Ok, so I know Ugandans are polite. So much so that I usually feel like a badly dressed potato around them. But the amount of messages I got after arriving me to Kabale, asking if I was alright, seemed kind of extreme, even for Ugandan standards. But then my colleague Paul told that people weren't just polite, they were asking quite literally if I had survived the trip. Looking at Ugandan road statistics, actually not a surprising question. I know I'm a spoiled European and all that, and that I cannot expect the same level of comfort than at home, blablabla. [View Full Entry]

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ENGLISH Sadly things have taken a turn for the worst. We've not eaten in days and are sleeping on the streets. We've had to turn our skills to street crime just to get by........ Hehehehe, only joking. After our bus ride to Kampala we woke up at Red Chili Hideaway to very heavy rain. We got dressed and went to have breakfast. The place wasn't that friendly so we decided to move and find somewhere else. We packed and took a taxi to UWA (Ugandan Wildlife Authority) to buy permits to see the Gorillas. $1000 later, we booked a 1 hour [View Full Entry]

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It’s not all work, work, work here, of course! I’ve treated myself to two amazing trips while I’ve been here, the first to go Gorilla tracking in Bwindi, over in the west of the country, and the second, last weekend, up to Murchison Falls, around six hours north-west of Kampala. The Afro-alpine landscape of Bwindi (sometimes known by the wonderfully romantic title ‘Bwindi Impenetrable Forest’) is very different from Bujagali, and although the distance is little more than from London to Manchester, even in a private vehicle the journey took us fifteen (yes, rea [View Full Entry]

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Day 10; 17.06.09 Ruhengeri; Rwanda - Kabale; Uganda An early departure from Ruhengeri and we were at the Rwandan / Ugandan boarder in about a half hour. We´ve quickly come to realise that if there´s a boarder involved then nothing is simple in Africa. Our crossing was supposed to be as easy as getting from a to b, however there always seems to be some jumped up boarder official wanting their payoff before allowing you to get to b! So after paying the corrupt pen pusher $50 for an unwanted duplcate stamp in our passport, it was on to Kabale where [View Full Entry]

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Left for Uganda on 6-11. The boarder crossing was amazing. I never seen anything like it. The truck that we are traveling is very large and yellow and screams attention. Every time that we stop we are swarmed with people. The boarder was no different. You can buy fresh water, simosas (my new favorite African food), and you can also exchange your currency with men that are standing at the boarder crossing wearing yellow coats. They looked like stock exchange people. Uganda is so much pretty than Kenya, it is very green and for the most part the roads are a [View Full Entry]

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As instructed by the Horizon bus company man the previous day, I arrive at the bus stop at 7AM in order to catch the service linking Kampala to Kisoro that passes through Kabale. This is also where the shared taxis depart from and one of the drivers tells me, in tones so solemn I assume he's BS-ing, that the bus passed through 2 hours before. I wait for 15 minutes but there's still no bus, and the shared taxi guy then tells me he's about to leave if I want to go with him. I look inside his car and discover [View Full Entry]

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Mgahinga Gorilla National Park is only 14km from Kisoro but the prices I'm quoted for transport there and back suggest it's more like four times that distance. I'm told that the road is "very bad". I find this hard to believe - though the Mgahinga mountain gorillas are currently in DRC, this is still one of only four places in the world where you can (sometimes) see these creatures. And one rule of Africa so far seems to be that governments will spend lavishly on tourist infrastructure even while ignoring the needs of local people. I grudgingly hand over the money, [View Full Entry]

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It's a short journey back to Kabale from Lake Bunyonyi. As I wait for my taxi, I idly glance over a map showing the districts of Uganda and am surprised to find that more than a quarter of them begin with K. I stay a couple of nights in Kabale. The Golan Heights hotel appeals because of its incongruous name but I choose a funky hostel that has wifi. Once again, travellers are in the minority, though there are plenty of volunteers. Kabale is swarming with bicycle boda bodas in numbers I've never seen before. I meet a Scottish couple who [View Full Entry]

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Yet another Fort Portal power cut on the morning of my departure for Lake Bunyonyi means a hot shower is not forthcoming plus I have to complete my packing in the light from my headtorch. We have been told to be at the bus office for 5:40AM, though the bus doesn't show until nearly an hour later and we don't depart Fort Portal until a further thirty minutes after that. The bus isn't completely full and in fact only one other passenger joins Sonja and I in the five seats at the very back. We learn that Ugandan speedbumps are extremely [View Full Entry]

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I leave Kampala in a torrential downpour on a bus that, despite having a supposedly fixed departure time, waits around until it is full. The first two hours have competing attractions. A well-dressed salesman somehow spends this entire period giving a pitch for various Chinese medicines. Unlike in the UK or US where he would be ignored - and quite possibly requested to shut up - by all passengers, here most are actually paying attention and he makes a few sales. The competition is the series of amusingly amateurish music videos playing on the bus's lone TV. The nadir is reached [View Full Entry]

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