Please note that VSO is in no way connected with or responsible for the content, comments and observations in this blog: these are solely my own in a personal capacity.
Monday 6th April
Up at 0700 and walked (slowly) up to Nakumatt to get some bread for the journey. Also bought a copy of Collins Easy Learning French Conversation for Rwf 7.900 to improve my mind on the trip (Alfred: pity he didn’t buy it ages ago – turned out to be just the book he has been looking for, really good. Well, I think so anyway – don’t speak any French myself!). Then down to Nyamagogo on a moto and onto the bus. This turned out to be a big executive bus with lots of legroom and I had booked a right-hand side aisle seat so I could stick my leg straight out along the aisle. Long story short – pleasant nine-hour journey, leg actually felt a lot better afterwards!
On the way I was sitting beside a Rwandan girl called Happy who is a primary teacher but is also studying in the Kigali Institute of Management. I asked her what she was studying – she said ... ‘Management’. (Alfred: like the time Ruairí tried to post a small parcel in Butare and the postmistress gave him twenty-nine stamps to put on it. When he asked ‘Where should I put the stamps?’, she answered witheringly ‘On the parcel’!! His face!!) Happy told me she was getting out of Rwanda for the Genocide Memorial Week as were most of her friends – she found it hard to understand why anyone wanted to relive and recall the events each year.
First impressions of Uganda were – how empty is was!! In Rwanda you are so used to every square inch being cultivated or occupied; here there are huge swathes of empty plains, with the odd farm dotted here and there. Also, the potatoes are much bigger – strange thing to notice but the potatoes, at least where I live, are tiny little things! When we crossed the border at Gatuna (sp?) there were women on the Ugandan side selling potatoes and they were enormous!!
At Gatuna we had to go through Ugandan immigration. Now, I don’t know if I mentioned this before but there is a curious anomaly in Ugandan immigration procedures. Citizens of the East African Community do not have to pay for a visa but everyone else does – Americans, British, Canadians, French, Belgians, Japanese, whoever – except the Irish. No one knows why and I haven’t even been able to come up with a convincing theory (Alfred: All suggestions – or preferably the truth – welcome!). Gatuna was a pretty shabby place, crawling with money changers and beggars but we got through it pretty much as fast as could be expected.
The quality of housing also improved immediately we crossed the border – not there weren’t some houses like those in Rwanda but the general standard was much higher; even the smaller towns were all electrified with proper banks and shops and offices.
And finally to Kampala – big, sprawling, dirty, absolutely jammed with traffic. It had taken me half an hour from the border into Uganda before I figured out we were actually driving on the left now – Kampala knocked a big hole in that theory as everyone seemed to drive wherever they liked. OK - the lorries, buses and most of the cars did keep to the left but some cars and ALL the motos (here called ‘boda bodas’) drove pretty much wherever they liked, or (more to the point) wherever there was space. Amy and Eric had booked me into their hotel and Amy rang me and gave me instructions. It was actually only a few minutes from the bus station but I managed to overshoot and walked on for ages, all downhill, which I then had to reclimb (Alfred: this can be explained that, due to recent events, Ruairí walks around staring at the ground in front of him all the time and doesn’t look to the left or right). Anyway, found hotel and dumped stuff. The room was fine and the shower actually had hot water (Alfred: Emmm, Ruairí, hotels are supposed to have hot water, get a grip). Then I met up with Eric and Amy and, guess what! They had a present for me – a walking stick!!!
Now, I’m not exactly sure whether this was intended as a joke or not (Alfred: Duh, I wonder .....) or whether Amy was making up for the laughter (which she was still prone to bursting into from time to time whenever I reminded her of what had happened, which was pretty much every time I moved!) but it is fair to say that this may be the single most useful present I have ever been given in my life. Simple black African hardwood stick with a rounded top – exactly what I needed and proved invaluable over the next few days. Thanks guys!
