Don't give up the day job

Unnecessary Illegal Meeting Not Allowed

2010-01-21T17:03:00.002+03:00

When we stayed the night in Kitgum on the way up to Kidepo, we were amused by the hotel rules stuck on the wall of our room.

I wondered if illegal meetings were allowed, just as long as they were necessary. And R regretted bringing all his military equipment...

Seriously though, this is what hotels are like in previously civil war afflicted areas where child abduction to the Lord's Resistance Army was common.

Never mind sleeping with those under 18, how about kidnapping those under 12, making them your bush wife, have them kill their own friends with their new military equipment to prove their loyalty to the LRA and having them bear several children - all before they turn 16...

An Elephant For Tea

2010-01-16T17:50:00.016+03:00

Ostrich. Kidepo Valley National Park

We'd spent New Year way up North in one of the remotest areas of Uganda, past Gulu and Kitgum and their lingering IDP camps, and even up past the land of the Karamojong - Ugandan tribal pastoralists as famous for their cattle as they are for toting AK47s to keep the cross-border cattle-raiding at bay.

IDP camp between Gulu and Kitgum

Kidepo Valley is made up of rolling savanna plains and bush, sandwiched between craggy mountain ranges on the Sudanese and Kenyan borders. The park offers bush camping in two wilderness campsites, with nothing more than a pit latrine and a shower room to have some privacy with a jerry of water (but you bring the water with you). We'd come for the bush camping but little did we know that Uganda's best kept secret was secret no more.

Kidepo Valley

The day we arrived in the park, we stopped at the UWA headquarters en route to pick a wilderness campsite, only to find out the campsites were full. One had a posh temporary tented camp in it, which we knew about in advance. But the other site, the one we were planning to take, had apparently been taken by a group of 29 - mainly families with young kids and a close personal relationship with Christ.

So, the options were to camp at the UWA village, where the staff live and there were some bandas for rent as well, with the background hum of the generator and the daytime metallic pounding of the truck workshop. Or, depart for a campsite full of kids and guitar-toting Christians.

Well, we figured, If we set up our tents facing out over the valley and stick fingers in our ears we can just about imagine we're in the middle of the bush and so we set up our carefully angled New Year's 'Bush Camp' at the UWA village with the sound of a distant welding torch the only clue that we were slightly closer to civilisation than we'd hoped for.

Giraffe

We picked a large acacia tree for shelter, and having checked with a ranger that the spot was reasonably safe, set up camp. That afternoon, whilst building campfires and reorganising the minibus after our two day journey to get there, we saw more wildlife than I went onto see on any one game drive later in our days in the park. Within minutes, a side-striped jackal appeared and slunk his way past us. Later, a pair was seen, one without a tail, which gave it a curious air of poodle amongst the other jackals.

Side-striped Jackal

Patas Monkey on a termite mound

Then, a small group of Patas monkeys lollopped across the grass in front of our tents and settled down for a grooming session. Two buffalo, caked in red mud, grazed at the firebreak line, where the shorter grass gave way to waist high grasses and reeds. A magnificent male waterbuck lay lazily about 100m away, chewing thoughtfully on the grass and giving us the eye, whilst herds of giraffe and elephant passed by on the horizon. Later, when night fell, a herd of zebra turned up, which we only noticed when someone flashed the minibus lights by mistake, momentarily illuminating the group of stripes in a mirage-like apparition.

Jackson's Hartebeest

So, whilst we had been a bit annoyed that all of Kampala had had the same idea as us and Kidepo was over-run with visitors, forcing us to camp in the village, we ended up delighted with our running wildlife sideshow, waiting to see what would pop up next.

R eyeing up BulBul. Or was it BulBul eyeing up R?

And earlier that afternoon, about 50m away at a ranger's hut, we had also spied the famous "BulBul". A semi-habituated African Elephant, BulBul has been a visitor to the UWA village in Kidepo for many years. The rangers claim (and we later witnessed) that he comes every day to drink his 'brew' (in reality, eating the peelings and fruit husks discarded by the village brewery before the things begin to ferment and become boozy) and has also been known to knock down the door of a UWA banda when he can smell Posho being made inside (a sticky mushy mealy mash).

The first day, BulBul kept his distance, deciding to stick to his tried and tested diet of posho and brew. But on New Year's Eve, when we were peacefully mooching around our camp and a few of us were peeling potatoes for lunch, for no reason at all I can remember, I suddenly looked up to my right and saw BulBul, about 15 metres away and approaching with purpose.

Elephants - they may be big but they can sneak up on you pretty damn quietly. My sister tells me it's something to do with having enormous flat feet.

Uhhhhh.... Guys. Elephant approaching, I managed to stutter. Maybe it was that slo-mo that kicks in in weird situations but noone seemed to react straight away.

Guys! BulBul! Pick up your cameras and head for the bus! He was quite close by now.

BulBul at our picnic table

I gathered my own camera bag, looked at our pile of foil wrapped potatoes for lunch and gathered up those too, and jumped on the minibus. Clever, our driver (yes, his name really was) jumped in the driver's seat and started the engine. We backed off by 20m from our camp but BulBul was now right where we had been sat. He looked at the table filled with clean camping bowls and mugs. His trunk delicately felt around for something less plastic and more edible - no such luck - and several of our bowls fell to the floor. He sniffed at a black bag I'd forgotten I'd left on top of the catering box.

Oh no I groaned.

What's in it? asked Rich.

I was just sorting out our fruit and snacks for the journey tomorrow. That's got all our bananas and mangoes in.

We watched in dismay as it was deposited from trunk to mouth and swallowed, black bag and all.

One bag down...

Quite a crowd had gathered to one side from the UWA bandas - part laughing at the muzungus in their safari bus, watching an elephant trash their camp, part raising the alarm to gather help.

In the meantime BulBul took a step forward and knocked a chair over. In front of the chair were two bags. My heart sank.

What's in those bags? asked Rich, me being chief food monitor on our excursions and me having just re-ordered our food supply and organising the bags for the journey back down.

One's a rubbish bag I was about to throw away, and one's got the Doritos and our remaining chocolate bars in it... I trailed off, willing the inevitable not to happen.

No prizes for guessing which one BulBul took a fancy too. But it seemed he inverted the bag just a moment too soon. He got all the Doritos, and the packet of novelty crisps I'd bought just for the name ("Big Ring"), but two little shiny packets of purple dropped onto the grass at his feet. The Dairy Milk was saved!

BulBul makes his exit...

