he said, “that’s a different incident, there were two seperate murders here last night. My friend was ambushed at the bridge just out of town and shot dead. That craft shop girl didn’t know him.”

Jaysus. Welcome to Kotido.

I asked him about the murder. He said it was politics. Andy and his recently murdered friend are town councilors, I suppose something like “local T.D.s”. He didn’t know why his friend was murdered, but it was no accident, it was planned. They waited for him at the bridge out of town. They knew what vehicle he was driving. They assassinated him and got the hell out of there, without stealing anything. There was a definite motive. Andy was sure to find out the full story soon, as Kotido is a small enough town, and the police and military had begun to arrive in droves for investigations. I had seen the police jeeps earlier on but I thought it was just normal Karamoja every day carry-on. Maybe it is???…

I decided to join him and have a drink for his friend – an early wake – and got myself a gin. I promised never to drink this Uganda Waragi Gin ever again after a mental night in Kampala which involved me nearly getting Aids Cancer and Malaria from the the hangover, but feck, the guy was pretty depressed and he needed a drinking buddy. I checked the time – about 1.30pm. Session.

After a few gins Andy relaxed a bit and we started a long talk about absolutely everything and anything. Evolution, Aids, Religion, Female Genital Mutilation, the state of Karamoja, Corruption, nights out in Kampala, Women, Poverty, Racism – an interesting fact he told me about the Karamojong was that the area, for many many years, used to be rich in alluvial gold ie panning and sieving of riverbeds. The bulk of the gold that Karamoja once had was given to the Kenyans, Sudanese and Somalis in exchange for cattle. They would give so much gold for the smallest amount of cattle, a total rip-off for the Ka’jong, but they didn’t care. All they wanted were cows. As I mentioned at the start of this story – cattle is king.

After a few more gins the conversation descended into shite and we started having proper craic. I tell him about the legendary Buckfast, and say I wouldn’t mind a bottle of wine. So we get one each and drink it straight from the bottle. It’s 4pm in the day and we’re both in bits, customers from the lodge passing through the bar looking at these two lads falling around the place. We decide to head out for some fresh air and a cigarette. I know, fresh air, cigarette – whatever. So as we’re standing outside the door smoking, straight across the road we see two guys building a coffin. It could be for either one of the two people murdered the night before, but it still sobers Andy up a bit. A silent minute or two passes…. “I need more beer” he finally says.

We head back in and finish the wine, and get some beers. Andy got a deck of cards from behind the bar. He asked me if I knew some card game with a strange name, can’t remember what name he told me… I said “Never heard of it, but what is it? Explain it.” So he started explaining and after about half way through it suddenly clicked, he was explaining how to play take two, the card game I used to play at lunchtime in school! So we played a few rounds with some more beer. After a few more rounds of take two, he called his friend and told him to bring some sugarcane. After about ten minutes, his mate arrived, another well educated chap who knew about the whole situation in Ireland, including Sinn Fein, Fianna Fail and Gerry Adams. He had a bag of sugarcane with him. It looks like really thick bamboo, and you chop it into pieces and peel off the tough outer skin.You chew the pieces until all the juice is gone, then spit out the fiber that remains. I couldn’t eat much as it was just way too sweet, but it was a nice snack all the same.

By this stage it was getting dark. I asked Andy if there was anywhere we could go play some pool, he said there was one place in town, so off we went. On the way we called into a restaurant to order some chicken and chips. I go to take a seat and Andy says “hey, she’s gonna bring it to the pub! Let’s go!” Awesome. Imagine calling into a restaurant back home and telling them, while langers, to “bring that shit to Dannos!!!” …You’d get a smack in the head.

We finally got to the pub, our chicken and chips arriving shortly after, and sessioned away and played pool for the rest of the evening. Afterwards they showed the African Cup of Nations game Cameroon vs. Egypt – it was 1-1 in case you’re interested. My bus was leaving at 4am in the morning, and it was already about 10.30pm. I needed to get some sleep, so I said my goodbyes to Andy and the folks in the pub and headed off into the night. After about 30 seconds of walking through the pitch black, I realized that I didn’t have the slightest clue where I was, so I went back to the bar. “Eh, Andy… where the feck is my lodge??” So he brought me back to Caves Inn safe and sound. He went back to the pub to finish off the session, and I packed my bag in the most drunken way possible, set my alarm for 3.30am, then fell into a deep drunken sleep.

DAY 10 – KOTIDO TO MOROTO

The Inn manager was nice enough to wake me up for the bus at 3.30am, the exact same time as my alarm. Luckily enough my hangover wasn’t that bad, since I was still drunk. I stumbled out of bed. In the distance I could hear the bus blasting it’s horn out into the night. This is a way of saying “OK I’M ABOUT TO GO, GET THE FECK OUT OF BED RIGHT NOW IF YOU WANNA GET ON THIS BUS!!!” Well it worked.

I followed the beeping of the horn until I got to the roundabout in the center of town where the bus was parked. I thought to myself that it’s kind of silly to have a roundabout in a town with almost zero traffic. I was heading to the next town, Moroto, four hours away. This bus was also continuing to Kampala, but it would take about 15 hours and there was no way I was sitting on the banger of a bus for that length of time, full of chickens and cabbages and bags of spuds and people coughing and spluttering typhoid and meningitis all over the place, on the worst roads in Uganda. I hopped on the bus, it pulled off, and I fell back into a deep sleep….

Poke.

Poke.

Poke….

Sir!

Poke.

Excuse me sir!

Hey!

“Whaa?”

“We are in Moroto. Is this your stop?”

The sun was up. I looked out the window and recognized the place. Yes, I was in Moroto, and “Yes, thank you! This is my stop!” The mysterious good Samaritan said goodbye and exited the bus, I don’t even remember what he looks like. Well, ok he was black.

I got off the bus like a zombie, now truly hungover from the night before, and fell onto a boda boda. “Mount Moroto Hotel!” I told him, and off we sped. Moroto Hotel is in the outskirts of town, just at the foot of Mount Moroto itself. It’s nice, quiet, and relaxed, no traffic except for the odd UN jeep leaving their nearby base.

You remember I was in Moroto before? Well so did the staff at Mt. Moroto Hotel, and when they saw me arrive at 8am they gave me a free “welcome back” breakfast – omelette, tea and bread. After breakfast I got a room and went straight to sleep again. I still owed my body another few hours of recovery time from the night before in Kotido.

I woke up in the afternoon, hangover finally gone. Sauntered out to the lobby. I tend to saunter a lot in Africa, but then again so does everybody. Nobody is ever in a rush. It’s probably the most relaxed place you could ever be.

“I thought you’d never wake up” Rita the receptionist said to me. She asked if I wanted some lunch, but I said no, I’m going to town to use the internet. I hadn’t seen the internet in so long at this stage I felt as if I was living in 2000BC.

As I was sipping the coca cola outside the front door, Sarah the supervisor came over to have a chat. How was Kidepo? did you see the animals? etc etc. I told her I was going to town. I asked her if there was any place that I could get some socks, as all the socks I possessed had turned into the finest of cheese. She told me that she didn’t know. She never goes to town. “I fear town. It’s too dangerous.” But she wasn’t from Karamoja, she was from Jinja, down near Kampala. A “city girl”. She just stayed around the hotel as a supervisor. Whatever she needed from town was brought via boda bodas. After being through the thick of Karamoja and back, the town of Moroto – still in Karamoja territory, but only slightly – was nothing to me. I finished the coca cola and made my way into town.

Since we were on the outskirts, by the UN bases, there was barely any traffic. I had to walk about 20 minutes until I found a passing boda boda, but he was carrying a passenger in the opposite direction. I asked him if he was coming back this way towards town. “Yes, first you wait, I am coming!”

So I waited around outside a local Ka’jong settlement. Mud-huts and fences made of sticks. Kids running around. Staring at the mzungu. A perfectly constructed NGO base belonging to “Relief Emergency Group” or something along those lines was just a few meters up the road.

As usual, you stand around rural folks, they come over to stare. But it genuinely was kind of strange of me to be standing outside a Ka’jong settlement doing nothing. “What are you doing here?” one kid asked me. A perfectly normal question given the circumstances – a white lad arsing around kicking stones outside a load of mudhuts. “Waiting for a boda” I replied. He explained my answer to his friends which seemed to satisfy their curiosity. This was my second time in Moroto, and the only mzungus I had ever seen were those flying around in NGO or UN jeeps. I guess I was seeming like a bit of a wierdo alright. The boda boda finally arrived and I hopped on.

