Kampala - July 28th

July 28th, 2008:

Short: Brave another Motorcycle taxi, Tour downtown Kampala, Find a restaurant that is out of food, Find a restaurant with food, See the new Batman movie, Meet new friends: Jaccie, Sandy, and Ingrid at the hostel

Long: This morning, finding few transportation options to downtown, we reluctantly decided to hop on another motorcycle taxi. It was no consolation that our driver at least donned a helmet. After a fairly daunting drive through heavy Kampala traffic, we jumped off in the center of downtown and began walking. We snapped some pictures at the Independence monument and then walked into the business district. After years of civil war, Uganda experienced explosive economic growth in the 1990’s, and has become a role model of development for other African countries. While the recipe for development is sure to differ depending on the country, Uganda has benefited from sound government leadership that created their own plans for development and, with the help of foreign aid, executed them. While there have been setbacks in recent years (There is worry that President Museveni’s is becoming too power hungry - He changed the constitution to keep himself in power), Uganda has been doing well for itself, and this was evident on the streets of Kampala. We even saw large advertisements for mortgages and suburban home sales (See picture).

After walking around for a few hours, we stopped at a café for lunch. After ordering drinks the waitress informed us that they were out of most of the items on the menu. We left, and ended up eating at a fairly expensive (for Uganda) Italian restaurant. While at lunch we decided it had been far too long since we had seen a film (One week maybe?), and so we walked to Kampala’s upscale shopping center called Garden City. We highly recommend Batman – Dark Knight...Heath Ledger’s last performance was outstanding. When we exited the cinema we came across a taxi cab with a meter. A taxi meter!, this was a first for us in Africa. The taxi driver didn’t even seem sure, asking us if we wanted to use the meter or pay a flat fee. We asked him to use the meter. It was 6pm and it took us almost 45 minutes to go the measly five kilometers back to our hostel.

Once back at the hostel Nikolai struck up a conversation with Jaccie, a woman in our dorm. Jacci mentioned that her, and two of her friends, were looking to go to Lake Bunyoni the next day. Nikolai and I were already planning to leave the next morning for Lake Bunyoni, and we therefore offered to drive them. After a quick review of the room available in the back of Betsy, everyone accepted the offer. We then readily accepted Sandy’s offer for a beer. We learned that Jaccie, Sandy, and Ingrid are all from the U.K., although Sandy is originally from South Africa. All of them have traveled extensively, and Sandy has even worked across the world as a tour guide/operator. All of them have months of travel left in their itinerary. We came to the conclusion, quite quickly, that these were great people, and that we didn’t have to worry about them trying to machete us on the way down to Lake Bunyoni.