Since the UWA crowd had sounded the alarm, a truck roared up to see off our hungry visitor. Bu tactically reversing the truck at BulBul in short, sharp bursts, the driver managed to finally see off the elephant who trotted off down the road in a huff. We felt quite bad. Whilst we would miss our Doritos this was by far the most interesting animal encounter we'd had all trip and it seemed a shame to chase BulBul off when we were the visitors.

Turns out, the big tall Acacia we were camped under was also his tree. The helpful ranger who had smiled and said "No Problem" when we asked if it was a good place to camp had failed to mention this.

Poor BulBul. He must have thought us most ill-mannered. Camping under his tree then chasing him off with a big scary truck...

Monkey Business

2010-01-11T10:30:00.002+03:00

To give you a flavour of the kind of executive business problems we have to deal with here at Red Chilli, we had a customer report a problem to us this morning.

Turns out there is a monkey fried on a power cable just outside his room. The monkeys leap from tree to tree, and house to tree, but where there are no trees near the houses, they will run up and down the power cables.

This one obviously reached out for a juicy avocado whilst still on the cable, or simply didn't clear the building before stepping on to the cable. How do you sensitize vervets to the dangers of electrocution?

So now we have to figure out how to get the corpse down. It will mean turning the power off at some point and then someone has the grizzly task of removing the body.

This is when I'm glad we have a team of camp attendants who will no doubt see the task as a manly challenge, and I can stick to the VAT returns...

The Big Bumper Blog New Year Catch Up

2010-01-10T09:22:00.005+03:00

I know, I know... It’s been far too long.

First the Kampala riots happened in early September, and I wrote a piece but while there was still the sound of gunfire in the distance at night and stories of journalists getting arrested for ‘inciting violence’ (read, criticizing the established government), I thought better of posting it. But I may resurrect it after casting a careful eye over the final edit…

RIOTS IN KAMPALA CITY CENTRE, SEP 2009

Then I got embroiled in the whole oil and tourism debate. Or rather, trying to start one. Oil has been discovered in the national parks in Uganda. The government and the oil companies want to drill further test sites and then start production, in between selling their stakes and making millions.

GIRAFFE ON THE DELTA, MURCHISON FALLS NP, OCT 09

The conservationists are horrified and are desperately trying to work with the relevant parties to mitigate the potential for damage to one of the top ten global areas for biodiversity. The tour operators and lodge owners are also up in arms – if the wildlife goes then so do our customers – so it’s in all our interests to run sustainable businesses and suddenly someone else comes in with full permission to start drilling up the Delta. Furthermore, they didn’t even want to speak with us. Two test sites were drilled and completed and restored within the National Park before any of the tourism concessionaires were consulted. And when we were finally consulted we were reassured that it was before the Environmental Impact Assessment for this next round of test sites would be submitted, only to see a copy of the report stamp-dated a week before our interview. Letters were written, petitions were signed, meetings were held. We played a nice game of what PR merchants term “Stakeholder engagement” for a while (ironic that it took the stakeholders to force a little engagement in the first place) until I personally decided that the fury and frustration I felt at some of the bureaucratic side-stepping and meeting avoidance being practiced by state and corporation alike was no longer worth the effort. I was keeping myself up at night, fuming at the latest email chain of weasel words and weak excuses, but the net effect was that nothing tangible was being achieved, so I quit campaigning for the tourism sector and went back to the day job.

It was a period of two months which left a bitter taste in my mouth. I have worked more than a decade in advertising, considered to be a profession that attracts individuals with little personal integrity, and yet I met more weasels in the process of a couple of months of oil and tourism discussions than I ever did in advertising. The whole process did however leave me in awe of the NGOs that I came across. There I was, railing in anger at knock back after knock back, but mindful of the fact that these conservation NGOs (amongst others) have to do this day after day after day. And still somehow seem to stay motivated. I doff my cap to them all, wherever they may be.

A VOLCANIC VIEW, NKURINGO, NOV 09

Then, Rich and I took a much deserved week of leave at the end of November and did another loop around the South West of Uganda. We stayed yet again at the beautiful Mihingo Lodge (I can’t possibly pass down the Mbarara road without making a night of it there now), went onto Lake Bunyonyi where we enjoyed a peaceful evening at Bunyonyi Overland Camp, and then onto Nkuringo for a walking safari at 2000m, more about which I shall write later. From Nkuringo, on the fringes of Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, we drove up rocky switchback roads to pass over the mountains and down onto the Western Rift Valley plains again and made for Ishasha. The southern sector of Queen Elizabeth National Park, Ishasha is famous for tree-climbing lions. Of course, with our luck, the lions were on their holidays and had not been seen for a week or two. But it was fine, we stayed at the lovely, peaceful Ishasha Wildnerness Camp on the Ntungwe River and were spoiled rotten by being the only guests and eating some fantastic food.

December came and went in a rush of tourists, trips and festive meals. Our camp at Kampala is full to the brim a few days either side of Christmas itself but on Christmas Day it’s strangely quiet. Those that do stay here on the 25th December itself, are usually in town to visit relatives or friends and so disappear to spend the day with them. It’s when Rich and I eat Christmas Dinner twice a day and play our annual game of pool.

New Year saw us take a trip to Kidepo, a remote National Park in the North East of Uganda on the Kenyan and Sudanese borders. More on that later too, but suffice to say we ended the year with the memorable experience of watching an elephant trash our campsite and eat all our Doritos.

And that, in a nutshell, is the last five months… I’m sorry it’s been a while and my New Year’s resolution for 2010 is to write more posts. So here goes….

The Long Awaited Front Page Splash

2009-08-22T12:39:00.004+03:00

Some may remember me mentioning the Kampala purveyors of finest tabloid journalistic tat, The Red Pepper, with its lurid front page stories. One of the readers of this blog, who spent some time in Uganda last autumn, even brought up the famous Pastor Kiweweezi 'Bum Sex' scandal, which ran and ran and ran.

R had taken a photo on one of the best front pages from this particular sordid tale, but had not got round to downloading it off his phone yet.

Then we read a recently released book by a very funny writer called Jane Bussmann, The Worst Date Ever. When recently in the UK for all of about two days (enough time for my brother's wedding a little light shopping) I picked it up because I'd heard it mentioned Red Chilli.