After I did my internet business, I went in search of socks. I had to pass gauntlets of beggers on my way through town. Kids, middle aged people, old drunkards. I bought two kids some rolex ( “roll eggs” – an omelette laid over a pancake and rolled into a burrito – savage. Costs 20cent) as they looked genuinely hungry, but didn’t give anything to the adults. I asked around what time there was a bus going towards Soroti, the next town down south. 6am they told me. For feck sake! Is there any bus in Karamoja that leaves at a normal time??!

I eventually found some socks in a pretty well stocked shop. I got two pairs, and a coca cola. As I was standing outside sipping the coca cola, I saw some tribal Ka’jong people moving through town. No 2pac tshirts, no Man Utd caps, no Nike Shoes – nothing. Just traditional clothing, scar markings on their faces and all. They were all staring at me as they walked past. I took out my camera and went to take a photo, pretending I was just talking a photo of the street, but secretly aiming at the Ka’jong folk as it was a wide enough lens, but some guy beside me shouted “NO PHOTO NO PHOTO!!!” He was an old wrinkly fecker, probably Ka’jong himself. He looked pretty angry so I put the camera back in the bag and began to walk up the road in search of a boda. Suddenly a kid with a bundle of twigs tried to sell me one single stick. He was holding it out and saying “yes? Yes?” I stared at him like a rural villager would stare at a mzungu…. “what the hell is going on? Why would I want to buy a random twig off this lad??”

“It’s a toothbrush!” a guy in the shop behind me shouted. “You brush your teeth with the top of the stick, it works!” I already had a toothbrush back in the hotel, but I really would have liked to try this unique “Toothtwig”, but at the same time I really didn’t want to stick a filthy twig into my mouth, picked from the African bush with dirty hands, possibly covered in rat piss and baboon shit. I politely declined, and grabbed a boda boda back to the hotel.

Back at Moroto Hotel, I walked around the grounds for a while, enjoying the view of Mt. Moroto. There were a few foothills around that looked climbable…

I turned a corner to find Sarah, the supervisor, relaxing on a chair. I asked her if I could climb any of the hills dotted around the place, and she told me “No! There are warriors on those hills!” Then I said “what about that one?” pointing at the most boring looking one, right beside the hotel. It looked like it would take only ten minutes to climb. “Ok” Sarah said, “but I’m going to get somebody to escort you.”

I think this lady was way too paranoid. She told me she never goes into town as it’s too dangerous, but I went downtown and all I saw were some drunken feckers and people begging. There was no actual danger or violence. So now she tells the hills are too dangerous to climb except for a crappy little one by the hotel…. but I obey her, just in case. They have police in town but there’s nobody up in the hills.

Sarah called for a staff member, only a younglad of about 17, to bring me up the hill. Out he burst from a shed and up the hill he ran like a mountain goat. His name was Nelson, and he was a black version of Kyle Warnock, jumping around the place and acting the Rambo.

Anyways, I followed him uphill for about ten minutes, then he stopped. “Are we here?” I asked. “Yes”. Ah this was useless, we were surrounded by huge hills, but we were only allowed to climb the smallest, closest one. I looked down by a dry riverbed, where there was a gaggle of mud huts and smoky charcoal fires. “What is that place? Is that a Ka’jong village?” I asked Nelson. He laughed and replied “No, that’s the barracks!!!”

“Barracks? You mean Military Barracks?” I asked. “Yes.” Feck. The Ugandan Army, sworn in to protect the citizens of the country until death…. living in “barracks” made out of mud

I looked up at the really interesting tall foothills…. “Are there really warriors up on those hills? Is it dangerous?” I asked him.

“Yeah, there are warriors, it is dangerous.”

Ok, I didn’t really believe Sarah, the fat lazy hotel supervisor, when she told me about the security situation on the hills, but I did believe the active younglad who loved running up hills like Chuck Norris in Missing in Action III.

I settled down and realized that there was no chance of me ever getting to see the real rural Karamoja. It’s allegedly too dangerous to venture outside of the towns. But they wouldn’t really kill a mzungu would they? Why would they kill a mzungu? I’m not gonna steal their cows, and that’s basically the only thing they care about. They’re not gonna mug me for my camera, phone, laptop or any electronics, because first of all they wouldn’t even know how to use them, and secondly, if they did know how to use them, they’d have nowhere to charge them! What are they gonna do, plug it into a rock?

One day I will return to Karamoja and hire an indigenous guide to drive me around the no mans land between the towns and villages. I don’t care how much they ask for, as it wont be a lot. A years income for them is about a weeks wages for me back home. Crazy isn’t it?

The sun is starting to set. Moroto is the last Ka’jong town I’ll stay in, south of here is Teso Region – “normal”. As I stand on the hill with Nelson I spot some plumes of dust rising from the earth far in the distance – two vehicles are coming to town.

All the roads in Karamoja are sand. Look at a map of Uganda, every road north of the town of Soroti is muck, sand or dust. The presidents wife has been appointed to the unique post of “Minister for Development of Karamoja” – a bloody tough job I’d say. But it doesn’t really seem like she’s doing anything. There is no electricity bar the rare generator or solar power cell, no reliable water supply due to constant drought – I can’t remember how many dry riverbeds I drove over – not a scrap of tarmac, no internet, UN and NGO bases act as scaffolding for the region…. if they pull out the Ka’jong are fucked. But I ever come back in the future, I’d still prefer to ride to the next town in the back of a pickup with 50 other Ugandans and their chickens than to have to take a comfy bus on a tarmacked road.

I head back inside and buy young Nelson a coke and myself a beer and watch some rubbish Nigerian movies for the rest of the night in the staff room.

The next day I stayed in Soroti just to check it out but nothing really exciting happened. Soroti isn’t in Karamoja so it didn’t have that rickety edge. It didn’t even have any crazy street people. On day 12 I finally got back to Kampala, burnt to a crisp and famished to bits, and ordered a cooooold coke and some proper mzungu food, cheeseburger, chips and some lovely coleslaw. I rang Christine to see if she got my gifts yet – “no” she said. Fecking drunk rangers probably stole them! Or crashed into an elephant on the way back. She told me that she was now in her outpost, stationed there for the next two months, bored as hell, and wanted me to tell her what the gifts were – she was like a kid at Christmas – but I wanted to keep it a surprise, maybe it would make her day just the teeniest bit more exciting. I told her to call me when she got the gifts if they weren’t stolen or “lost” en route… I never got that call. Lousy.

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.

So the UWA jeep was supposed to come at about 2pm…. by 3pm we were still waiting. Judith called the driver and asked him where they were. It turned out that as they were driving to Kotido they heard some heavy machine gun fire in the distance and had to hold back for a while. They eventually made it to town at 4pm, two hours late. The pickup stormed into dusty Kotido with five Rangers on the back, four with AK47s, one with a huge G2 machine gun. One guy was decked out like Rambo – in his AK he had two magazines taped together, and he had a pouch that went across his stomach which held three more magazines. As I looked at all the equipment the guys were carrying I then realized that I was truly in the infamous Karamojaland. They’re hardly going hunting ducks now are they?

We waited around outside the office for the accountant to do his business in town. There were about ten kids just standing around staring at me. It was starting to get a bit windy and the dust was getting into every fecking orifice in my body. There is no tarmac in karamoja, the roads in Kotido were just sand. I wasn’t looking forward to the two hour journey to the park, but at the same time I was… on the back of a pickup through arid Uganda, just a stones throw from Sudan… As I sat outside the office waiting, a huge herd of cattle made it’s way through the center of town, escorted by the military.

At about 5pm the accountant finally finished his business and we moved towards the pickup. Christine asked me if I wanted to sit in front. I declined, and hopped up onto the back with the rangers, and about 50 other Ugandans. When a vehicle comes into Kotido it’s pretty much the only chance to get out of town, as there’s only one official bus out of town per day, and that’s at 4am, and that only goes south. The UWA truck was going north. So I was on the back of the pickup with the five armed-to-the-teeth Rangers, mothers, fathers, kids, auld wans, bags of this that and the other. As everybody was shuffling around trying to squeeze in I’d get the odd poke of an AK47 to the face. There was ammunition and guns everywhere, including two chickens which wouldn’t shut up. Even a government town councilman had to bum a lift from the UWA jeep – public transport is a shambles up these parts, and that’s what makes it good craic!

So off we tore into the desert at about 5.30pm.

It was amazing how quickly Kotido town disappeared. We were suddenly in the desert, speeding past cacti, huge rocky outcrops, random lone Karimojong warriors walking in the distance, wind blowing in our faces. The environment reminded me of Looney Toones Road Runner. Some of the outcrops had huge rocks balancing on top of them, just waiting to fall off… or just waiting to be pushed off by Mr. Wiley Cyote. Everybody was having the craic on the back of the pickup. A few people on the pickup were familiar about the history of Ireland so we gave out about England for a while. Then the Ugandans started arguing amongst themselves about the Karimojong people, whether they were civilized or not, or are they even Ugandans? I just stayed out of it and watched the argument for the craic. I learned nothing, they just went around in circles!