We headed out to eat and found ourselves in a place called the TUHENDE SAFARI LODGE where we all had .... wait for it, fillet steaks! Ah yes, best meat I have tasted in, well a hell of a long time. Fried vegetable thingies with dip, tiny portion of cabbage soup, steak with mash, gravy, carrots, salad, garlic bread, some other stuff as well and then fresh fruit salad in cream for dessert. Total cost 12,500 shillings, or Rwf 3,800 or just over €5. Beers came in at 3,000 shillings each for 50cl bottles (Nile Special, gorgeous beer) or just over €1 each.
Another thing that suddenly dawned on me as we sat there was that the music that was playing was actually nice! If there is one thing I have really got used to in Rwanda it is the absolutely crap music that is played loudly everywhere you go. This place was playing really nice Latin American music and it was SOOOOOO nice! And the owner came around all the tables to check that everyone was OK and if we needed anything – like being in Paradise!
Tuesday 7th April
Amy and Eric headed off to Jinja at the crack of dawn this morning. I staggered out of bed much later – my leg was really sore, no doubt due to the bus trip and the amount of walking I had done. However, getting on a moto or anything that involved bending the left leg at all was sheer agony, so walking it would have to be. But first to breakfast!! Ah yes, breakfast was actually included in the room price and it was easy to see why. It consisted of: a) one mug of hot water and a tea-bag b) one egg (Amy had referred to it as ‘slightly dodgy’ and I could see why) c) two slices of bread and a knife with a miniscule lump of margarine already on the blade. This is where Rwandan food began it’s fight back – what I wouldn’t have given for a nice omelette! (Alfred: while we are talking about the hotel – Hotel Luzan by the way, near the Kigali bus station – a few other peculiarities: the staff never smile, which is par for the course in Rwanda but unusual here; the bed is huge but has two mattresses running horizontally rather than vertically so there is a hole under your hip; the toilet has a shower-head attached to the wall and a drain in the floor, so basically you sit on the loo and let the water pour down on you! Comfy bed and clean room and only 28,000 shillings or about €13 for a double room and very handy for the bus station .... but .....!).
So, what is Kampala like at first sight? Rather than give a blow by blow description of the day (which would be unutterably tedious) here are the highs and lows:
Things not to like about Kampala
1. The moto/boda boda drivers: they are completely insane. They drive like lunatics, none of them wear helmets and in all the time I was there only one had a helmet for the passenger. They drive on the wrong side of the road, on footpaths, through parks, and pay absolutely NO attention whatsoever to the traffic police (what a s**t job THAT seems to be). They also have an insane system of calculating fares, though that’s not so different from Kigali, I suppose.
Things to like about Kampala:
1. The moto/boda boda drivers: they are amazingly good drivers. After a few days in Kampala I realised that it’s not the boda boda drivers who are insane, it’s the traffic itself and they have just adapted their behaviour to cope with an irrational and dysfunctional system. The fare structure (allowing for bargaining etc) actually makes some sense. You will pay up to twice as much for a boda boda at rush hour as it will take easily twice as long; you also pay extra for going on a route that is primarily uphill instead of downhill. All boda bodas carry two passengers if necessary – not an experiment I tried at any stage!!
Things not to like about Kampala
2. It’s really dirty – not so much litter and stuff lying around, though there was plenty of that, but air pollution. Kigali isn’t great but this was incredible. Especially because there are so many motorbikes. Also lots of buses and lorries and their engines seem to be even more poorly maintained than in Rwanda (Alfred: which is REALLY saying something, believe me!).
Things to like about Kampala:
2. I was invisible. In a city where there actually seemed to be fewer white people than in Kigali, no one gave me a second glance. Not once in my entire stay did I hear the word muzungu. No one tried to sell me anything, no one begged, you could go in and wander around shops without either being harassed to buy stuff or followed around by two suspicious shop assistants as if you were about to steal the entire contents of the store!
Things not to like about Kampala
3. What is this obsession with clothes shops? Just how many clothes do they buy? Row upon row of clothes shops and no cafes or bars or restaurants – well, very few by comparison.