It did mention Red Chilli, with equal measures of praise and scorn, which is probably fair, and it had me snorting out my Emirates orange juice with laughter as I read my way through the flight back home. It's less a guide to dating and more an acutely funny take on Uganda's political situation with some extravagantly dark jokes that most people wouldn't dare make about Aids orphans, genocide and the like. But those jokes smuggle in revelations and conclusions that most people working in the business of genocide seem to spend their lives subtly avoid facing up to.

Anyway, in it she discovers (with some delight I might add) the Ugandan slang for a man's penis, whopper, as popularized by the Red Pepper. So we found her email address on her website and emailed her our appreciation of the book along with a copy of this picture, which she says made her day. Unless she's just saying as some sort of anti-stalking device...

She's currently performing at the Edinburgh festival, Bussmann's Holiday, which is, I would imagine, definitely worth the ticket price if you're up that way. I believe the festival finishes next weekend... Crossed fingers for Jane for the Perrier, or Tap Water, or whatever awards are the ones to have these days...

Maybe the Red Pepper could introduce their own awards called "The Best Whopper Award (And We Don't Mean Burger King Either....But We Would Probably Call It Bugger King If We Had To Write A Headline About It)". But maybe they would come up with something a little catchier.

School sign, Masindi

2009-06-26T18:17:00.006+03:00

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

2009-06-05T15:26:00.002+03:00

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

2009-06-04T19:28:00.005+03:00

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

2009-05-26T15:23:00.005+03:00

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

2009-05-26T14:03:00.002+03:00

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

2009-04-30T16:54:00.003+03:00

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

2009-04-28T20:13:00.005+03:00

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

2009-04-18T17:50:00.003+03:00

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...

Chips, Anyone?

2009-04-11T16:42:00.005+03:00

Call us hippies if you will, but as soon as we got here we realised that we could develop a way of filtering used vegetable oil from our kitchens and reusing it as fuel for the generator and the Land Rover.

So, in our first few months last year, we asked the Kitchen to save all their waste oil in the big yellow jerries. When we had enough to do anything half decent with we'd work on the filtering system.

It took a while to get the kitchen into the habit of regular collection of the waste oil - the first 20l jerrycan took two months to fill - but now we're getting a full 20l jerry every other week to play with.

The first filter stage is to get the big chunks of stuff out. Breadcrumbs, pieces of chips, Tilapia tails - it all smells quite disgusting when we're doing it. We have a stock of old mozzie nets that we chop up into squares and layer in a filter, balanced in the neck of a jerry.

The next stage takes a lot longer. We have about 16 boxes of coffee filter papers in the store from when a manager two years back bought the wrong size for the coffee machine. The paper provides a very fine filter. Which takes forever for a cup of waste oil to pass through. R puts the jerries outside, in direct sun (warm oil passes through a lot quicker) and pours a mugful of old oil into the filter and then comes back to the office. Twenty minutes later, or whenever he is passing, he tops it up. In this way it takes several days to second stage filter a 20l jerry of used oil, but the stuff out the other end is a lot cleaner for it.

(We have to take care when it rains tho - many a time we've headed out to the shops and had to call the bar in a hurry to ask them to move the jerries inside when we see how black the clouds back over Red Chilli are...)

R then adds a little white spirit, to thin the oil, and pours it out into clean, dry old water bottles. We wait two weeks for the glycerine to separate out of the mix, and then it's usable. We're adding it to diesel, as to go 100% veg would require a lot more chemicals to be added and make the whole process a lot harder to implement, but we can go up to 50/50 with a veg oil/diesel mix, though realistically, with the amount of oil we can produce, we've probably never gone more than 70/30...

The funny thing is, despite Africa being so inherently anti-waste (everything is used and reused several times over here - every piece of 'rubbish' has a use), most Ugandans we've told about the joys of running your landrover or gennie on what is essentially re-cycled chip fat tends to laugh in disbelief.

It was only when R polished off an article for one of the newspapers here about it that a taxi driver we knew suddenly sat up and took notice. When R told him about it, he scoffed. It was another one of those Muzungu stories that just didn't ring true. But when he read it in the New Vision, well, it was most definitely true.

Getting the horn

2009-04-11T15:26:00.005+03:00

Last October we added the relatively new joy of tracking wild rhinos on foot to the Red Chilli Safari tour. We kept one tour as the tried and tested itinerary, and marketed a new one, called "Big Five on a Budget", which included all the usual game drives and boat launch trips in Murchison Falls National Park (where one has the potential to tick off at four out of the 'big five' game animals), but also tacked on a visit to Ziwa Rhino Sanctuary, just off the road between Kampala and Masindi (thereby ticking off rhinos, the remaining member of the 'big five').

The Northern White Rhino used to be indigenous to Uganda, but years of civil unrest and war led to extensive poaching of these magnificant creatures, and the last homegrown Ugandan rhino was killed in 1982.

In the last few years, Rhino Fund Uganda has created the Ziwa Rhino Sanctuary to help them with their aim of, one day, releasing rhinos back into the wilds of Uganda.

The Rhinos at the sanctuary have been donated to Uganda from various sources (four came from Kenya and two came from Disney in Orlando, of all places) and they are working on a breeding programme to grow their numbers and develop sustainable rhino 'families' that they can later release into national parks like Murchison Falls and Kidepo.

The Sanctuary itself is 3,500 acres of bush - a mixture of swamp and savannah - situated along the Kafu river basin area near a small village called Nakasongola. The Rhinos move vast distances around the sanctuary every day as they graze and deal with minor herd 'disputes'.

A Rhino in the long grass

(A couple of months ago I phoned the director of the Sanctuary to discuss some business matter, only to find she'd been bush camping all week as they tracked a runaway Rhino. He'd fought with the other dominant male and ran off, out of the safety of the sanctuary and into the surrounding countryside. Angie, her husband, and some of their rangers had been tracking the beast for days in an attempt to bring him back by gently guiding him back towards the sanctuary, rather than having to resort to darting and transporting him, though, as she pointed out, they were 85km off road in the middle of the bush, and couldn't have got a transporter out there if they'd tried.)

The rangers not only guard the rhinos and protect them from potential poaching threats, they have also succeeded in habituating the group to human presence, so that small groups of visitors can be brought through the bush on foot to view the rhinos and help generate some income for the Sanctuary.

This source of income is increasingly essential - a few years ago it seemed quite the rage for corporate donors to give to Rhino Fund Uganda but apparently 2009 has seen barely any 'large' donations or support of this kind. They are surviving, just, based on tracking permit sales and accommodation (they have a beautiful guesthouse and backpacker accommodation where people can stay overnight).