At one point the Rangers went silent and started cocking their guns and pointing them over the side of the pickup. This silence lasted for only about five minutes – I didn’t ask but I’m guessing that we were passing the area where they heard gunshots earlier in the day on their way to Kotido.

We reached a village called Kaabong and stopped for a while to get some provisions. Within four point two seconds the pickup was surrounded by village folk checking out the mzungu. The Kaabong village nutbag, a real “Seany Gull”, about 80 years old I’d say, came over to me and had a chat. He was wearing a helmet made out of a punctured football. He told me he was American, and that he went to the moon. I was like “Oh really you went to the moon? Wow that’s great…” I was just about to have a bit more craic with him when one of the rangers came over, pointed the gun at him and told him to move or he’d kill him. Poor auld lad. Obviously he fecked off pretty rapid. Another crazy drunken guy came over and asked me “Where are you going?” …. “I’m going to Kidepo National Park” …. “Ok, you give me money then you can go” …. Feck that.

A few more people hopped onto the back of the pickup, including a young girl who nobody knew. She was sat in the corner and one guy was like “Who owns this child??!!!” but there was no answer. He picked her up and gave her to me to put her to another corner of the pickup. She was really quiet and she looked scared… I dunno where the feck she was going but I can’t remember what happened to her!!! Oops.

Off we sped into the desert again. Everybodys face was now powdery with sand. My hair was rock hard. I kind of liked the feeling actually. We were now in pure mud hut territory. The thatched huts had cool little roofs. They reminded me of crooked witches hats. I would have taken some photos but a number of reasons held me back; we were going too fecking fast, the road was too bumpy, I was surrounded by really poor people who’s yearly wage was half the price of my camera, and it was too dusty. I really want to return to Karamoja some day to properly take some photos though. It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen, in real life or on TV or otherwise.

We finally got to the park gates at about 8pm. Some of the people hopped off the pickup to go god knows where, and myself and the park staff continued into the park, exposed to the elements on the back of the truck. It was pitch black though so I couldn’t see the lions watching me… but I could feel them! There sickle moon was casting only the slightest of light on the park, perfect for lion hunts. They usually stay at “home” when the full moon is out, as the prey can see them coming a mile away.

Once we got to the park HQ I booked myself into a Banda, like a little thatched cottage, in the Apoka Park Hostel. There is another Hotel in the park called Apoka Lodge, but that costs $400 per night. My banda was $15, and it was pretty comfy. After throwing my bags in I went over to the hostels “restaurant”… a tiny kitchen with just one cook. I asked for whatever he had. The menu was meat, rice and potatoes. Perfect. I went and sat outside in the patio and listened to some strange whimpering and growling sounds. I was hoping they were lions, but then the cook came out tapping a spoon off a pot and a group of jackals came running over to receive the kitchen scraps. It was my first time to see a jackal, and they move fast. They gobbled up the scraps in seconds and bolted back into the darkness to wait for more. As I was eating my dinner an elephant slowly walked past the patio and into the bush, which was cool, but I had already seen plenty of elephants in Queen Elizabeth. I was here to see only one thing: lions. I organized a game walk for 6am in the morning and hit the sack.

DAY 5 – KIDEPO

I woke at 6am and made my way to the park HQ to meet up with the ranger who would be taking me on the game walk. There he was, waiting, AK47 in hand, and a huge smile on his face.

“Good morning!” I said.

“Thank you!” he replied. His name was Sam, and he loved to say thank you.

“How are you Sam?”

“I’m fine, thank you. How are you?”

“I’m good!”

“Thank you!”
I asked him if we were waiting for some more tourists, and he told me that I was the only tourist in the park! Is this place remote or what? So off we went on the walk. He pointed to a mountain in the distance and told me that it was in Sudan. I knew we were close to the Sudanese border but I didn’t think we were that close. I asked him what the chances were of seeing lions, and he said we will see them if we are lucky. There were zebras, buffalo, antelopes, impalas, elephants… but no lions. The antelopes had an interesting feeding strategy. The whole group would graze except for one, who would stand on some high ground nearby and scan the area for predators. This guard duty would run in shifts, all of them taking turns.

We walked around for about two hours, and Sam told me a few stories about his home town, Gulu, in northern Uganda. Gulu and other areas in the north was up until a few years ago the site of “the biggest neglected humanitarian emergency in the world” according to the UN Secretary for Humanitarian affairs and Emergency Relief. The Lords Resistance Army wreaked havoc there for almost two decades, trying to install the Ten Commandments as law but breaking every one of them in the process. They kidnapped thousands of children to use as sex slaves or child soldiers, mutilated and/or killed much of the population to keep them quiet (chopping off hands, feet, nose, ears or lips) and generally tore the north asunder. Sam was lucky enough to get the hell out of there, but his brother and stepmother were killed. The LRA are now allegedly hiding out in the Central African Republic. Northern Uganda, including Sams hometown Gulu, has become relatively stable again, although there are still some Internally Displaced People camps up there. To change the tone of the conversation to a happier one, especially since it had begun to rain, we started talking about crazy nights out in Kampala and swapped some funny stories.

We finished the walk without seeing any lions, but at least there was a game drive the next day and we could traverse much more of the park in the jeep. We got back to HQ at about 8.30 and I gave Sam a decent tip of 20,000 shillings – he gets 175,000 a month and has two kids to send to school, who he almost never sees as he is stationed in the park for months at a time. I told him to go buy some beers and relax for the day.

As I was eating breakfast, across the plain I saw a huge, lumbering elephant making it’s way towards the staff quarters. I stopped eating and looked around to see if anybody else was seeing what I was seeing. That elephant is moving straight towards the staff housing! Where are the kids? hide them! Lock the windows! Get grandma!

“That’s Bull Bull” the cook said to me.

“Eh?“

“He comes here every morning for alcohol and won’t leave until he gets it. He has even broken down doors looking for it before.” It turns out Bull Bull the alcoholic elephant loves the local brew, made from rice. He gets the residue and some of the drink from the staff who brew it themselves. He arrives like clockwork, every morning at about 9.30, to get his sip. I looked over to him and he disappeared into the network of Bandas that is the staff quarters, and I heard kids laughing and screaming. I finished up my breakfast, grabbed my camera and made my way to the huts.

I followed the commotion and laughter of the children through the staff village until I finally came across Bull Bull. He was absolutely huge, standing totally still like a statue, just staring at one particular house – obviously the house of the lady who brews the best stuff, as an alcoholic he’s surely tried them all. A few kids were hanging out the window trying to poke him with a stick but he barely noticed it, all he wanted was his sip for the day. A lady exited the house with a saucepan and made her way over to a nearby tree, and Bull Bull came to life and jollily followed her over. She emptied the contents onto the ground and ran back to the house as Bull Bull lapped the stuff up. Happy as Larry after finishing the brew, he stuck his tusks between some branches of the tree to prop his head up, and went for a nap standing up. I went back to the kitchen and got myself a beer to show solidarity for Bull Bull and his cause. The rest of the day was spent just relaxing in the sun, sipping beer, watching the zebras come into camp to graze, and also watching Bull Bull stumble around. At one stage I heard people shouting “BULL BULL AGGGHHHH!” and I ran over to have a look, he was eating the straw off the thatched huts – the local brew obviously gave him some serious munchies.

Later on Christine invited me to her hut for some chicken and rice. She lives on her own, away from her kids and husband, and usually has nobody to share dinner with. Her hut (in fact all of the staff accommodation) had no electricity. She told me about having to send her three kids to school on her measly wage, leaving almost nothing for herself, so she has set up a little shop in her hut. She sells beer and cigarettes to the staff to supplement her income. The next day she was going to be stationed in a remote outpost off in the depths of the park, there for two months at a time, with nothing to do. She has a scrabble set, but the guy she’s stationed with can’t read or write English. I told her that I would send her a gift once I got back to the nearest decent town, something that would help pass the time in the outpost, where probably the most exciting event is the monthly delivery of rations.

After dinner we went outside to play some scrabble, and she nearly bet me, even though English is my first language, and not hers. Christine was pretty intelligent, sharp, spoke her mind. She really wanted to be a nurse, but any money she has goes towards her kids’ education and can’t afford any for herself. I bought two beers from her and I added my own “Mzungu tax”, half for the laugh, half just to give her an aul tip. After the beers I went off to bed early, as I had a game drive at 6am. I told myself if I didn’t see a lion this time, I was going to escape from the camp at night and run around the savannah naked shouting and screaming to attract them. Fingers crossed.

