School sign, Masindi

Not sure if I have already posted this before. Apologies if I'm repeating on you. But amidst all the poor taste Wacko Jacko jokes here's a little light relief from Uganda. Schools, mininbuses, grocery stores, tailors, hardware shops - if you operate a physical 'space' in Uganda, you need to get with the mode and have your very own slogan.

Here's my favourite from the road to Murchison.



Closely followed (literally - it's about 40km down the murram track into the park, as you are about to descend the Bunyoro escarpment into the Albertine Rift Valley) by my favourite example of road traffic signs in this country. How's this for a graphic description of what could happen...

More Shopping Tales From The Dark Continent

A tale in the same vein as the one where I tried to return three rakes, and only got my money back for the ones that weren't broken...

A colleague of ours was telling me a story last week. She wanted to get some skirts made out of the loud, funky Congolese cotton prints that are so beautiful. She'd bought her fabric and found a local seamstress.

The seamstress gave her a quote which included a charge for making a lining for the skirts. Our colleague didn't want a lining - she just wanted a simple cotton one piece skirt run up. She agreed with the seamstress that she would sew her the skirts without a lining.

When she went to collect the skirts she was presented with a bill that was the same price as if she had included the lining. She queried it, reminding the seamstress that the skirts had been made without the lining, so there was no real justification for charging her for the extra material a lining would have used.

Ah but Madam the seamstress replied, You are thin, but some of my clients, they are fat. And they will use extra material for their skirts and linings, so I need to charge you extra to pay for that material.

This is a logical conclusion for most shopkeepers in Kampala. And yet it is a scenario where most muzungus come unstuck, ranting and railing at the ridiculousness of it all.

Don't get me wrong. I have my days when I rant and rail. But it rarely gets you anywhere. Sometimes you just have to accept that you will be paying for fat women's skirt linings, and you'll probably be happier for it.

Let Sleeping Hippos Lie

So, I'd seen Lake Albert and, more recently in our last trip to Queen Elizabeth National Park, Lake Edward too. But up until last week I'd never seen Lake George.

It seems all the lakes in Uganda are named after old British monarchs and their family. They were re-named after independence, under Amin, but after his own family members, so that was hardly any better and their old colonial names were swiftly restored after his downfall.

Maybe, a little cynical bit of me thinks, they thought it would be better for their tourist industry. And they'd probably be right.

With me going on about all these places named after British queens and their husbands or sons you'd think the whole place was Little Britain. Rest assured, African and black sporting and political heroes abound in street names and civic building titles (we have an Akii Bua Road, a Nelson Mandela stadium, a Malcolm X drive, Nkrumah Street, and so on and so forth). But the areas of interest to foreign visitors, the parks and mountains, the rivers and lakes, they all seem to have stuck with foreign names. Ah well.

Anyway, I digress. This last trip to QENP, as Queen Elizabeth National Park shall henceforth be known, saw us go to the end of the road (quite literally, there is a sign) and visit Lake George as part of a game drive.



We'd seen the kob, waterbuck, lions and birds, and we drove on past a momentarily quiet salt lake (with the rainy season upon us, the water does not produce the crystals needed to produce salt, being all too frequently diluted by more pure water falling from the skies) onto to a fishing village on the shores of the very shallow Lake George.

We got out and watched the fishermen paddle past in their dugouts or mending their nets. And saw children as young as three or so busy in the everyday task of collecting water. They lifted heavy 20l jerry cans from the sandy shallows to the bank, and some of them used an oft-seen example of Ugandan ingenuity.



Lost your jerrycan cap? Don't worry, simply use a matoke banana to seal the jerry instead. They seem to fit perfectly and are readily available, where plastic screw tops would be hard to find.



When we'd finished watching the fisherman, our sharp-eyed driver Hassan pointed us in the direction of a sleeping pod of hippos a little further up the bank. Hippos are one of Africa's most dangerours animals, easily startled with 12 inch incisors, but we decided, accompanied by our UWA ranger, to sneak a little closer anyway.

Hippos sleep by supporting eachother's chins on their backs. So you are faced with a rather endearing weaving of grey humps and wide-mouthed lumps as the hippos make up their sleeping jigsaw jumble.

We stayed watching long enough for a hippo or two to notice our presence and they started a round of Har Har Har honking which built into a crescendo that echoed across the flat expanse of rift valley all around us.