Tracking them is pretty exciting. Depending on where they are within the 3,500 acres of bush you may drive the first section in your vehicle, having already picked up your ranger. He knows where they are within the sanctuary, and you'll pull up and park some distance away from the group. If you want to spend 90 mins tramping through bush you can ask them to have you leave the vehicle a bit further away, but usually they get you to about ten to fifteen minutes walk away from the rhinos and start from there. Then it's a matter of following the ranger as he walks through the bush. You may see a bushbuck or some birdlife in the bushes as you make your way through the long grasses (or swamp - one group we sent were very game and decided to wade through thigh high waterlogged swampland to get to their rhinos - but they did avail themselves of a hot shower and a change of clothes on their return to the lodge!) and eventually, you'll see a couple of ranger trackers ahead of you. Then you know you're close. The ranger will tell you how to behave around rhinos, and, slightly concerningly, how to react if charged. Apparently their eyesight is terrible, but their hearing is great, so speak quietly around them, if at all, and if charged, stand your ground until the last possible minute and then step aside, matador style.

Mmmm. There is a bad joke in rhino conservation circles that goes along the lines of "If a rhino charges you, the best thing to do is to pay up".

When you suddenly see them, they're massive. Big grey prehistoric things, sleeping or standing in the shade, maybe even have a munch on some grasses. And when they move, lumbering is the only word to describe it. But then again, I'm lucky enough not to have seen them move very fast at all. And that's the way I'd like to keep it.

So if anyone is visiting Uganda it really is worth dropping in to see them. The thrill of seeing wild rhinos up close is amazing, especially when you are on foot. And it's a worthy cause. One of the cows was pregnant last year, but miscarried. But now, it seems that every one of their three cows is pregnant. So babies are expected. And soon. We keep sending trips off every other day expecting the next minibus to come back telling tales of rhino calves.... lets watch this space.

Ironically, many people who are independently travelling around Uganda probably don't go and see them because they are reliant on out of date guidebooks. The Sanctuary was only set up a few years ago, and has only been open to visitors for less than that, so it's no wonder it's not mentioned in books that may have last been publishes in 2005 or so. In fact, we've booked people on our 'Big Five on a Budget' trips, who have then rung us up a week later saying "If my guidebook says there are no rhinos in Uganda why are you taking my money to send me on a trip where you say I get to see Rhinos - I mean how is this possible?".

Though the idea of setting up completely impossible trips is quite amusing - roll up for the Red Chilli Dodo Birdwatching Tour...

http://www.rhinofund.org for more info...

The Quad Squad

2009-03-31T15:39:00.007+03:00

Last November, when S&J visited, we decided to do something R&I had been saving up for some time.

Quad bike safaris up the banks of the Nile, up past Jinja around the Bujagali Falls adventure area.

All Terrain Adventures are a company that was set up by an Antipodean couple - the mad and lovely Shirray and PK. He knows his bikes and spanners, she does the hospitality side and runs the craft shop and cafe. They built their house out of the containers the quads got delivered in, and it's an amazing warren of rooms and open plan areas that works really well.

We were kitted out with overalls, helmets and goggles, signed our liability papers and were led out to our bikes. I used to ride motorbikes (small ones) in the UK, and picked up my full license just before we came out here, but I hadn't been on a quad since a friend of mine had a birthday 'do' at a quad track in South London when we were in our late 20s. On that cold October morning we raced round and round a sandy obstacle course with steep banks and long curves. We raced heats against eachother and somehow I managed to beat everyone else and win the bottle of asti spumante, thanks to a winning combination of a fiercely competitive streak and the fact I was one of only two people there that morning who had ever ridden a bike before.

Back in Jinja, I couldn't even get my bike started. It did turn out to have a flat battery (most bikes I ever ride do) so I didn't feel too bad. But it meant I had to remember not to turn it off when we were out!

After a warm up changing gears and getting a feel for the steering column, we lined up and set off. We turned down steep slopes towards the river and climbed up gnarly banks, studded with tree roots. We flew along dirt tracks adjoining banana palm plantations and weaved our way through cassava and maize plots. We passed village children who tried to high five us as we passed. We stopped for a swim in the Nile, where we bumped into a group of kayakers, one of whom R and I knew. Without drying off we got back into our overalls and let our wet t-shirts act as natural air con as we drove along the lanes and tracks, goggles down to keep the orange dust out of our eyes.

Later, we pulled into a trading post and bought sodas. Local kids crowded the bikes, clambering all over them and us. S and I got our cameras out and spent a happy hour part playing with, part photographing the children, who loved seeing themselves on the LCD screens on the back of our cameras.

Some of the photographs I took will actually probably end up as postcards, and it was while I was taking them that I first thought about finding a charity to donate a portion of the postcard sales too.

When you have the mixture of pride and pleasure at a perfect shot taken, combined with the squirming sort of uncomfortable voyeurism that you feel from photographing a child who quite clearly does not have all the benefits of sanitation, health, provision and care that we have in the West, it creates a certain kind of guilt only tourists and professional photographers know.

Back in Bujagali, it was time to get back on the bikes and head back for a shower to get the dust off. We were actually Tango coloured. Sweat and river water had stuck the dirt and dust to us - we had orange arm hairs, orange faces, orange necks and orange cleavages. After a hot shower and a banana pancake we all felt a lot better, and a little cleaner, the exhiliration and adrenalin slowly wearing off from the day's riding.

Going Commercial

2009-03-31T15:28:00.002+03:00

With all the money that being a landlord in the midst of the credit crunch is costing me, it's time to up the ante on this downsized life.

Over the next month I will be enjoying the increased salary perks of entering into a second year contract with Red Chilli, which, while tiny by UK standards, enables us to enjoy a nice lifestyle in Uganda and still put some dollars away. And long may the current trend for a strong dollar continue, if only to help me use my dollars to subsidise my UK mortgage.

Then, I have a postcard plan. There are a couple of good postcard suppliers in the Uganda market, but only a couple. I have amassed a load of shots of wildlife etc over the last year and it seems like a big opportunity. I have found a really good printer, who, as it turns out, really wants to promote their own printing services so will help cover the costs in exchange for their details on the back, so it looks like when I return to Uganda we should be finalising the choice of designs and going to print. My plan is to also donate 10% of each card's sales to a charity called The Busoga Trust, who put boreholes in remote villages in North and East Uganda - areas of the country which are seriously affected by poverty compared to the bouyant South and West.