DAY 6 – KIDEPO

Up and ready to go at 6am, I strolled out my door and made my way towards the HQ in the pre-dawn light. I was cursing to my self “there better be some fuckin’ lions out here or I’ll go nuts, I didn’t travel through these wild west towns for feckin’ nothin’. I swear I’ll….”

GRRRROOOWWWWWWLLLLLLL!!!!!!

“That was definitely a lions roar! And it was close! That’s great!…. Except I’m out in the open!” So I legged it back to my room as quickly as possible, jaws theme playing in my head, trying to unlock the padlock on my door horror movie style, keys jingling all over the place. Come on come on open you stupid lock! Once I made it into my room I started peeking out the door like a little baby. I couldn’t see any lions but they were definitely close. I kept my eye on the HQ, waiting for the ranger to arrive. He would have an AK47, all I had at that moment was a shitty torch, so I wasn’t leaving my room until I saw him arriving with his gun.

After a short while the jeep pulled up at the HQ, then the ranger arrived shortly after, so I slowly walked over. Maybe I was being too paranoid but I thought to myself if the lions saw me running across the camp, their predator instinct would come to life and they’d catch me and chew my head off and spit out the beard.

So I got to the jeep and hopped in the front. The ranger came over and said “Hey what are you doing?? You come up here on the back!” With the lions that close I didn’t really want to be on the back of a pickup exposed to the elements, but he had a gun, and he assured me that not once have the lions ever attacked a tourist in this particular park, so I obliged and hopped up with him.

We drove less than a minute and came across three large male lions, resting right beside the road on a small little mound. The mound was about the same height as the trailer I was in, so we were perfectly level with them. The pickup stopped beside them, and one of the lions got up… I was like SHIT!!! … but he just walked off, not very comfortable with the sound of the engine I suppose. The other two stuck around and relaxed as I observed them – David Attenborough shtyle – and took a few photos. They looked so gentle and cuddly and relaxed, but anytime I made a sudden move, to change the camera angle for example, they would turn to look at me, ears pricked and eyes wide open… a killer look. For any cat owners reading, it reminded me of this exactly – imagine your cat relaxing on the couch, and you suddenly start scratching the cushion beside it, or dangle a shoe lace or something, the cat would turn to predator mode. So every time I shuffled around a bit, the lions would suddenly become more interested in me. We stuck around for about 15 minutes just watching them. Mission complete. I got me a lion! Three lions actually. I imagined how awesome it would be to catch them hunting, but they usually hunt at night, and night drives are much more expensive. I suppose I’ll have to settle for the Discovery Channel for that sort of stuff.

Off we went for some more driving, elephants, buffalo, antelopes… all boring at this stage, especially after seeing the spectacle of Bull Bull the alcoholic elephant terrorizing the local community. I wanted to go back to the lions but they told me that we were going to try find some giraffes. Sure why not, I’ve never seen a giraffe before. On our way around the park, I saw these white objects on a hill in the distance. I asked the ranger what they were, and he said it’s Idi Amins old hotel, Katurum Lodge. Destroyed in a wildfire after the collapse of Amins Regime, it used to be one of the poshest hotels in Uganda. About 300 rooms, swimming pool, bar, electricity, everything. Now the only thing that remains is whatever couldn’t burn in the fire, basically just walls, which were the white things I was seeing on the hill. I asked the ranger “Do you think we can get a beer in the bar there?” and he said “No, the bar was also destroyed in the fire…” Yeah, eh, have you ever heard of sarcasm? We went over to have a look. It had a ghostly feel in the morning light. It was like being on the wreck of the Titanic. (Yeah I was on the Titanic before). As I was walking around I got lost in my imagination, I could see the hotel full of rich customers, soft lighting, staff with bowties carrying trays of champagne around, classical music in the background, somebody playing the piano, big fat Idi Amin walking around greeting foreign diplomats… then I walked into a dark room with a torch only to be awoken by a huge flurry of bats flying past us to get out the door. We came across one wall where other visitors had scrawled their names with bits of burnt wood. I added “Cookie 2010” beside Baldwin, Olivier, Cole, Perry, Gemma and Louis.

We went to try and find the giraffes at their last known resting spot, but they had migrated to a different part of the park. Oh well. We finished the game drive after about two and a half hours.

Back at the park I bumped into an auld lad outside by the toilets. He was walking along the wall, barely able to hold himself up. I had an aul chat with him. Thomas was his name, being langers at 10am was his game. He had a hole in his forehead and I asked him about it, hoping for a cool war story. Instead it turned out that his brother just hit him in the head with an iron bar and busted a hole in his skull.

I went for a walk over to the super posh Apoka Safari Lodge just to find out what $400 a night gives you. It’s only a five minute walk, but before I went, one of the rangers told me to watch out for the bachelor buffalos. Bachelor buffalos are the guys who were kicked out of the herd and wander the plains alone. Since they lack the advantage of safety in numbers, anything is seen as a threat to their life and it takes very little to provoke them. I looked up the road and it was all clear, there was one bachelor buffalo but he was off in the field somewhere, so off I walked to the Apoka Lodge.

Once I got there I looked around for staff, or the reception, or anyone at all, but the place was totally silent and empty except for the the tweeting of birds and the odd warthog snorting around the place. I decided to give myself a tour of the place. It was bloody nice. The dining area was high up on a platform on stilts, covered with thatched roofing, but all the walls were open so you could see 360degrees around the park as you dined on your $400 dinner. The swimming pool was just carved straight into an outcrop of rock. The lounge had huge big fat white couches and expensive looking rugs probably imported from some mental Himalayan village. All this was open to the elements, and a nice breeze from the plains made it’s way through the room. There was also viewing tower three stories high, which gave awesome views of the park. Just as I was thinking that I had the whole place to myself, up on the tower I found an ashtray with a single stubbed out cigarette in it. Strange…. I picked it up and licked it – I deduced that it couldn’t have been there more than ten minutes. Ok I didn’t lick it but it looked pretty fresh. I was like where the hell is everybody? Maybe they were eaten by lions…. I looked in the windows of the cottages, it looked so comfortable… I checked my wallet to see if I had $400 – nah, just a few shillings. “When I win the lotto…” I said.

I eventually decided to leave, and when walking past the garage where they keep their own private game drive jeeps, a lad poked his head out from behind a generator he was fixing and said HELLO! It was the manager, not eaten by lions as I had previously thought. We chatted for a while about how fecking expensive the place was, but also how very nice it was. He told me it was worth it – for $400 a night you get all this luxury like the pool, private baths dug into the rock, all food included and cooked very professionally, as much beer and cigarettes as you can handle – he said if the customer wants, they can take a full crate of beer off to their room – game walks, game drives – one in the morning, one at night where you have the chance of seeing lions hunt – hot water, internet, amazing views, their own watering hole where the animals come to drink…. you decide if it’s worth it. I told him maybe some day I’ll be back, but right now all I need is a bed and an aul mosquita net. I say goodbye and turn to make my way back, and see a bachelor buffalo on the road, standing in the shade of a tree. I ask the manager “Ehhh I need to get back to the hostel, is it safe to walk? Look at that buffalo there…” “Yeah it’s safe”, he said “once you walk up to him he should run away.” Ok, he “should” run away… I try my luck and make my way down the road. Once I get within 30meters of him he turns and stares at me… I walk a bit closer, and he moves out from under the tree and begins to walk towards me. So I stop and slowly turn around, only to be met by…… the manager from the hotel driving down the road towards me. “Hop in” he says, “maybe this buffalo is a bit crazy! I’ll drive you back.” He revved the motor as we drove past the buffalo and he scattered off.

More beer was had that evening, courtesy of Christines off-license, located in her wardrobe. I was to leave early the following morning, so I paid all my bills and said my goodbyes to Christine, and then went off for some dreamy sleepy nighty snoozy snooze.

