Start Me Up

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In Uganda we.ve decided to do things a little differently than we did in Tanzania. Here we have hired a car – well an old SUV, it’s a 20 year old Toyota RAV4. The benefit of this is that we can see Uganda without having to take an organised tour. I think it should be more fun and also considerably cheaper.

This plan doesn’t get off to the best start as we need to wait until after lunch for our car to arrive at the hotel in Kampala. By then we’re decided that we should spend another night in the city and head on out to Jinja - the source of the White Nile- early the next day.

Jinja turns out not to be much of a place, but our hotel overlooks the river, is OK for the money and we find a decent cafe in the town centre for lunch. There is also a British war cemetery we stop to take a look around. Later in the afternoon when we come to drive down to the Nile I find that the car won’t start, in fact won’t even turn over. The battery isn’t flat so it’s not immediately obvious what is wrong. We ring the hire company but with the assistance of a friendly local who has come to the hotel for his dinner we manage to fire the car into action. The local is a doctor and very generously offers to loan me his car whilst he is eating in the restaurant. The problem appears to be loose battery terminals but despite fixing this it turns out to be a recurring problem that we don’t actually resolve until near the end of our trip.

The Nile Park has a statue of Ghandi (some of his ashes were scattered here) and a monument to the CHOGM 2007 held in Uganda as well as a few bars/restaurants that fortunately enable some of our party to make the obligatory “Sauce of the Nile” joke. I’ll have to check whether Top Gear made it here and best us to that one….

For the moment the car seems to be in working order as tomorrow we’ll drive back to Kampala and then south-west towards Rwanda and our main goal the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest.

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