And finally (and why not) I have succumbed and signed up to Adsense to get ads placed on this blog. It may earn me only a few pence a year, but every little click helps in these cash-strapped times, so if you see an ad for something you fancy, feel free to take a look.

I feel dirty and used, but if it helps me avoid meltdown, then it will all be worth it in the end.

2 Years - Part 2

2009-03-31T15:12:00.002+03:00

At the hospital two weeks ago I was advised to call last Wednesday for a fast track answer to my Mammogram.

Last Monday however I got an early call back from the doctor. Recognising her voice on the phone gave me a bit of a chill. In the world of follow up scans for cancer you don't want to be on a list of people the doctor would rather phone than write to. Generally, being phoned means being asked to come in for bad news.

But she put me out of my misery and, before I had time to panic, announced my mammogram was all clear and 'she just thought I might like to know as soon as possible'.

Which made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Not only the all clear, but an NHS doctor stepping outside the system to put a (difficult) patient's mind at rest. If you remember, the original timing on hearing back on the scan was meant to be one month in writing, and here she was, phoning me in person, four working days later.

Maybe the NHS ain't so bad after all...

Now all I have left is an ultrasound and re-meet with the Professor tomorrow. I'm really looking forward to seeing him in a perverse sort of way.

I mean after all, he was a bit of a life-saver.

2 Years - Part I

2009-03-22T00:44:00.004+03:00

Two years ago I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Three days ago I went for my two year scan.

It was a lesson in the benefits of private healthcare, which I was lucky enough to be on at the time of diagnosis, over the disadvantages of the unwieldy, creaking old behemoth that is our National Health Service.

The breast specialist who originally diagnosed me (and went on to operate on and treat me), Professor Kefah Mokbel, also happens to have an NHS clinic he runs at St Georges Hospital in Tooting. Which also happens to be just down the road from where my flat is in Earlsfield.

So when I discussed with him the prospect of how to retain some continuity in my follow up care (not essential but beneficial - as understanding the difference between the pre and post operative breast state is quite important) he said he'd be very happy to see me at his NHS clinic at this hospital. All I needed to do once I relinquised the private healtcare ticket through my job at DCH, was to get my GP to refer me to him at said clinic about two months before i wanted the appointment.

I had last year's 'one year' scan on March 19th, and passed with flying colours, getting all the scans (mammogram, ultrasound), blood tests, and clinical exams (a quick prod and a grope) done the same afternoon with the consultation and results delivered personally by the Professor moments after my ultrasound.

So my two year scan was a bit of a letdown.

Firstly, despite getting my doctor to refer me all the way back in January, having booked my March 16th flight home from Uganda about a year ago, the hospital made noises about 'not necessarily' being able to give me an appointment when I needed and wanted one.

My father then took on the phone campaign on my behalf to save me from bankruptcy caused by excessive phone calls between East Africa and SW19, speaking to a man named Igor (yes, really) and was given an appointment time of 3pm and told I would definitely get all my scans done the same day, but, just to note, the Professor would himself not be there.

Now, I don't begrudge the man a holiday, but it suddenly seemed rather silly that I had constructed this delicately balanced plan for the continuity in my own personal healthcare and yet events had conspired against me to make this effort entirely redundant.

Ah well, at least i'd get seen, scanned, and given an answer.

Or so I thought.

I got seen, got a clinical, got a broad thumbs up but was sent to radiology with a yellow form to get the mammogram appointment. When I was bold enough to suggest I may want to be seen the same day a lady who clearly spent more on cigarettes than she did on shampoo nasally intoned "We don't do afternoon appointments".

But lo, a radiologist took pity on me and an afternoon appointment was obtained there and then.

And as my left boob was squeezed between two perspex plates, I was advised by the radiologist that the doctor would write to me with the results of today's mammogram, but if I hadn't heard anything within a month, I should get in touch.

A month?

Apparently it takes a week to report the scan (I presume this means look at the films and enter the results into a computer), another week to dictate the letter to the patient, and another two weeks to allow the British Postal System time to find its arse from its elbow.

Thankfully my doctor knew I was flying back to Uganda on 1st April and advised me to call her next Wednesday between 1-2pm.

But then there's the Ultrasound. Not something they normally do in NHS follow ups apparently, but something I was very clear was instrumental in my original diagnosis and was used in follow up scans when i was private. Try as I might, I still can't see any sign of a 'mass' in my original mammogram from 29th March 2007, but I can't miss the reading of the ultrasound - it's a super-obvious massive black hole, which sounds more like a title for a Muse album.

But I have a bit of thickened tissue, 99.9% likely to be scar tissue from the radiotherapy, just under the original tumour bed area which I pointed out to the Doctor. Apparently it's nothing to worry about, but it does give me permission to badger them into giving me an Ultrasound. But this could have either have been next Wednesday, when I would be in the middle of a relaxed week at my parents about 150 miles west of the hospital, or on the Wednesday morning of the day we fly back to Uganda.

So I gamefully opted for the day we fly back. Which also means I get to see the Professor who will be back by then. Which will be nice. A friendly face.

So, this is follow up in stages. I have one set of thumbs up on the physical, am awaiting the mammogram results (due next week) and then will be going in for the final piece of the puzzle come the day I'm due to go home. Of course, going home will be a damn sight harder to do if the result is not a good one, but it's highly unlikely.

Either way, it makes me all extremely glad I had private healthcare when it actually mattered. Way back then, I was diagnosed within nine hours of visiting my GP with a suspicious lump, and operated on a mere 48 hours later. I was in chemo before most people would have got their written mammogram results.

And for that, I will always be thankful.

God bless Standard Life.

Ten Years of Red Chilli

2009-02-21T16:19:00.010+03:00

In all the talk on here, I'm not sure I've ever told the Red Chilli story properly.

It's one I know pretty well now, after nearly a year in the job now, but it pre-dates me by some time. Red Chilli turned 10 in Jan 2009, having been set up by a British expat couple, Steve and Debbie Willis, back in 1998.

Steve worked for the High Commission in Uganda and had met Debbie whilst she was on her backpacking tour of the continent. She continued the tour, but came back to Uganda when Steve persuaded her that he was both the man for her, and that he was going to leave the civil service and they would start a backpackers hostel and campsite together.

They found a plot of land to rent, with some decrepid, rotting, buildings on it, and started renovating and knocking through walls, opening for business officially in Jan 1999, though rumour has it they may not have turned away the overland trucks that started pitching up as early as November the year before, hot on the heels of the rumour that a new backpackers' operation had opened in Kampala.

