Uganda

We went to Uganda to see animals. It is, after all, what we do in Africa. Safari. Lodge. Safari. Lodge. Repeat as often as possible before it's time to go home. Until next time when we will inevitably do the exact same sort of thing in a different spot on the continent. And there will be a next time. I guarantee it.

We had hopes for this trip. We had wants. Gorillas. Chimpanzees. Shoebills. Elephants. Hippos. Bee-eaters (yes...bee-eaters). Lions. Leopards. Marabou storks. Vervet monkeys. Giraffes. Fish eagles. Kingfishers. Cheetahs. Hyenas. Vultures. Buffalo. Warthogs. Crocodiles. Crowned cranes. Hornbills. There were more, I'm sure. Some were a reach. Most were seen. Some were not. No cheetahs or giraffes in Queen Elizabeth National Park apparently. Yes to leopards but not where we were. Or at least not where we looked. But that's what you get with leopards.

We had some surprises. All sorts of monkeys. Ugandan kobs, which are basically impala with slightly different markings, maybe a bit more than slightly different horns and no "M" on the butts. Bushbucks and waterbucks, large antelopes which we hadn't seen since Botswana in 2015, if I'm remembering right. Lots of ants. Safari ants. Ants that bite. And bats. Hundreds and hundreds of bats on our hotel property in Kisoro, safe on the other side of the fence in the daytime but all around in the morning before sunrise, so loud that they served as a sort of alarm clock. Difficult to sleep through all that din. 

Candelabra cactus with buffalo (top); red-billed hornbill (bottom).

We found way more than just animals. Driving between lodges takes time and patience. And passing through tiny Ugandan town after tiny Ugandan town and from the back seat of a safari van, we saw more of Uganda than just the wildlife. Pepsi. Coke. Airtel. MTN. Comfoam. Goodwill Ceramic, Ltd. Regal Paints. Monaco Coatings. Lafarge. Coldease. Plascon. Simba Cement. Nile Special. Club. Blue Magic. Black plastic Gentex water tanks. Red LeBron James Lakers jerseys (I don't understand that one). Name brands and global icons. Consumerism in all its glory.

Maybe some of the names in the previous paragraph ring bells. Others I'm sure don't. Uganda is building. And Plascon, Goodwill, Regal, Monaco, Lafarge, Simba and Gentex and others are there for Uganda. Everything is piece built by hand out of components that can be carried and lifted by hand. Construction is everywhere. Bricks are fired by the side of the road in kilns made of the bricks they are cooking. Scaffolding is stick built. Literally. Out of actual sticks of wood. Brick and concrete and sand and terra cotta tiles are mixed and sifted and lifted and placed by hand. No machinery. No equipment. One piece after another. All available at the hardware stores that appeared to be in every town, there to help it all along.

The smell of the earth cooking around those bricks reminded me of the peat in Scottish whisky distilleries. Earth burning is earth burning, I guess.

Stores and houses and hotels and offices may be springing up everywhere. They can't disguise the fact that Uganda is a farming nation. Goats and cows are tethered to patches of grass by the side of the road. Chickens are luckier; they get to roam free. As does the occasional turkey. Fresh milk is everywhere. So are Bananas. In markets, on breakfast tables, on the backs of motorcycles, served with lunch as matoke along with similarly flavorless posho or cassava. The fruit is better than matoke and posho and cassava. Pineapple. Mango. Watermelon. Passion fruit. Papaya. And just plain sweet bananas. Wash it down with coffee or tea from the massive plantations and individual plants on small farms all over the country. 

Tea plantation (top). Paint store (bottom).

Think it's odd to carry bunches of bananas on the back of a motorcycle, by the way? Don't. I'm convinced Ugandans have figured out how to carry everything and anything on a motorcycle. Bananas. Greens. Pineapples. Wood. One or two or three passengers. Six foot long lengths of pipe. Other motorcycles. You name it. Anything that needs to be taken from point A to point B can be taken on a motorcycle in Uganda. Don't think that it can't be done. In Uganda, it can be done on the back or the side or the seat of a motorcycle.