Things to like about Kampala
3. It’s a REAL city. They have real bookshops ... and supermarkets (Alfred: I refer readers to my earlier comment about hot water)! I went into one supermarket in the Garden City shopping centre and it was pretty much like being in Tesco’s or Dunnes Stores. Oh, and I went to the CINEMA. Crap film – The International with Clive Owen and Naomi Watts, a dog’s dinner of unlikely and plain stupid plot twists that even the necrophile estate of Robert Ludlum wouldn’t have touched – but a cinema! I think that is the single thing I miss most out here, actually.
Things about Kampala in general
Religion: I didn’t think anywhere could be more religious than Rwanda but that was the impression. At least, there were more religious maniacs around, standing on street corners with Bibles shouting to the heavens and loads of religious books for sale on the footpaths. The best one was when I was having lunch on Tuesday in Antonio’s Food Court (not particularly recommended – African Plate Chicken was the dish: one small drumstick in sauce, rice, chapatti, mashed sweet potato, cabbage, beans and something grey and sludgy called ‘posho’ which tasted a lot better than it looked, thank God). This man came by my table and said ‘Hello brother’ and held out his thumb, upwards. I pressed my thumb against his (guessing, correctly, that this is what he wanted). He immediately sank to his knees and said something like this: ‘Dear Lord in heaven, bless this man and President Museveni and Barack Obama. Keep them from danger and harm and guide their steps on the road of righteousness. Amen.’ Then he took away his thumb and asked me for my phone number. I explained that I didn’t live in Uganda. He was momentarily taken aback and then asked me (surprise, surprise) if I was married. When I said I wasn’t he replied: ’When the day comes that God Almighty places the wedding ring on your finger here in Uganda, I shall be there to bless you.’ And off he went. No one else in the restaurant paid him the slightest bit of attention whatsoever.
Beer: Nile Special is definitely the one to go for. I tried Bells which is fine but very low alcohol, even lower than Primus, so it barely tastes like beer, to be honest (Alfred: Amy said it is called ‘girls’ beer’, so there!). Eric warned me off Club, Pils is Pils as it is anywhere. Didn’t try any others as Nile Special was really good, so why not stick to what you like (and it was cheaper than Mutzig, though more expensive than Primus)
Television: Al-Jazeera seems to be the station of choice. Virtually every bar, electrical goods store, restaurant and so on was tuned to it. They also seem rather fond of weird kung fu type movies, dubbed into a bewildering variety of languages with at least two sets of subtitles.
Reading: Amy had started Amos Oz’s autobiography A Tale of love and Darkness but didn’t like it so I swapped with her, thinking I might like it. Well, it’s heavy going (I eventually gave up two-thirds of the way through and that’s a pretty rare thing for me!) – just one family anecdote after another. There were a few nice things here and there: I particularly liked this quote from his Aunt Sonia about Jewish mothers: “ When it comes down to it, you are just the yolk of the egg, you are what the chick eats to grow big and strong.”
English: it is strange to be surrounded by Africans speaking English all the time. I am so used to NEVER hearing English unless it is being spoken by muzungus or a member of the VSO Program Office. The standard does vary enormously but most people I heard speaking to each other used English, though there were plenty of other languages also and sometimes two or three simultaneously.
Clothes: people are better but not as entertainingly dressed as in Rwanda. One of my favourite pastimes there is weird t-shirt spotting as my regular readers will know, but Ugandans, or at least Kampalans, don’t seem to shop in the second-hand boutiques to the same extent.
NEXT INSTALMENT: RUAIRÍ MOVES TO THE BACKPACKERS HOSTEL: BIG VSO REUNION; DINNER AT THE AMBASSADOR’S; CLOTHES SHOPPING; GENOCIDE REMINISCENCES (as Gaeilge, be warned); UGANDAN ATTITUDES TOWARDS HOMOSEXUALITY (not for the faint-hearted) AND DEMONIC POSSESSION AND TRAVELLING HOME WITH ELSPETH.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment