Uganda

His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular.
-Idi Amin's Self-Given Title


Despite how awesome I knew Uganda was going to be, my semi-limited time meant that I only ended up spending about a week and a half in the country. That was a shame because there is a whole lot for the wandering backpacker there.

The first stop for me was in Jinja, a popular backpacker stop and the starting point of the Nile (Unless, of course, you could Burundi's spot on Lake Tanganyika, which the Ugandans do not.) Besides that claim-to-fame, the river provides some fabulous rapids for kayakers and rafters and a number of tourist companies have chimed in to offer "adrenaline" activities such as mountain biking in the surrounding hills and bungee jumping over the river. Personally, I find self-proclaimed adrenaline activities to frequently be over-rated, so I limited myself to a day of rafting a few more days of exploring the area.

I stayed in a lodge/camp site a few kilometers outside of town that was on a bluff overlooking the beginning stretch of the Nile, and luck was on my side when I set up my tent and I got a spot on a ledge near the water. The site had an outdoor shower, inexplicably utilized very little, that I used every day. It offered a beautiful view of the water as it started its course towards Egypt. The shower was closed on three sides and completely open on the fourth, so I had to be careful not to get soap in my eyes or I could slip and plunge down the embankment. Totally worth the risk though.

The rafting, for any pooh-pawing I may have done, was a very great time. There were a total of six rapids throughout the day and we flipped on two of them. The last set of rapids, and the second flip, kept me under initially just long enough to feel a beautiful surge of panic. Then, as rapids do, it tossed me up long enough for a brief gulp of air before taking me under again. This continued for maybe forty seconds (that seemed more like four minutes) until eventually I was able to make my way to a shoreline and get picked up by a rescue kayak. If we weren't feeling it before, we all certainly felt the adrenaline at that point.

For anyone in the region, I would recommend rafting or kayaking these. Do it soon though, because a dam that is scheduled to be complete at the end of this year is going to wipe out half of the rapids I took. Bummer.

As I briefly alluded to in my last post, my schedule when traveling is comfortably vacant and I can spend hours doing what in normal times should only take minutes. Case in point was one day in Jinja when I had a craving for a pineapple. (Okay, three pineapples.) The hawkers outside my camp site were selling them at twice the normal price under the assumption that we wouldn't know enough or care enough to go and get normal priced ones from a nearby village. But I've found that walking just a couple kilometers from popular tourist destinations puts you in a different world where the locals are as surprised to see a tourist as if you're hundreds of miles from a tourist hot-spot. You talk to people you wouldn't normally talk to, you see gardens, rivers, waterfalls, and houses you would miss, and you buy food at the local rates. The "local rate" issue might not sound like a big deal, but having to barter with every person you purchase food from for months on end is mind-numbing, so having someone just naturally charge you the correct price is an uplifting experience every time.

On this occasion, the road I was walking looked vaguely familiar and I got a sense of deja vu, but I chalked that up to the fact that I've walked on a whole lot of red-dust roads lined with banana trees. I didn't find any pineapples until I was about six kilometers from my camp site, and when I got there the stall owner was so surprised to see me that she insisted I stay for some banana wine.

By that time I ready to leave it was starting to get dark so I stuck out my thumb at the first vehicle that came by. It turned out that it a bus filled with kids from a local school that were coming back from a soccer match. In the front were a pair of cute Australian teachers who looked to be about my age and were happy to give me advice on good places to hang out, local prices for various foods and tell me about their volunteer work. After a few minutes one of them said "Oh yeah. This road? It's the one in "The Last King of Scotland."

I snapped my fingers - that's where the deja vu had come from! The dropped my off outside my site with a gratifying "no charge!" and I was left thinking about "The Last Kind of Scotland" and Idi Amin.

Of the African "Strong Men" that came out of the Independence period in the 1960s and 1970s, Idi Amin may not have been the worst, but I wager he was the craziest. Besides being an avowed anti-Semite, tossing the Indian population out of Uganda, threatening war with Kenya and actually going to war with Tanzania, killing between 300,000 and 500,000 of his people, destroying Uganda's reputation as a popular tourist destination, allowing his soldiers to kill most of Uganda's big game, and killing a number of his ministers and cohorts, Amin was also rumored to be a cannibal who ate the organs fresh from the bodies of his enemies. The movie, in opinion, hardly does his insanity justice.

Large sections of the country, including its tourism sector are still recovering from his eight year rule that ended in 1979 and his name is synonymous in my mind with the phrase "completely and utterly bat-shit crazy." But maybe that's just me.

The next day I crashed for the first time since being in Ethiopia. I call days like these me "Why-the-hell-am-I-here-when-I-could-be-at-home-with-ice-in-my-glass?" days, and they're typically when a few things go wrong one-after-another. They're days when I'm just tired of it all; tired of moving from bed to bed and city to city in cramped buses, of everyone trying to rip me off, constant power cuts, and tired of having to make new friends every few days.

This was compounded by Jinja's popularity among the backpacker crowd. It's not easy to explain, but I rarely relish be surrounded by large amounts of travelers. It's not a turf issue, as meeting one or two in the middle of the bush is always a thrill and we typically hook up as travel partners for a few days. But being surrounded by them in a city or lodge is disheartening to me for some reason. This was the biggest popular backpacker hang-out since I was in Egypt, and it came as a shock to me to see so many muzungus ("foreigner" in Swahili) in one area. They were all nice enough, but I have gotten used to being by myself or with maybe a couple other muzungus. 50 others all stumbling drunk around my tent at 3 A.M. is something I forgot happened in Africa.

The next day was a complete 180 and my spirits shot up just in time for me to leave the city. This was partially due to a sudden downpour, my first rain since Jerusalem, that was so heavy it cut visibility to just a few feet and signified an end to my stay in drought-regions. I took off on a bus through Kampala and to the city of Rukungiri, home to my friend Megan who is staying there for peace corp. Not only did her place offer the first semblance of a "home" I had slept in on this trip, but she also bluntly told me that I should wash my clothes. The water shortages from Addis all the way to Uganda had meant little extra water for washing, so everything I had was absolutely filled with dust and dirt. We must had gotten seven pounds out of my stuff by the time we were done. So, thank you Megan. Seriously.

Before leaving Uganda I traveled to Lake Bunyoni, a meandering Rift Valley lake that is the second deepest on the continent and travels for 25 kilometers near the Rwandan border. More rain slightly dampened (har!) my mood, but soon I was on my way to Rwanda.