We retraced our steps to the minibus and left the hippos in peace. It had been a pretty magical moment, but we didn't want to push our luck...

Don't Try This At Home

One of our more gung-ho guests has just got back from the DRC.

He'd been asking us about the prospect of gorilla tracking in the Congo, which is just starting to open up again. I'd been in touch with a French woman working with the gorillas in a NP near Bukavu, who was introduced to me via some mineral mining guys we know who work over there but evacuated their Landrovers to Red Chilli when the trouble flared up last year....

The mineral guys had told us that Congolese gorilla permits were rumoured to be $150 (an attractive price when compared to the $500 permit fee you'd pay in Uganda and Rwanda). The French lady corrected this and said that in Bukavu, they charge $300.

Noone recommended driving in via Goma. The week before, a western woman who'd been driving down the Beni-Goma road was taken into Goma with a bullet in the leg so the fighting is still pretty active in the area. Both of our contacts suggested going to Kigali in Rwanda and then flying or driving in to Bukavu.

This would have been enough to put most people off, but clearly this guy is either mad or made of sterner stuff. He went to Kigali, and asked around. Everyone there still quoted $150 per permit but a congolese guy told him that the road to Bukavu had fighting on it so the only safe way to the park there was to fly in. And anyway, the gorillas at that park are not as good as the mountain gorillas in the Virungas near Goma.

So does the guy fly in? Nope. Given he's on a budget, he decided that if he was going to get public transport through an area of civil war, he may as well go to the Parc des Virungas near Goma. So he gets on a bus to Goma and shits his pants all the way.

The roads are in ruins and the buildings (what's left of them) unrecognisable. Everything that is still standing has coils of barbed wire at every angle. The only other vehicles on the road seem to be white UN landcruisers.

Our intrepid friend got to his hotel and fell gratefully asleep, glad to have made it alive. He wakes at 3am to screaming and gunfire nearby. When he asks the hotel staff where the shooting is, it's just down the road. At this point, he says, he started to wonder if coming to Goma had been a good idea.

The next day he finds a travel agency and negotiates for a gorilla tour. The permits appear to be $400 pp however, so he's not biting. The guys won't come down - apparently that is now the going rate for gorilla tracking in the DRC (which makes me wonder what on earth their business plan is based on).

So he goes for a $30 taxi tour of the town. He doesn't wind down the windows or get out of the car at any point, until they're out of town and near a crater lake. He said it was just too dangerours to walk around the town. That said, he apparently went to a club one night - with a Congolese guy from his hotel - only to witness the apparently regular sight of UN aid workers circling the local prostitutes. Or was it the other way round? Ladies of the night can be pretty predatory in these parts - R always hates it when I leave him alone in a bar for long as when I get back he's invariably covered in prostitutes, looking mildly petrified.

He was the first tourist in town for months and months. His hotel had last had a Spanish couple stay four months before. And the tour guide hadn't seen anyone for a year. He bought some masks, and the sellers bargained hard. But then again, that sale probably had to feed them for the next four months.

Anyway, this mad tourist got back to tell the tale. And you could tell he now feels pretty invincible. But I couldn't help thinking he was a very lucky, lucky man and it could have gone either way.

Jobs for the boys.... and girls

So if anyone is out there reading my (far too infrequent) posts on the trials and tribulations of running a backpackers lodge in Uganda and feels that they could do a job like that, then look no further.

Yes, we are recruiting. One of the Murchison managers has taken up an opportunity she cannot turn down, and her partner will be disappearing within the next few months, so we are looking for a permanent management couple to replace them, starting pretty much whenever if the right candidates apply (but certainly no later than early Autumn).

We are also looking for a temporary pair of hands to help us in Kampala. Because of our colleague's departure, we're losing one of the Managers based in Kampala to the Murchison camp for most of the next 4+ months. So we reckon we've got space for a temp assistant manager, based in Kampala, to help us out from NOW until early October or later in the year. Basically, this place is always about 30-40% busier than the equivalent month last year, so we're busier all the time, and the right candidate could find themselves morphing into something more permanent if this trend continues.

In the meantimes, we're opening up the email for applications now! So if you're interested, or know anyone who is, please email a note to chilli@infocom.co.ug and we're send you more details of the job so you can send us a fuller CV in return.

Or Your Money Back

We bought three garden rakes from a massive supermarket here recently.