DAY 7 – Kidepo to Kaabong

Woke up fresh, not sure what day it was, but was excited to be making my way back to Kampala. I needed a good COLD beer, not desert temperature beer. The park vehicle dropped me off at the nearest trading center, Karenga, at about 9am. There, some guy had his own hiace bushtaxi and ferried people to Kaabong once a day. I asked what time he was leaving at and he said “we are leaving now now.” Ugandans sometimes double up words for emphasis. “Now now” means right now. But… never believe bus drivers in Africa. Add between half an hour and three hours onto whatever time anyone says. We left at about midday when the hiace finally filled up with people. Since this was the only vehicle going from Karenga to Kaabong today, anything people needed delivered to Kaabong and anywhere in between was thrown up on the roof or shoved into any free space inside. Big sacks of spuds, matresses, chickens, boxes of this that and the other. It never felt as if we were moving anywhere as the taxi was flagged down so often. We eventually got away from civilization and hit the open desert road. I was finally happy to be getting somewhere when the fecking thing broke down, in the desert. “Tut! What is wrong with this thing!” the driver complained. You know full well what’s wrong with it! It’s due a feckin’ service since 1987! It was hot. HOT. I didn’t know how long we were going to be stuck out here in the midday heat, but at least I had some fluids to keep me going – a bottle of beer that I had bought from Christine the night before. After a while of the driver poking around the engine I decided to hop out and crack open the beer. It was as hot as tea, but I didn’t care – this was an emergency, and it was either the roasting hot beer or my own piss. A friend from Kampala rang me and asked me what’s the craic how am I getting on. I told him our bushtaxi broke down in the desert, on a road that’s barely used by any traffic, but everything was ok as I had my desert-temperature beer, and there were a few chickens in the back and spuds on the roof. I told him I’d see him in Kampala but it might take me a while to get there… The driver finally got the taxi to shplutter to life an hour later and off we went.

We stopped in some tiny village to deliver some stuff or pick things up, and by now you probably know what happens when you stop in any of these rural villages – MZUNGU TIME! The taxi was surrounded by an absolute heap of people, mostly kids at the front and older people at the back. I was sitting in the front seat and they were all poking their heads in to look at what I was wearing or to check out my backpack, one of them was feeling and poking my arm as if I was some sort of scientific specimen. I decided to cause a bit of havoc… I stepped out of the taxi. It’s so crazy, it was as if I was an alien stepping out of a space ship, everybody gawking and staring and chit chatting and oh jaysusing. I found an old toy gun on the ground and asked the kids “Hey can you do this?” and spun it around my finger, cowboy style. They all had a go, the ones who could do it got a cheer, the ones who couldn’t do it got a boo and we all had a bit of a laugh. Then the inevitable happened – give me money! A middle aged man pushed his way through the group and started telling me how the Africans are starving and how I should help him etc etc. He wouldn’t feck off, and they never believe you if you say “I have no money.” So I gave him a 100shilling coin, and off he went, probably to buy some snuff. They love it here in Karamoja. Everybody carries their own little vials of the stuff around and just SHNIFF every now and then. And then the second inevitable thing that always happens happened. If you give money to one person, everybody else will want something. But I had no coins left. I only had 50,000 Shilling notes, and they weren’t getting that, so I said “I have no money” and they were like ahhhhhhh come on stop talking shite. But I kept it up. “I swear I have nothing!” and pulled a few scraps of paper out of my pocket. They still weren’t buying it, but by this time, the driver was ready to go, so I hopped in and we tore down the road. I was getting really bored of all the begging in Karamoja. Even if the children have never learned English in school, they can still say “Give me one thousand!” or one of my favorites “Give me my money!”.

There was some nice scenery on the way to Kaabong, I was back in Roadrunner territory. On some of the huge rocky outcrop/pillars, I saw Karimojong warriors just standing still, leaning on their staffs, shawls flapping in the wind, surveying the land. I don’t know how they got up to the top of some of the pillars. We drove over many dry river beds that were just basically sand. It hadn’t rained properly in this region in almost three months. Just some slight drizzle is all they got.

We finally reached Kaabong in the afternoon. I asked around if there were any trucks or vehicles going further south that day, but there were none. Next one would be the following morning at about 8am. So I took out my notebook and looked under “Kaabong” – “Blue building at end of village” it said. I got this recommendation for a lodge off some guy on an internet forum. Forgot to ask which end. West east north what? I was hungry and decided to get something to eat and ask the folks at the restaurant about a blue building. I found a place called Riverside Restaurant, which served some savage rice, potatoes, beef and beans for 3,000 shillings, about a euro. I asked them about a blue hotel somewhere, and the manager lady called some guy from the back room and said “This boy will escort you there”. Sound. That’s one great thing about Uganda, if you ask for directions, they’ll usually just walk you there. And the “boy” escorting me there was almost 40 and had three kids. Can’t remember his name but let’s call him Joe.

On the way through the village, Joe stopped to talk to some people on the street. I could tell they were Karamijong from the markings on their faces and the staffs they carried. The staffs are used to beat the cows by the way. But they weren’t “real” Karamijong, they were slightly westernized – they were wearing man united and 2pac t-shirts. Judging by the tone of the conversation, they seemed to be complaining about something, tutting and shaking their heads. Joe explained to me what they were saying. Thousands of their cows had recently been stolen – or “rustled” – by the Jie tribe. These guys we were talking to were from the Dodoth tribe. The Ugandan military has pledged to protect the livestock of the Karamijong people of all different tribes if they give up their weapons. So most of them gave up their arms, and allowed the military to watch over the cattle in protected areas known as Kraals. But somehow, the Jie tribe overpowered the military and fleeced about 3,000 cows! Since the cattle was the under the protection of the military, it was their job to get them back. So they did. With gunships. It really goes to show how well armed these Ka’jong tribes are if the military has to use gunships against them. But it musn’t have been much of a fight as only one warrior was killed and there were no military casualties. Anyways, the military retrieved 3,000 cows from the Jie, and brought them back to the Dodoth, here in Kaabong. Operation Cows Come Home. So the Dodoth guys we were talking to had just returned from the military compound where they had inspected the cattle, and guess what – the cows weren’t theirs! So now they’re really pissed. The cow is everything to the Ka’jong. All they have are mud huts and cows. Well I suppose these guys only have mud huts now. I tut and shake my head with the lads on the street. Myself and Joe bid them farewell and he shows me to the blue building – Memamo House it’s called. I checked in and went back up town to keep a promise.

Evans, the Kenyan teacher I was talking to when our bus broke down the week before on the way from Moroto to Kotido, told me to call him if I was ever in Kaabong so I can visit his school. I said I promised I would call him if I was in town, and here I was. I gave him a buzz and he met me downtown with the principal of his school, Emmanuel. They wanted to show me a new school they had under construction just on the outskirts of town, so we went for a walk. On the way, I asked about climbing the many hills and mountains that surround the town. They said absolutely do not climb them, or the “warriors will get you”. I asked if they could maybe escort me to one of the hills so I could just take a few photos and they said no, they weren’t going anywhere near those hills. Fair enough so, looks like I’m stuck in this village for the rest of the day! We eventually reached the school grounds, where two nice new well constructed buildings were almost complete, just the furnishing had to be done like the blackboards, desks etc. They were also laying a foundation for a laboratory nearby. They had taken over the project after the last director “mismanaged” funds. Then they brought me round to the staff quarters where I met Emmanuels wife and his child, I can never tell the age of babies but I’d say it was about one. He was relaxing away on his mothers lap when I sat down in front of him and gave him the shock of his life. I was the first mzungu he had ever seen, and you could tell. His eyebrows raised up and his mouth opened wide in shock. I grabbed his little hand and shook it, but he didn’t flinch, he just kept on staring at me as if I had two heads.

Afterwards we went back into town for a beer. We bumped into “Honorable” Emma, a local district judge I think. She had just been to the scene of a shooting and was on her way back home to file a report. As we were making out way through the village towards the pub, everyone was coming over to greet Evans and Emmanuel and to ask them who the hell this mzungu was. One really fat lady ran over and gave us all a big fat hug. We made it to the only bar in the village that had cold beer as they used a generator. We stuck around for a few beers and played some pool. I noticed that there were no women to be seen in the bar and asked Evans about it. “Here in Karamoja, the woman stays at home during the night. The bars are for the men. If a woman is out alone people think that she is a prostitute.” The only woman in the bar was the girl serving drinks.

After the beers, we said our goodbyes and parted ways. It’s strange having to say goodbye to such friendly people who you know you’ll never ever see again. I made my way back to the lodge and bumped into a guy just by the reception. He asked me where I was from and I told him Ireland. “IRELAND!!!” he said with joy. “I’m going to DCU next year! I was at the Irish embassy in Kampala last week and they told me everything is arranged! I can’t wait to visit your country!” I congratulated him, but advised him to bring at least 40 jackets, ten wooly hats, and some gloves. The shock of moving from roasting semi-arid Uganda to frozen Ireland could kill a man.

DAY 8 – Kaabong to Kotido

Woke up early and wandered up town to scope out the transport situation. One khat-chewing guy came over to me and asked if I was going to Kotido, I said yeah, and asked him if he knew of any transport leaving town. He brought me over to a red pickup truck and told me to get up on the back, along with other villagers and some soldiers. We waited for the pickup to fill up a bit more, then off we went at about 8am to Kotido.

I was glad to arrive in Kotido. It’s no metropolis, but at least it had a better selection of restaurants lodges and shops. It even had a newly constructed shiny bank with an ATM – which looked well out of place amongst the rickety buildings and dusty streets. I checked into a lodge called – wait for it – “Caves Inn”.