Eventually, bit by bit, they converted all the derelict buildings on the plot, adding larger dorms, more rooms and even cottages. A bid for a concession in a national park led Steve and Debbie to managing the Rest Camp at Paraa in Murchison Falls National Park, tearing down the old mud bandas that the warthogs would just barge into, and putting smart new brick bandas up in their place.

Red Chilli started running 3 day safari trips - back then they were as little as $99 (but then chimp tracking cost a mere $6 compared to the $40 it costs today, and park entry was peanuts) but even today at $240 they're still the cheapest safari in East Africa.

Then, when everything was going so well, Steve responded to a distress call from some rafting friends who had got into some trouble on the Nile up in the Northern section of the park. Steve went to their rescue in the white landrover we still drive today. He never came back.

This was in November 2003, and Joseph Kony's notorious LRA army had, in previous years, retreated to the jungles of the DRC and southern Sudan, but pockets of guerillas had been left behind. They were armed, hungry and scared. They were now in the minority and all the villages they had been busy raping and pillaging in the late 80s and early 90s were now angry and keen for revenge.

A few of these bandit types ambushed Steve's vehicle on his way back from picking up the rafters. Shots were fired and while everyone else got away (even one of the rafters who had sustained a broken leg on the river) Steve was tragically killed by one of their bullets.

Debbie returned to the UK, utterly devastated at the news of her husband's death, and in a strange twist of fate, also newly pregnant with her dead husband's child. The day to day running of Red Chilli was left to the then Murchison Managers, a South African couple called Hennie and Anne, but as time went by Debbie got more and more involved. She also got more and more pregnant and gave birth to the lovely Zoe the following summer, who joined older brother Joe, as part of the new reality of her single parent family.

Debbie was still mourning Steve, but life in England didn't feel right. Uganda, a country that many saw as being implicit in her husband's death, was luring her back, and what better way to honour her husband than go back and grow the business she and Steve had built together?

In January 2007 she returned to Uganda with her children. Hennie and Anne were still running Kampala but new managers had to be recruited for Murchison as their replacements up there were moving on.

That's when we came into the picture and answered an ad and got the job at Murchison. The job we couldn't take up because I then went and rather stupidly got cancer. In our place came the very able Jim & Tanya, who still run Murchison today. Buildings at Murchison were renovated, and Kampala gained a new adjoining compound with extra rooms and cottages.

In January 2008, Hennie and Anne sadly decided to call it a day on a personal level and Anne returned to South Africa. We got the call and joined Hennie as Managers of Kampala in April 2008.

Now, ten years on from when Red Chilli was launched, the two camps cater for around 2,500 different guests every month. Kampala sleeps up to 150 or so in beds and with a few overland trucks and campers, this can be bumped up to around 240 or so on busy nights in peak season. And we send up to 320 people on safaris to Murchison every month.

The Murchison camp is smaller, but perfectly formed, sleeping 44 in beds and several more camping, but they are permanently fully booked, being the only budget option inside the park.

Genuinely, the business is booming. We're low margin, high volume. Everyone's talking about the global credit crunch affecting business but in our world of backpacks and budget travel, it's hard to believe there's a financial crisis on. Maybe all our customers are disillusioned bankers who've been made redundant. One of the overland truck companies is actually marketing a trip along this basis ("Lost your job? Sod the lot of them and come away with us....").

So, when it came to how best to mark the passing of a ten year anniversary we decided to hold a massive party. Invite the world and his wife - all of Debbie and Steve's friends and supporters over the years, all of our staff and their friends or families, all of our suppliers and business partners. More than 400 people turned up, with plenty of kids thrown in as well.

Nile Breweries donated some beer, we donated some more, and bought cases and cases of wine.

The kitchen slaved for 3 days to prepare the salads (try mixing 50 litres of coleslaw) and some friends from Nile River Explorers produced a salivating spit roast.

Icemark, a fruit and veg export company, donated several cartons of beautiful red and orange scotch bonnet chillies, which were piled around the tables and displayed in every corner.

Grace, Annet and Susan from housekeeping had helped me make loads of papier mache chillies and Fred Opar (a groundsman and one of the 3 Freds we have employed at Chilli...) had shown his artistic talent by helping me paint them bright red and hang them in the trees.

Maringa Ogilvy lent a hand by organising the printing of some massive banners and blowing up some of the Red Chilli archive of photos taken over the years (with thanks again to Nile Breweries for picking up the printing bill), and a massive firework display was organised by a good friend of Debbie's.

Raffle prizes were donated by friends and business partners and a free raffle ticket was given to every guest... Vodka jellies were served as dessert - I tell you, our kitchen floor was sticky for days after making 400 vodka jelly shots.

Debbie had made some chilli tequila, so after the vodka jellies were finished, the chilli tequila shots started. Someone was even seen cutting the top off the scotch bonnet chillies, fillin it with chilli tequila, and then downing the shot and eating the chilli whole and raw. He was later witnessed throwing up in the car park.

The party was a huge success. We were stressing about the weather all day, as it poured with rain all morning and afternoon. The first guests braved the rain, and then as the sun came out, everyone else came out of the woodwork and appeared. The food went down a treat, the fireworks made the whole evening go with a bang, the bar never ran dry, debbie made a moving speech, and the great and the good of Kampala were out in force.

And I spent most of the following week recovering from a vicious cold and wondering just quite how we managed to pull off hosting and catering a party for more than 400 people.

But somehow, someway, it fell together. The staff excelled themselves and lots of other people and companies helped us get it all sorted. And I may have been here ten months and not ten years, but it felt pretty good to be part of it all.

In the lap of luxury

2009-02-21T16:16:00.009+03:00

Bwindi, home of the gorillas, is not a short distance from Kampala.

It’s a gruelling 11-12 hour drive. And that’s without a car that’s falling apart…

So when we went, back in early January, we rather sensibly decided to break up the journey with a night staying at Lake Mburo National Park. And we rather wonderfully decided to have a night of extravagance in what is probably the best luxury retreat in Uganda - Mihingo Lodge. Halfway between Masaka and Mbarara, the lodge is approximately a third of the way between Kampala and Bwindi, and I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere more beautiful.

Perched up on a rose-tinted grey rock kopje, overlooking the grassy savannah of Lake Mburo with zebras at the water-hole down below the infinity pool, the lodge emerges from the rock-face, hidden into nooks and crannies around the kopje, with everything in its place.