One broke within a few days and the others were on their way out too. Pretty poor by most raking standards, we thought. Our shambas, the gardeners, were most disappointed in the rake quality. Next time, they said, we should only buy the orange plastic ones from the local markets. They last for ages. These posh green metal ones from the shiny new supermarket are no good at all.

So we bought some local market rakes, and next time we hit the supermarket, we took back the posh green metal rakes to ask for our money back.

Out of three rakes, one was completely broken - the head had become seperated from the body. The other two rakes were nearly broken - you could see where the metal around the neck was splitting and would certainly snap with further use.

I got money back for two out of three of them. The supermarket explained they could only give me my money back on the rakes that could be re-sold. They could not give me back my money on the rake that was broken, because it was broken.

Naturally.

That's African consumer rights for ya.

Days of Kings and Leopards

We've just returned from six days exploring Queen Elizabeth National Park out west. Despite both suffering some unknown virus from the day we set off (where's that swine flu tester kit, anyone?) it really was quite spectacular.

Where the Rift Valley curves southwards to meet Lake Edward, this amazing park stretches out in several different directions. When you come over the Kichamba escarpment, the view takes your breath away. Miles of flat savannah grassland stretching out across the Rift Valley floor, from the densesly forested Kyambura Gorge in one corner to the flat mirror like expanses of Lake George in the other. And we didn't even explore the park's nether regions - the wilderness of Ishasha, seperated from the DRC by a shallow river, with it's great plains of Topi and tree-climbing lions. We wanted to head down that way but we a) ran out of time, and b) felt it would be wasted on two very ill people.

Yes, the dream trip turned into a bit of a nightmare. Firstly, we nearly never left, as every hire car we tried to take had some inherent problem. The first one, which we picked up Saturday evening, had a problem with the alternator or the starter or something - it wouldn't move on Sunday morning when we were due to leave at 8am. Nothing else was available to later on so we picked up the next one at 4pm . We drove it a few km and had to turn around as the wheel bearings were on their way out, and you could turn the steering wheel 180 degrees before anything much happened. As we know from Ugandan roads, the ability to swerve (around potholes, cyclists veering into the middle of the road, or massive suicide buses that play chicken with smaller vehicles) is actually quite key, so as we fancied staying alive we took that one back too and demanded a new one. So finally, we ended up leaving Kampala at 5pm on the Sunday (when we were already meant to have got to QENP by then) in an ageing Mitsubishi Pajero. The horn didn't work, the air con was broken, there were massive cracks in the windshield and there was no handbrake, but other than that, it was fine. So we took it and got moving, and it did us proud all week.

The next problem was our health. I'd come down with some bug on the Saturday before leaving Kampala. R came down with the same thing on Sunday night. We ended up spending most of the week feeling rotten. As our fevers spiked at over 38 degrees (38.9 on our last night for me) and we had to turn down the chance to try out lots of lovely safari activities, the week turned into an exercise of checking timings, mileages, prices, directions and what kind of footwear is necessary, before going back to our room at Simba Safari Camp to collapse in a heap. I felt like a guide book editor and decided that I could never do a job like that - it takes all the fun out of travel.

But we still managed to be blown away by our location and what we saw. The sheer epic scale of the park, coupled with our inevitable sightings of game despite not really trying to spot any, gave us the thrill we had when we first went to Murchison.

We sat in Tembo canteen (or rather, R lay on the cool concrete of the low wall to ease his fever) and watched herds of elephants cavorting in the shallows of the Kazinga Channel on the opposite bank. We faced down am extremely grumpy matriachal flump with a high pitched trumpet on the Main Track to Mweya peninsula (R reversed quite quickly).

We did a bizarre high speed game drive on the Kasenyi plains with an understanding ranger ("Look, we just want to note the mileages of the tracks you might pass by on your average game drive, we won't be stopping to look at the animals unless they actually jump out in front of the car") where we whizzed round the open tracks of the Kob hunting grounds, wild stretches of grassland studded with Euphorbia trees, or Candelabras, as they are sometimes known. Without trying to spot game, game comes to us. Within 1km of driving off the public road, and at 10am, far too late for good game viewing by most people's standards, we pass a family group of eight lions.

Then, one late afternoon, we are trying to cool our fevered brows with a rest in the rooms after a long and hot day trialling a community village walk in the foothills of the Rwenzoris, and visiting the Bakonjo Kingdom's palace where I met a living, working, tribal King (his name was Charles and I have the photos to prove it), when we get the call. The Chief is free to meet.