Motorcycles are everywhere in Uganda. And they are ridden solo or by two, three or four people and accompanied by anything they can hold or strap onto the bike. But if there's anything more everywhere than motorcycles in Uganda, it's people. There are tons and tons of people out on the streets at all hours doing anything anyone could possibly do in Uganda. Building. Selling. Making metal doors that are sold as storefronts and gates in every town. Sweeping streets with brooms made of twigs. Sitting at gas stations waiting for customers (no self serve in Uganda!). Sitting at the equator waiting for customers to see some equator themed tricks for the equivalent of almost $3 US a time. Making a living. Scraping out a living. Moving from one place to another from homes to markets to roadside grills hawking meat to pork joints, often with gigantic sacks of rice or shopping bags or bundles of twigs balanced on their heads in ways that us mzungus can't possibly imagine doing ourselves. It's chaos and it works. 

Most people seem to be moving from nowhere to nowhere else. Walking across roads they have no business crossing to get to nothing. Absolutely nothing. But the fact that there's nothing in the immediate vicinity doesn't mean that's where they are going. The distances people walk are incomprehensible to us, those of us who are used to hopping in a car or in a taxi for any sort of distance more than a five minute trip on foot.

Visit to the equator (top) and vervet monkeys peeking out of a candelabra cactus (bottom).

If you need any proof of the patience and perseverance of Ugandans walking from home to somewhere else, look no further than the youth of the country. Dressed in uniforms, they are up before dawn walking in ones and twos and packs and lines along dusty roads passed by vans holding tourists to see elephants or gorillas or chimpanzees or whatever else we are en route to see. They are up early because their journey is miles long. No bus. No parents dropping them off in front of the school. Just walking in the dark.

And if you didn't get it the first time, after a day of sightseeing you will see the same kids on the same road going the other way. Walking again. Far from home. Far from school. The length of time they walk each day is not a distance felt by visitors. We can't relate. It's not part of our experience. But it is part of the Ugandan experience. Seven in the morning. Half past five in the afternoon. That's 10.5 hours of the day and that's not the start or the end.

All this from the back seat of a safari van. Kibale National Park. Queen Elizabeth National Park. Kazinga Channel. Mgahinga National Park. Those places didn't teach me about Uganda. Watching people and their lives from that seat in the back of the van showed me the real Uganda. 

I took a lot of photographs while traveling in Uganda. I have amazing and detailed pictures of some incredible wildlife, a lot of which I am sure I will share on this blog. But nothing sums up our experience in Uganda more succinctly than the photograph below. It's a perfect representation of what we went to see juxtaposed against what we found driving between parks. Truth be told, these people photobombed my elephant pic. But they did it just right.

---

How We Did It

We booked our time and activities in Uganda as part of a tour package through Uganda and into Rwanda with G Adventures, who have become our favorite tour company to take us to places where the logistics are just a bit more than we want to try to tackle ourselves. Other than the first day, which we coordinated ourselves and which I am sure will be detailed on this blog, we let them handle all the arrangements. The exact tour we took was the Gorilla Treks & Safari Drives tour.

We almost didn't make it into Uganda, although that statement may be a little bit dramatic.

Before we arrived in Uganda, we applied for an East African Tourist Visa through the Uganda E-Visa application webpage. The on line approval was quick and efficient and we printed out the approval document with barcodes that could be scanned on entry to the country and exchanged for a visa sticker that would be applied to one of our passport pages.

That all worked great until...we were told that the immigration staff didn't have any visa stickers at the airport that day. No stickers? At the airport? When they knew we were coming into the country that day AND people come into the country on the East African Tourist Visa all the time? Yep. No stickers. The immigration officer emerged from his office with two receipts for our passports and told us to come back Tuesday (we arrived on a Friday). 

Just one problem with that: we'd be eight hours away or so by car on Tuesday and would never be any closer to the airport than that after that date since we were ending our trip in Rwanda which is a whole other country. And we would definitely need our passports in hand to enter Rwanda.

The solution: wait. For about three and a half hours for someone to go to Kampala (about a 45 to 60 minute drive one way) to pick up some stickers so we could have our visas that day like the system is supposed to work. We arrived in Uganda at about 2:30 in the afternoon. We left the airport at about 6:30 with our visas and passports in hand.

When we got inside the airport after getting off the plane, there was a woman from the Uganda tourist office who had been sent by G Adventures to meet us off the plane and guide us through the immigration process. I don't want to say we couldn't have gotten through the no visa sticker experience without her, but I can say that it would have been a lot less smooth without her help. I appreciate the fact that she was there for us as soon as we got off the plane and guided us through the entire experience, right up to the point when we got in the car for the transfer to our hotel. Sometimes it helps to have people looking out for you. 

I'm saving the receipt that the immigration officer gave us for our passports as a souvenir.

---