After throwing my bag into my room I went for a beer in the bar. I asked the barman about the transport situation. I needed to get south, preferably to Moroto. He said there was a bus leaving in the morning at 4am, and that was the only fecking bus out of town all day. I finished my beer and went for a walk around town. Every single village or town that I had passed through in Karamoja had at least one crazy bum, their own Seany Gull. Kotido was no exception. One drunken guy latched onto me like a parasite. He was very friendly, but I knew that he was looking for money. “I’m hungry you know, we have no food here”. Just to piss him off, I gave him a tin of fish that I had in my pocket. The last thing they want is actual food. They want money for either the local gin, or snuff. They get free food from the nearby UN bases. He was like “ehhhh, thank you but, I need some money to buy my own food you know…” I politely refused and said sorry I need money to buy food for me too, I can’t give you anything. I’d like to give everybody in town a bit of cash, but I would fuck up the “system”. I’d exacerbate the MZUNGU = FREE STUFF situation. I ducked into a shop to buy some water.

Inside I got talking to the shopkeeper, Tom I think was his name. I told him that there was a crazy homeless dude following me around and I’m going to stay in the shop for a while until he goes away. “No problem” said Tom, “You are welcome”. He sold absolutely everything in his tiny shop. I should have asked him if he had any buckfast, but I obviously wasn’t thinking straight dammit. He asked me about the price of cars in my country. Then about the price of vans, jeeps, trucks, trailers… he had his calculator on the go, tipping and tapping away. He said he needed his own transport so he could expand his business by driving to Kampala himself to pick up his own goods instead of buying them from other people who make the round trip. I was like jesus what else do you need to sell? He asked if I could help him get a car from Ireland to Uganda, and I told him the truth that I really wouldn’t know where to even start. I gave him some Irish used car websites and told him to start from there, but he told me that he didn’t know how to use the internet. He didn’t even have an email. Well there’s not even any point in having an email if you live in Kotido, as there is no internet, except for maybe in the UN bases. I told him that if he really wanted to get a car from Ireland, he needed to learn how to use them internets, and start from there. That’s all I could do for him. I got my water, and went back out to the streets.

“HELLO!” That drunkard guy was still there, waiting for me just outside the door. He started following me around again, so I gave in and gave him 100shillings. I know, I’m making it worse for the next mzungu who comes into town, but by that stage he was wrecking my head so I had to get him to leave. Off he went to probably buy some snuff.

I came across a guy sitting behind a table full of samosas, out in the open, covered in flies. I was really hungry so I bought two, but grabbed them myself from under the pile where hopefully no flies had reached. They were absolutely delish, and cheap as dirt.

I wandered around a bit more and came across a bar called Discovery Bar at the edge of town. And when I say the edge of town I really mean edge. The town just stopped and the barren countryside began. I sauntered in to find a guy setting up a board game by himself. I asked for a beer and watched the guy play the game. It looked pretty complicated… it was a wooden board with four or five rows of holes, ten holes across. And some of the holes had big seeds or peas in them. I asked him to teach me and he said “no problem, take a seat. Ok, let’s play” So from what I gather, you just pick the beans up really fast and throw them around the holes for a minute, then the barman says “I win”, then game over. I asked him what the game was called, can’t remember the Ka’jong name, but in english it means game.

After the beer I went to different bar for another beer. I could get used to this dusty little town. Any child that passed the bar and saw me came over to the door and just stared. Some of them came in and shook my hand, others asked me for money. By this stage I hadn’t spoken to a mzungu or seen one outside of an NGO jeep for so long I was wondering how I was going to readjust to Kampala. What do mzungus talk about again? What’s their culture like?!!! I finished the beer and shtumbled down towards the local market. The midday heat and the warm beer was making me fairly tipsy. I decided to buy some stuff for Christine. I got a portable radio, some batteries, and some playing cards, should keep her occupied in her outpost in the middle of nowhere. I walked around the market a bit more and popped into a shop to get a coca cola. I stood outside and sipped away, watching the market. Once you stop walking around a town and stand still, you instantly get people coming up to you to check you out. One old guy came up and started sniffing his nose and rubbing it – he didn’t speak English but I could tell that he was asking me for money for snuff. I decided feck it, I want to try this snuff stuff, so I decided to go with him. I made charades, trying to say “where is the snuff? Where?” and he grabbed me by the hand and led me to a tree where the snuff sellers were sitting under the shade. I told them “I want to buy some snuff for my friend here, how much can you give me for 100shillings?” and you actually get a lot for that price. I got the bag of snuff and poured some into my hand, then gave the remainder to the old guy. I had some of the powder in my hand and I asked the sellers how to do it. “Just SNIFF SNIFF!” The moment of truth, everybody was watching the mzungu, anxious to see what would happen. I turned around to the old guy who had the snuff in his palm and was sniffing away like no tomorrow. So I too stuck my palm up to my nose and snorted the lot, and it burned big time! They must have added some pepper or chilli or something to it. “How is it?” they asked. ‘”IT”S HOT!!!” I replied as I fanned my nose and pretended to pour the coca cola up my nostrils, which got a laugh out of the folks. The old guy thanked me for the bit of snuff and I made my way back to the town center to find another bar.

As I was walking, some crazy excited nervous guy came up to me with a battered PCB, it looked like a bit of a remote control, and started talking some crazy Ka’jong to me. I don’t know what he wanted me to do with it. Fix it? Buy it? Dunno. I went into the Botanic Hotel, where I got the good food when I was was in town the week before, and he followed me in and just stared at me as I sat down and waited for the waitress. Some guy came along and scooted him off and he made some funny noises like “Eh Eh Eh Eh!” as he ran out the door. I’d love to know what he wanted me to do with that old PCB. Maybe he was from the future and he was trying to tell me something before “they” got to him. Could the electronic device have been a flux capacitor?? Did he want me to take it and hide it somewhere?…. Maybe. At the time I didn’t care though as I was starving and I wanted another beer.
I got talking to the waitress and after dinner she invited me to her house out the back to meet her family and friends and we took some photos together. At that point I had enough experience to calculate that the Ugandans are on average 654 times more friendly than the Irish.

By now it was evening time, and my bus was leaving the following morning at 4am… I was anxious to get back to Kampala, but Kotido also had a certain charm that I liked. It was a dusty “wild east” town, I wouldn’t have been surprised if Clint Eastwood walked into the bar and shot everybody up, goats and chickens wandered around outside the shops, the odd vehicle driving through town kicking up dust which got into your beer eyes and teeth, crazy but harmless characters stumbling around the streets, friendly people, cheap food, cheap beer, cheap accommodation, comfortable weather if you stayed in the shade… there was no real touristic reason to stay in town but feckit, I decided not to get the bus in the morning….

Part III coming soon… gimme a fecking chance!

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 that I could be waiting up to two days for transport, and these pickups don’t actually drive to the park so they would be dropping me off at some random spot in the bush about 30km from the gates. I wasn’t expecting to be able to get to the park so in my head I was just planning on touring around the towns and villages. The plan was Kampala-Mbale-Moroto-Kotido-Kaabong-Kidepo and back. A night in each place on the way up and down. The only non-Karamoja areas on the list were Kampala and Mbale.

So I say my goodbyes to the staff and punters at Backpackers and head out the gate. After a minute or so a boda boda pulls up and asks me if I need a lift. I never get bodas to town as they charge too much. Minibus taxis are 500, bodas always ask for 5000. I say no, I’m gonna wait for a taxi to pass. He says it’s OK, I’ll give you a good price. I say bring me to the taxi park for 2,000. He says sure, hop on. What a surprise, he didn’t try to rip me off… I actually like boda boda rides, every one is like being on a roller coaster, and 2,000 for a roller coaster ride into town is a good price. So I get on and we head off down the road, skirting around the traffic jams. He asks me where I’m going with my big backpack and I tell him Mbale. He said don’t go from the taxi park, that the minibus taxis are too dangerous, and the road to Mbale is one big black spot. He says he’ll bring me to the bus park where I can get a good comfy coach to Mbale, which is much safer. “YOU WON’T DIE!” he tells me. Ok, I don’t want to die on Day 1 of my roadtrip so I tell him to show me this bus park.

We get off in town and he walks me to the bus park. I’ve seen this bus park before, and I know that the conductors are the most persistent in Kampala. They see you walking past and they say “Hey are you going to Jinja??” and you say “No, I’m just going to that shop there” and they say “OK” while dragging you onto their bus. But this boda boda guy I was with fought all the conductors away and brought me to the right coach. I thanked him and shook hands, and instead of the agreed 2000 I gave him 3000 for helping me out. The coach was pretty nice and it had good suspension for the dodgy roads, unlike those piece of shit minibus taxis. On the way to Mbale we passed two accidents. Seems like that boda boda driver was right about the dodgy road afterall.

