Category: Uganda

During our time in Mount Elgon, we go on hikes around the thick forested mountains, discovering the true meaning of “rain forest”. The diluvian rain doesn’t ever seem to relent, alternating between mere tropical downpours and hailstorms.

During our slow, lumbering progress up and down muddy, slippery slopes in the gushing rain, we get mildly disheartened by the school children darting past us, barefoot in their school uniforms. 

As the heavens open up and we rush to put on our Goretex jackets, we feel like clumsy astronauts stepping for the first time onto another planet populated by lithe, sprightly spirits.

We’re back in the highlands, at Mount Elgon, a chain of extinct volcanoes in the east of Uganda, on the Kenyan border. Like elsewhere in Africa, we find the more fertile highland regions with a more temperate climate heavily populated. Every inch of the mountains, with the exception of the national park, is carved into a jigsaw of small plots whose owners manage to grow cassava, maize, bananas, coffee and keep a few animals.

Each of Kampala’s hills seems to have been adopted by a different faith. Namirembe is home to the Anglican cathedral. Rubaga to the Catholic cathedral. Old Kampala hill, to the Gadaffi mosque.

Kampala, like Rome, is built over seven hills. A pleasant city where the few high rise buildings mix with stately old bungalows and shanties, it feels a bit like a backwater compared with the larger capitals of its neighbors. It reminds us a bit of another garden city, Singapore, or of the suburbs of Kuala Lumpur. Green, not very dense, reasonably clean and organized. Even the perfectly predictable afternoon showers are reminiscent of South East Asia.

The old underground torture chambers of the Idi Amin era, where over 8,000 people were tortured and killed, are on the grounds of the Kabaka’s palace, in a pastoral setting which belies the horrors it witnessed.

Our arrival in Uganda is rather low key. For all its infamous reputation from the Idi Amin days and the 1976 Israeli raid, Entebbe is a genteel, rather sleepy town on the shores of Lake Victoria. Its long driveways and lush gardens hide large colonial era bungalows. Only the wreckage of the aeroplane partially destroyed during the 1976 raid, still lying near the airport, reminds us of Uganda’s troubled past.

The two hour drive to Kampala, the capital, reveals a somewhat less hectic, greener, more organized city than we have been used to in other large African cities.