Hayestack

Have you ever woken up and, for the first 30 seconds, had no idea where you were? It was like that when I woke up in Sophie’s Motel. The bed was strange (I’m not used to waking up in strange beds), the room was strange, the light was strange. Then I remembered…we were half way around the world.  Being on the equator, daylight remains at a constant 12 hours throughout the year. From about 6 until 6, no change, no seasons.

The road from Entebbe to Kampala was being radically improved.  Gangs of workmen and women were clearing rubble, planting trees and bushes.  Mostly, the women did the work while the men looked on.  Moses took great delight in telling us that this was because the Queen (of England) was coming. I looked for a hint of irony in his eyes when he talked of the Queen with such excitement, but there was none.  He seemed genuinely excited.  He wished she would visit more often so that more roads would be improved.

Moses also explained that the Money Exchange at Entebbe airport had short-changed us.  The woman at the counter had deliberately “picked” (Ugandan for stolen) some of the notes from the bundle.  We had given this money to Moses for petrol but some notes were missing.  “They prey on new visitors who don’t know the currency.  And the women are worse than the men,” he explained.  “They are more cunning”.  “Well, isn’t that true the world over,” I thought, but didn’t dare say it out loud.

As we entered Kampala in the early hours of the morning, a faint mist lay like gossamer over the city.  It was only when we entered the cloud that we could smell the diesel fumes in the air.  Lorries, buses and cars all belched out thick, acrid, blue fumes from their exhausts.  “Diesel engines cost more to service than petrol ones, so people don’t bother,” Moses explained as the lorry in front disappeared in a cloud of it’s own exhaust.  It was amusing to think how paranoid we, in Britain, were about our meagre “carbon footprints” when other parts of the world were indiscriminately spewing out huge quantities of pollution.  I don’t mean that we should do the same, but let’s not be so paranoid about our relatively much smaller contribution.  If you spend any time in Kampala, pack an oxygen mask along with your malaria tablets.  The pollution will get you long before the mosquitoes do.  Or, maybe the maniac drivers on those hugely congested roads will.  If there were a Highway Code (and I very much doubt it) there would be just two rules, viz. 1)  if you see a gap go for it at great speed.  2) Ignore all other drivers unless they are two inches from hitting you.  Our driver, Moses, was a professional Kampalan driver and he nearly knocked down just one motorcyclist.  If I had been driving, boy, would there have been carnage?  I’m glad we didn’t hire a car as we now would either be lying in the Kampala morgue or still trying to find our way out of “the city with no street signs”.  Accidents are a common occurrence.  A few days later we saw a car drive into a motorbike.  The pillion passenger (no helmet) neatly jumped of the bike mid strike and nonchalantly walked away as if he’d performed the same trick a thousand times before.

We hadn’t realised how ubiquitous private security guards were in Uganda.  Two burly guards clutching huge shotguns stood outside the currency exchange office in Kampala.  Were they expecting trouble?  We decided not to stay long enough to find out.  It was unnerving to see a line of young men on motorbikes watch our every move as we left the office with our money.  We jumped into the car where Moses had parked hoping it was his.  Fortunately, it was.  As we sped off,  I nervously looked out of the rear window but no bikers were following.   Moses knew all the short cuts.  To avoid congestion he turn a turn and we ended up in pot-hole city.  The road was like a Swiss cheese.  We zig-zagged around the biggest craters and even had to do a cross-country stint over some rough ground to avoid disappearing down a black hole.  The road led, unsurprisingly, to the car spare part centre of Kampala.  Mountains of rusty metal, salvaged, no doubt, from previous wrecks, were piled high by the sides of the road.  Nearly all the vehicles in Uganda are Japanese.  Most are minibus/taxis in various stages of disintegration and full of people.  They are legally allowed to take 14 people.  The one we went on had 19.  The law is regularly flouted.

Dilapidated villages and shanty huts line most of the roads in Uganda.  There was hardly a stretch of road free of buildings.  They were mainly structures cobbled together from odd scraps of wood with a piece of corrugated iron placed on the top.  These were homes to, perhaps two adults and four children.  Some were superior and made with mud bricks.  They looked like rows of garages.  Often they were painted bright yellow or shocking pink.  They reflected the battle between the two mobile phone companies.  The pink were for Celtel, the yellow for MTN.  They seemed to be evenly matched.  Well, I suppose it was one way of earning some shillings and getting your house painted for free. Apparently, this is a country where the average villager travels up to two kilometres to make a call and the waiting list for access to a fixed line telephone is 3.6 years, if you can afford it.  Some were shops, having a small pile of tomatoes, maize or similar placed outside for sale.  The towns and larger villages had shops with piles of mattresses outside, beds or even coffins for sale.  There was probably a good trade in the last item.  The roads seemed to be centres of Ugandan life.  Even in the most remote stretches there were people walking along the road.  They didn’t seem to be walking anywhere in particular.  They were just walking.  The men tended just to stand and stare blankly.  The local “gut-rot” made from Sorghum, a grass seed resembling corn, maybe partly responsible for this, together with the cultural tradition that the women do all the work.

We spent that night at the Margherita Hotel overlooking the Ruwenzori mountain range on the border of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.   Someone said there were gorillas in those mountains.  But he may have meant guerrillas.  I was too afraid to ask.   We didn’t stay long enough to find out.

Tags: 10 Days in Uganda, driving, England, lager

This entry was posted on Monday, September 3rd, 2007 at 10:44 am and is filed under Uganda. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.