It was night time when I finally reached Mbale. I pulled my notebook out where I had written good hotels to stay in in each town. Mt. Elgon View Hotel was under the title “Mbale”. So I asked somebody in a shop where it was and he actually got a member of staff to walk me there. Sound lad. So I checked in, got a room, and went up to the roof where you could see the streets below. From Mount Elgon View Hotel I could see dusty streets, homeless people, and some auld wan sitting on the ground selling bananas. The night was hot. Now I’m no good at measuring temperature just by feel but I’d say it was about six million degrees. I was only 1/5 of the way to my destination and the temperature was already noticeably hotter than Kampala. I was dreading the daytime. Got some food in an Indian restaurant, had some beers at the bar and then went off to bed.

DAY 2. Mbale – Moroto

Woke up and it was roasting hot as I had anticipated. I went to the Indian restaurant and got some breakfast. The ugly freakishly tall waitress asked me where I was from. I said Ireland. She said “Oh Irish people are really handsome” and I said “fact”. She asked me where I was going, I told her I was trying to get to Kidepo National Park, but also touring around the Karamoja region. She asked if she could come with me, I said “yeah sure, no bother”. After breakfast I snuck out the door, never to see her again.

I got my bags and checked out of Elgon View Hotel. The next town would be Moroto, in Karamoja land. I went down to the bus park and asked around for a bus to Moroto. They told me that one was coming at 12pm, a one hour wait for me. Lots of people were coming up to me asking me how I was and where I was going etc. Obviously the only mzungu around. I walked around a bit and came across a stall with sandals. I decided to buy some, as socks and runners weren’t good for this hot environment. I asked the guy the price… 25,000 he said. I told him in Owino they are only ten… which was a lie I don’t have a clue how much they cost there, but you always need a few tricks up your sleeve for bargaining. He told me 20,000. I said no, 10,000. He said 20,000 again. So I got a wad of notes and change out of my back pocket which I knew was about 13,000. I said can you give me the sandals for this? If they see a lump of cash in hand and realize that you’re about to walk away, they won’t turn down the sale. He ended up giving them to me. The sandals ended up falling apart the next day, they were useless.

Anyways, after buying the sandals I was standing around and a policeman came up and greeted me. He asked if I wanted to keep my bag in the police post for safety while I waited and I said yeah sure thank you. He offered me a seat outside the police post and we started chatting. His sergeant was there, a female, here name was Florence. Nice woman, gave me some tips on how to avoid being pick pocketed. I already knew them but it was nice of her to advise me anyways so I listened intently as if she was telling me the meaning of life. We chatted about her working life, her family, life in Kampala, travelling around Uganda, the karamoja. Just small talk to pass the time until the bus came. I bought her a soda.

So the coach eventually came and I hopped on. North to Moroto we went. Half way to Moroto, after the town of Soroti, the road turned to dirt. All the roads after Soroti are dirt. It’s like the final frontier of tarmac. And I wasn’t even half way to my destination. The driver sped up the dirtroad, the speed was incredible, I felt like I was on a train. The road was only wide enough for one vehicle, so when the driver had to overtake he wouldn’t wait for a good clear spacing he’d just maintain speed and drive onto the embankment while constantly beeping the horn. The embankment had a slope of about 25degrees and when the driver would move onto it the women would gasp and people would grab onto the seats in front of them. The kids would all laugh. The road got a bit bumpy and we left our seats a few times. Once again the kids loved it. There was a policewoman on board and she didn’t seem to give a hoot. When the bus went through villages, the driver didn’t slow down. He maintained constant breakneck speed and just beeped the horn to warn the villagers of his presence. If a bus driver beeps intermittently it means “watch out, big bus coming through get your kids out of the wayyyyy”. But if he holds his hand on the horn constantly it means that he’s going to knock somebody down if they don’t move immediately.

The bus was flagged at a village where about ten people were waiting by a tree. The bus stopped and only one woman got on, escorted by a man. The man explained something to the policewoman, and the passengers said the equivalent of “oh jaysus!” and started chattering amongst themselves. The policewoman took the other woman, the man got off and the bus pulled away. I asked the guy in the seat beside me what was going on and he told me that this woman was a suspected murderer, the villagers caught her and gave her to the policewoman to bring to the next town. Good start to the roadtrip.

The closer I got to Moroto, the crazier the villages got. I was entering mud-hut territory. When the bus stopped to leave passengers off in villages, the kids would all crowd around my window. Some would sing, some would shout Mzungu, some would just stare in amazement. Passengers on the the bus threw empty plastic bottles to the kids which they went crazy for.

The bus stopped in a quiet, ghostly town. I hopped off to stretch my legs a bit and the conductor asked me if I was getting off here. I said no I’m going to Moroto. He told me “This is Moroto!” I was expecting a bustling town, as lonely planet says that Moroto is the last place you can stock up on decent foods. It was only about half six but the town was nearly empty. A few kids came up to me and started begging for money. Not even a hello or how are you, they just put their hands out and rubbed their stomachs. I hopped onto a boda boda, checked my notebook, and asked for Moroto Hotel. We stopped on the way to get some water and more kids came up to me and asked for money. Im in Moroto 5 minutes and I’ve already been begged at more times than would happen during a full day in Kampala. We drive up a small dirtroad to the hotel and pass a community of Ka’jong people, all shouting Mzungu as we drive past. As we get closer to the hotel I spot a big UN base and many other small NGO companies. I realized then the cause of the frequent begging, NGOs dish out food, building materials, clothes, school supplies and what not, and this leads the people to think that Mzungu = free stuff.

Got a nice room in Moroto Hotel. I checked the shower… Yesss! It was electric! This would be my first electric shower since Ireland, I was so excited. So I hopped into the shower and turned it on. The lights in the room started flickering on and off, and then stayed off. So I was standing in the pitch black under a cold shower. Feckin cowboy electricians. After the shower I went out for some grub, and whenever the lights flickered on and off I was like “Ah, somebody’s having a shower!”

The mosquitoes that night were the worst I had seen. As I was reading in bed I could see them just resting on my net, watching me, waiting for me to accidentally stick my foot out in my sleep.

DAY 3 . Moroto – Kotido

The next morning I asked if there was an internet cafe in town. The hotel manager said there wasn’t, but she told me that the local radio station in town, Nenah FM, has internet, and I should be allowed use it. “Tell them Helen sent you”. So off I went to Nenah FM and managed to get 15minutes on the net. As I was surfing away, staff passing through would gasp “EH!” at the sight of the Mzungu using the office computer. The guy sitting with me in the office would reply “Hey what’s wrong? It’s 2010 you know!!!” I suppose the only mzungus they see are the ones driving around in UN jeeps. I walked around town a bit more and got harassed for money many times. I learned the word for Hello in Karamijong: Abalai. The reply is Mam, which means hunger. That’s how they greet eachother. Hello how are you? I’m hungry. But I didn’t know that the reply was hunger, so I was going around saying abalai to the folk, who would instinctively say Mam… then realize that they had just said hunger to a white person, which would then trigger them into begging.

The bus to Kotido, my next stop, was leaving at 4pm. So I went back to the hotel for a few hours. Traveling on your own forces to you interact more with the locals, so I just hung out with the hotel staff for the following few hours. We had some beers and a few games of pool on the worst pool table ever.

I went to the bus park in town and waited by a shop for the bus. A bunch of guys were playing some sort of dice game and wanted me to join in and play for money. I declined, knowing that I’d be fleeced to bits. Across the way in the bus park I could see two dodgy looking drunk lads stumbling around and shouting at random passers by. The shopkeeper came out to stand around have a gander at the day. We both had a laugh at the two drunk guys in the bus park. I asked him who the hell they were and he told me they work in the bus park, they ferry passengers around and load and unload baggage. And they were absolutely langers. For a few seconds I got a taste of tribal Africa when I saw three tall Ka’jong men running past the shop in single file, dressed in traditional clothing and carrying wooden staffs. Then the town went back to normal.

An absolute banger of a bus clattered into town, as big as a bus eireann bus but probably older than bus eireann itself. “That’s your bus” the shopkeeper said. I went over to the bus park and instantly I got loads of people asking me for money or a soda but I said no to everyone. If I give money to one, I’ll have the whole town surrounding me. One of the drunk bus park workers came over to me with a crazy look on his face, bulging red eyes from drink and feck knows what else. He was wearing one of those colorful 80s nylon jackets and raggedy pants. He had earrings, no teeth, was sweating like a pig. He shook my hand and said some Ka’jong word to me. I said hello. Then he shook my hand some more and said the same word to me. I said hello again. Then he shook my hand even more and said the word again, so I decided to repeat the word to him. Then he held my hand up like a champion and cheered and everybody had a laugh.

I was attracting a lot of attention while waiting outside the bus to buy a ticket from the conductor, so the driver told me to hop on and buy the ticket once we got moving. I sat down across from the door and looked back outside, where there was a crazy old guy shaking his bow and arrow at me. I don’t know was he trying to sell it to me or threaten me or if he was just saying hello, but I couldn’t wait for the bus to get going! I could hear babies crying and chickens squawking around the place as people shuffled and moved around looking for seats, hawkers were coming onto the bus with boxes of biscuits or water or pancakes, the conductor was shouting outside probably saying “Will ye feckin hauld on till ye get yer tickets!!” Four armed soldiers got onto the bus, Ak47s banging off seats bags and people. I turned around to see who I was sitting beside and saw that it was a normal person. Had a clean shirt on and was carrying a brown a4 envelope. If somebody has some documents with them it adds a bit of trustworthyness to their character. He asked me where I was going and I told him Kidepo. I asked him about transport to the park, which I know is unreliable, and he told me I was basically fucked. Oh well. Just then a woman sitting in the seat in front of me turned around and asked “You’re going to Kidepo?” .. I replied that yes I was going to Kidepo. “I’m going to Kidepo too!” She told me, “I’m a ranger there. I will help you with the transport!” Fecking nice one! That was my main worry about this trip, transport to the park, and by pure poxiness I happened to sit within earshot of a park ranger and talk about Kidepo. If there was such thing as god I would have praised him. Her name was Christine and she was on her way back to work from time off at home.

The bus pulled out of the park and clattered out of town up the dirtroad to Kotido. This dirtroad between Moroto and Kotido has seen it’s fair share of ambushes. The very bus I was on, run by the Gateway company, was ambushed twice by Ka’jong warriors on the Moroto-Kotido road, but the last recorded ambush was a little over a year ago so I wasn’t too worried.

About an hour into the trip I was admiring thesemi-arid landscape of Karamoja, dotted with cacti and tough desert bushes, lone Ka’jong warriors walking in distance… when the bus broke down. All Ugandan coaches carry mechanics with them, so the mechanic swung into action and grabbed his toolbox. He opened it and I saw that he only had a sew spanners inside. He went outside to fix the engine. We all got off the bus as it was slowly baking us alive. When I got out I noticed that the soldiers had positioned themselves around the bus, one at each corner. I asked somebody if it was usual to have military escorts on buses nowadays, and he told me that those guys are probably just traveling to their barracks upcountry. “Today it is very safe” he said, “just a year ago you could not travel these roads, you could not stand around outside like this, the warriors would kill you. But today it is fine!”

I sat down on a nearby rock and waited. A woman with a baby came over to greet me. She couldn’t speak English but she just wanted to shake my hand I guess. I shook her tiny babys hand too.and she looked as if she thought I was going to eat her. Another person came up to greet me, a teacher called Evans, from Kaabong, the next village after Kotido. We chatted for a while as we waited for the mechanic to fix the bus. He was actually Kenyan and told me I could stay in his families home in Mombasa if I ever found myself there. He told me to stop by his school in Kaabong for a visit and I said I would on my way back from Kidepo. I went over and had a chat with Christine, the ranger from Kidepo. She told me she had a chicken on the bus. “Ah so that’s your feckin chicken squawking under the seat?!” “Yes” she said, “and when you come to Kidepo I will cook some for you! Do you like rice?” Sound! She also offered to wash any dirty clothes I had. I asked her about how we were going to get to the park. She said we’ll try and find a pickup or something tomorrow. It’s crazy that even the rangers who work in the park have to find their own transport to work in this way.

So after an hour and a half waiting around the bush, only one NGO jeep passed, which two people managed to grab a lift from. The bus eventually started up and we all piled back into our seats. We would be arriving in Kotido, a town with no electricity, at night. But first we had to travel up the worst road I’ve ever seen. It windy, bumpy, and a large section of it was corrugated and ribbed with small ripple formations, probably caused by flooding in the rainy season, and each one would rattle the already rattly bus to pieces. I couldn’t hear myself think. I thought my teeth were going to fall out. I even got a headache and I never suffer from travel sickness. My cheeks were wobbling around like jelly. Worst…. road…. ever. This lasted for about an hour. At one point, as we were driving through the night, I saw a tiny light in the distance. “What the hell is that?” I thought to myself. It was a tiny pinprick. It surely couldn’t be a house with electricity out in the middle of nowhere could it? As we got closer and the light grew bigger, I could see that it was something yellow. A lantern maybe. The bus got closer… Come on shitty road give the bus a break so we can get to this mysterious light quicker! I could now see that it was a triangular yellow light. We eventually reached it and lo and behold, it was a reflective road warning sign that had a squiggly line on it ie. warning, bendy road. Thanks a bleedin lot! After hours of driving up the shittiest road I’ve ever seen, they decide to tell us “Oh by the way, some bends on the road…”

We eventually made it to Kotido at about 8pm. It wasn’t as bad as I thought, some people had generators so there was a bit of light thrown onto the streets from the shops. Christine showed me a good lodge to stay in. Well, good for Karamojan standards. It was like a compound, and each room had a big clangy metal door which you locked with a padlock. I said goodnight to Christine and we agreed to meet up the next morning at 8am to organize transport together. There was no power in the lodge, or running water, so I didn’t shower. I went to bed and read by candlelight. The bed was really comfy and it had a mosquito net, shur what more do you want?

TO BE CONTINUED….

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 walk back out. It doesn’t happen that much in the capital but in the towns and villages it’s inevitable. Kids can also just stand and stare at you for half an hour. When a bus stops in a rural area, the kids all come up to see who’s on the bus. They scan the windows. Sometimes they miss me and the bus pulls off, but when they see me in the window it’s as if they’ve seen a ghost. In one very rural village where the bus stopped, I was watching one kid scanning the bus, she was chewing sugarcane. So chewing away she was scanning each window while smiling, very exited to see one of the only vehicles that come into the village every day. And when she found me, she stopped chewing, stopped smiling, gob open, and just stared as if I had two heads… then I smiled at her and she started chewing and smiling again, but she stopped scanning the bus and just stared at me until the bus pulled away.

Ugandan English Lingo:

They Ugandans speak very good English, afterall it’s an ex-English colony like ourselves, and of course like ourselves the language has evolved a bit.

Commands usually start with “First”.

Can you come over here? = First you come!

Wait a while = First you wait!

etc. etc.

“Even me” at the start of the sentence is like putting “too” at the end of a sentence. “Even me I live in Kampala” = “I live in Kampala too”

“Ever” can be used instead of “always”. “My son is ever playing football” = “My son always plays football” … “I have ever wanted a motorbike” = “I have always wanted a motorbike”. It can also mean “before” as in: “I have ever been in Kampala” = “I have been in Kampala before”.

“I’ll be back” is “Let me come” or sometimes “First let me come”.

How are you? The reply is always “fine”. Never good, great, grand, ok, but “fine”. Sometimes they ask “How is you?” which gives me a laugh.

“Yesssssss?” means “Would you like to buy this product?” So some lad on the street might come up to you wearing twenty jackets – that’s how they carry the clothes around, they just wear everything – and just ask “Yesss?”

Some words end in “ee”, I haven’t figured out the pattern yet. But for example, somebody can wash your clothes-y. I was talking to a born again christian and she told me she was “saved-y”.

Hand shakes can be a bit confusing. You greet somebody, you shake their hands. But then you stop shaking and hold hands while you talk and ask eachother how things are going. The holding hands thing could last up to a minute, just standing around “Ah how are the kids?” … “Good! Did you go to that national park yet?” … “Yes it was very nice” etc. etc. all while holding hands.

Back to dancing, the people can dance anywhere anytime. If there’s music, somebody will break a move. On the street walking past a music shop somebody could bust a move, even if they’re carrying a crate of Coca Cola on their shoulders. It’s great.

If a woman is coming on to you, you’re guaranteed it’s because you’re a “rich” white man and not because they like you as a person. Many Ugandans would like to leave Uganda, but can’t because they can’t even afford the place ticket, let alone money to keep them going as they look for work in a new country. A Ugandan cricket team recently went missing when they went to play in Canada. They never turned up for the flight back home. I’m guessing it was like their chance to escape. Like that Stallone movie Escape to Victory. So when a woman sees a white guy, the first thing she thinks about is being whisked off to a nice foreign country where a decent wage can be earned. If you don’t whisk them off to another country they could end up just robbing money and belongings from your room, which happened to a liverpool scouser mate of mine here in Kampala.

That’s all for now, I’m sure there’s more so will update in the future.A