The Chief is a key post within the Uganda Wildlife Authority - every National Park has a Chief. And nothing really happens in that park without having the Chief on side. This was our chance to pitch our plan, so off we went. Take two paracetomol, jump in the car, and race down to the Park HQ to meet the Chief. After a good meeting, the sun was setting. Chief lives on site, at Park HQ, so he has nowhere to drive that will take him anywhere after dark. But we have at least a 45 min drive back to our Camp. So off we race, R watching the track and me scanning the bushes left and right ahead of the vehicle. Our track passed along the banks of the river and I was concerned about hitting a hippo that would be coming up to graze the plains at night.

Before long, we had made it off the park tracks, having passed close to, but not into any wandering hippos, and had reached the public road that linked to the sealed road that ran to our camp. By now it was quite dark, and we thundered along, R braking violently for the odd bird of prey that would sit, pensively, in the centre of the dusty track, eyeing us up as we barrelled towards it, then flying off at the last possible minute.

As we neared the tarmac road, we saw a small amber glow on the side of the track. R mentioned it and suggested it was someone walking, carrying a lit cigarette in their hand. Well, that's what it looked like from a distance, and we'd seen plenty of brave locals casually wandering the public roads, which given the amount of lions about, is actually quite, quite brave. Or stupid.

Anyway, the orange glow got a little closer, and it had a shape to it. Within the space of a second or two, we realised it was an animal. At first we thought it was a lion, as it was a big, muscular looking thing. Then our headlights picked out its spots.

It was a leopard

There is something about spotting a leopard. This one was our first (and possibly our last). They are shy, solitary, nocturnal animals and seldom seen on your average game drive. Our boss has lived in this country for ten years, and up until a day or two before we saw our leopard, she had never seen one, despite going on countless game drives.

And here we were, a year into living here, fifty yards from the main tarmac road from Mbarara to Kasese, and there was a leopard in front of our car. The thrill was greater than when I tracked gorillas (you kind of know they're coming, so while they're amazing to watch, it's no surprise to see them there). And it was more beautiful than seeing lions. There is something very aloof and casual about the leopard.

Our spotted cat gracefully slunk off into the savannah, clearly not rattled by our presence.

We, on the other hand, were extremely rattled. We manouevered the car round to try and prolong the experience of watching the disappearing leopard. I intermittently scrabbled in the dark footwells of the Pajero for my camera, then realising any pictures would be crap and I was much better off just enjoying the moment. We were both nervy, swearing with excitement and awe, and kept telling eachother what we were seeing in that simpleton way you hear people talk on home videos where they capture natural disasters or other unexpected events.

That night we told anyone who would listen that we'd seen a leopard. We're still telling people. And I keep having to remind myself that earlier in the day, I shook hands with a King too.

And there's not many places you can do that...

Nice Work If You Can Get It

Sometimes, running a backpackers in East Africa is not as great as you expect it to be. Like any job it has its low moments.

Last week for example, I walked into the Ladies loo to wash my hands quickly (there is so much red dust around in our office I end up washing my hands very frequently!). I had to back out quickly. Someone was very ill, and someone had had very bad aim. All I can say is thank god it occurred during normal working hours when Housekeeping were around. God bless them, they have a dirty old job sometimes...

The week before, I spent at least four or five hours wrangling and fighting with the local electricity firm. There is only one national supplier, so the customer does not have a choice of supplier, and they are, as a result, a lumbering, bureaucratic and simply RUBBISH organisation. R had to physically pull one of their workmen down from a pylon when they were trying to cut us off for non payment of a bill we had not yet received. Last November, they move to a swanky new computerised system. Since then, we get our bills about six weeks late, causing all sorts of arguments.

Then there is the bank. I won't even go into detail on this one but suffice to say, due to a typo that they made, some money got transferred into the wrong account and it's taken them two weeks to even try and correct the problem, and in doing so, we lose about 300,000 Ush (GBP 100 or USD 70) in bank charges or loss in currency exchange. That's customer service for ya...

So the job can have its petty grievances. But, life here does have it's perks.

Tomorrow, we're off on a six day recce of Queen Elizabeth National Park and its environs. We're pushing to launch budget safaris to the park within the next month, rather like the trips we send to Murchison several times a week.

So, we're off on work time to try out all the activities and check out the area. Which will be a good break from the banking/electricity/poo problems of the current day job!

Expect some updates on my return...