Mihingo is magical. I expected to enjoy it, and I expected luxury. I knew the owners and expected a display of good taste. What I didn’t expect was such a kind and gentle marriage of the lodge within the landscape – such a vision that has been followed through to the last detail - everything seems to have a place and just fits. Even swimming in the pool feels like you’re taking a dip in a natural rainwater hole – somehow it seems to lack the scrub-tiled, chemical experience that you find it so many other places.

The rooms are all huge and beautifully appointed safari tents on top of mahogany platformed decking, under thatched roofs. The en suite bathrooms emerge to the side, built out of the gnarled branches of acacia and smooth, curved, hand finished plaster walls.

Some are like eyries, tucked up on rocky outcrops, with a private view. Others are nestled in grassy dells, with waterbuck and warthog grazing a few feet from where you may be sat on the hand-enamelled loo. Our loo seat had an antelope painted on it, with hoofprints on the seat.

The windows to the bathroom were not so much windows, as wide, rounded apertures that reached from knee height to ceiling, fitted with fine mosquito mesh but otherwise offering the perfect ‘loo with a view’. Which does of course mean that anything outside has just as good a view of you, as you have of it…

I ended up needing to go for a pee whilst there was a warthog rooting in the grass in front of the bathroom, just a few feet away. I pulled the curtain to that separated me from R and my sister who were busy admiring the rest of the room. Stupidly, I announced they should both watch the warthog to see how he would react when I dropped my trousers. Down went my trousers, up went the warthog’s tail, and with a snort, he turned and fled. I’m not sure who was more traumatised by the experience, me or him.

Apparently, warthog and waterbuck are not the only animal we get around the tents. At night you have to beware of buffalo, and once or twice, guests have spotted or heard leopards from the tents we were staying in. Chris, one of the Lodge Managers, was forced (under duress) to do an imitation of a leopard calling. It sounded like a heavy breather with asthma.

Later that night, after Kiki and I had ridden on horseback around the fringes of the park, wearing amusingly colonial style riding hats and riding through family herds of zebra, eland and impala, we watched the staff feeding bush babies in the trees surrounding the bar area and then got fed ourselves, with some pretty damn fine food.

After a couple of glasses of wine around a campfire, it was time to fall asleep. The beds must be eight foot wide, surrounded by posts and draped in mosquito nets. The tent itself is open mesh on all four sides, and although you can roll down the canvas, we chose to fall asleep staring out at the night sky, dusted with stars and the ethereal wisps of distant galaxies.

The next morning, the others has left for a dawn walking safari, whereas R and I had elected for a lie-in and I had a massage booked. We woke when the sun came out, around 7am, and lay there for a while watching the waterbuck grazing from our bed. R left for the bathroom at one point, but I stayed wrapped in the sheets, watching the antelope with their beautiful dark eyes and remarkably furry coats, like native ponies in the winter.

Suddenly, the waterbuck, as one, started and looked up from their breakfast. All of them were looking into the middle distance beyond the line of acacia trees surrounding the clearing our tent was in. And there it was, a low bass rasping breath, like an asthma sufferer making a dirty phone call. The leopard. I couldn’t see him, but I could hear him. He called a few more times before moving on, leaving the waterbuck to resume their feeding.

R came back from the bathroom and scoffed lightly at my story.

But I heard a leopard and noone can convince me otherwise.

Next time, I’ll just have to make sure I get to see one too.

Land of Opportunity

2009-02-21T16:16:00.005+03:00

It’s a strange old thing, living the ex-patriate life in Uganda.

One of the stranger aspects is that there is opportunity every way you turn. One of the sadder aspects of this strange aspect is that this is mainly because we’re white.

It, quite literally, opens doors.

We drive up to the compound gates of a business, or a home we’ve never visited before (we did this a lot when we were tasked with delivering party invites for the 10 year anniversary party for Red Chilli) and merely a quick toot on the horn will gain us entry. The gates swing open, the guards peer out, they clock we’re white and wave us in. The owners may not be home, we may not have an appointment, but if you’re white you must be here for a reason, surely?

We’ve always joked, the day we decide to leave this town, we should take advantage of this open door policy and commit some serious theft.

On a higher level, being white and open to ideas led to R getting his slot as a DJ on a local FM station. And me as his celebrity gossip sidekick.

When R, who used to hustle and cajole motoring press and the odd newspaper to take his articles in the UK, emailed a national newspaper in Kampala asking if they wanted to consider any story ideas, they replied with the open invitation that they would “publish anything he sent them”. There was no suggestion of an editing process or quality control. The man takes pride in his work, but that’s just an invitation to be lazy…

Equally, I was approached the other day by someone I knew socially. Local guy, who knew I was something to do with Red Chilli, but didn’t really know what, told me he’d heard I used to work in advertising and would I mind having a drink with him and his friend who were launching an agency together.

I thought they just wanted to bounce some ideas around.

They offered me a job.

Just like that – as a consultant in some sort of freelance strategic planning role.

And they had no idea what sort of work I used to do in the UK, whether I was a creative or a “suit”, or if I was the post girl, how many years I’d worked in ads, how good I was, or anything important like that. Just because I had worked in ads, in the UK, and presumably because I could offer the bogus professional sanction of my whiteness for clients to feel ‘reassured’ by (a lot of the clients would be white or Indian), I fitted the bill. It beggared belief.

Of course, they also didn’t realise that I already had a full time job...at Red Chilli.

Though it’s reassuring to know that if that if I wasn’t still very much enjoying myself with that there could be other opportunities out there. You never know, one day the novelty may wear off and I may not have the stomach for any more tourists demanded a refund for the free internet service we offer (yes, think through the logic of that one...).

If and when that day comes, at least I could hawk myself round Kampala’s burgeoning ad scene…

Save the Gorillas

2009-02-14T17:24:00.006+03:00

My favourite, but slightly sad, Adam Ant story is when the poor bloke went a bit cuckoo a few years ago, he got it into his head that he had to save the world's gorilla population and went as far as to re-record a special versio of Stand and Deliver.

Instead of chanting 'Stand and Deliver' when it came to the chorus, he sang the refrain 'Save the Gorilla' instead. At the time, he was more out of his tree than the gorillas he was trying to save.

It was all a bit embarrassing really and the story died in the UK media out of a demonstration of sensitivity that UK journalists seldom show.

But the man had a point. After my sister, her boyfriend and I went gorilla tracking in early January, we worked out that in visiting the one family group who numbered twenty-three individuals, we had spent time with approximately one thirtieth of the entire mountain gorilla population.

Imagine one thirtieth of the world's human population? No wonder they don't let you track any of the remaining estimated 720 mountain gorillas if you've got a bit of a sniffle...

We tracked ours at Buhoma, in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. Which allowed our ranger to tell us, as we were about to enter the Forest boundaries, that we on the verge of penetrating the impenetrable.

Which I'm sure he says to all his trackers, but there you go.

Before we left Kampala I was concerned about how hard the tracking would be and whether it would be worth it.

Friends who'd done it before warned me of 8 hour take-no-prisoner hikes up steep volcanic slopes, slip-sliding between slimy tendrils and ruining hiking trousers all for staring into the eyes of some close relatives for no more than an hour tops.

Plus the permit alone costs $500.

So was it worth it?

Yes.

It ranks as my all-time top wildlife encounter as a landlubber. It was close to the thrill of seeing a shark for the first time when diving in the Red Sea. But with the sort of intimacy that comes with sitting your arse down on top of layers of rainforest mulch and just simply watching something eat, play, fight, sleep and fart.

And No.

It’s $500 for goodness sake. That’s now something like £350. And maybe it feels worth it to someone on a London salary, but to me on my Kampala salary it feels pretty darn steep.

And you know the discount you get for being an East African Resident?

A measly $25. And I didn’t even qualify for that as I was buying cast off permits from some tour company who’d had some tourist cancel on them probably out of a knee jerk reaction to the squabbling over the border in the DRC.

Ah well, you only live once etc...

So there we were, penetrating the impenetrable. Following a well worn track that was about half a foot wide, it didn’t feel that impenetrable. But then we went off-road. The slip-sliding had begun. We were heading down into a steep ravine, so steep you couldn’t help but simply lurch down from sapling to slimy vine. Except they weren’t that slimy. We had the dry season to thank for that, I guess.

The porters were incredible - all should have been handicapped by their local gumboots or simple leather soled shoes - but all were more sure-footed than any of us put together.

Every so often somebody grabbed a trailing vine that was just the wrong side of rotten, and with a crack and a tumble, they would accelerate slightly. A porter would somehow always be there, hand outstretched, ready to steady them, all the while carrying a couple of day packs and the best part of a camera shop in spare lenses, video cameras, extra memory cards and all sorts of photographic paraphernalia.

We were a relatively young and fit group. I’ve heard horror stories of enormous 250 pound tourists attempting the steep slopes with no fitness training, and usually having come straight off a plane and not be acclimatised to the altitude. One backpacker I knew was in a group with a couple of such specimens. A husband and wife from the US of A, whose love handles alone could have incurred an excess baggage charge. Apparently the husband collapsed on the way up to the gorilla group, and was pushed, pulled, hauled and carried the remaining distance by the hardy porters. When he got to the gorillas, he had to lie down to recover, and so saw nothing of the apes themselves. When his wife was asked how she had found the climb, she proudly declared that she had been fine by comparison, she’d only blacked out twice.

I hate to think what state those two were in. I consider myself grossly unfit and while it was tough going and pretty sweaty work, it was not that bad.

But then maybe we just had an obliging group of gorillas. There are three groups in Buhoma. One group that day had been found within forty minutes hiking. Our group was found within two and half hours. But by the time we’d spent an hour with the gorillas, hiked back for ninety minutes, been distracted by some local dancing and singing, and had the debrief back at the Park HQ, the third group had still not even found their gorillas. It was 3pm at this point and the day had started at 7.30 that morning.

I was glad I was not in Group 3.

On the hike back down the hill, you start to get a feel just how the local villagers and hill farmers are affected by the tourism. Once you are out of the forest and walking alongside tea plantations, small boys set up temporary stalls selling hand hewn gorilla statuettes and child-like drawings of the apes. When we pass, smiling and greeting but not stopping to buy, they wait for us to pass, then gather up their wares and bags and make off down the other side of the bushes lining the path, only to reappear round the corner, having laid out the same stall all over again.

We still didn’t buy any of their hand hewn gorillas, not even second time around.

We did stop and watch a performance by a local orphans group. While I usually find the carefully contrived ‘performances for tourists’ rather hard to stomach, this was actually quite special.

Most of the group donated a few dollars or shillings at the end, but the Slovenian couple with us chose to hand out boiled sweets. I do hate it when people think they can cheer up a poor little African with a piece of candy…

Even worse is when they hand out a sweet to each and every orphan, get everyone lined up (in a remarkably well behaved fashion – no pushing or shoving to be seen) and then discover they’re three sweets short by the time they near the end of the queue.

The three patient children at the end of the line looked like they were about to burst into tears.

As for the gorillas themselves, they were pretty special. We caught sight of the large silver-back first, an enormous black face through the parting leaves. He was far larger than any other gorilla in the group, and there were plenty of them.

From tiny baby gorilla twins, only a month or two old, to black-backed adults and playful sub-adults, and even a second silver-back who was just about happy to play submissive Lieutenant to the lumbering bulk of the lead silver-back’s General.

Every so often a young, inquisitive gorilla would pop over and try and approach one of us. Because of the danger of transmitting diseases, the rangers would break off a branch and wave it at the curious gorilla, warning them back. But had it been the silverback or an adult gorilla, we would have been behaving differently. Then it would have been incumbent upon us to sit or squat down, avoid eye contact and generally be submissive.

Thankfully it never came to that. The big apes kept their distance, busy being groomed by their adoring medium-sized groupies, and the little ones tumbled around learning to climb trees and play-fight.

So were they worth it? They were definitely worth doing once. But the cost prohibits most people from doing it twice. Once is certainly enough for me on my current budget.

Not so the Canadian couple that were part of our tracking group. They had tracked gorillas in Rwanda 8 years ago and were here on a four day trip to Bwindi, to track on four consecutive days. That’s $4,000 on gorilla permits. Upon hearing that, we were all too busy inwardly computing their madness to ask them why.

Finally, whenever I think back to looking at that silver-back, or review my photos of the day, I am constantly reminded of one thing.

Bollo, the I've got a bad feeling about this gorilla character from The Mighty Boosh…

How do you fail as a blogger?

2009-02-14T17:14:00.002+03:00

You don't post more than once in six weeks.

You blame it on being away on holiday for two of those weeks, then being extraordinarily busy for the next two, organising a party for over 400 people, followed by one week of being laid low with a cold, the next week being manic at work doing the previous month's accounts, which brings us up to date and leaves me without any more excuses.

So it's Valentines Day in Africa and we're on the radio again, playing Leonard Cohen's "I'm your man" and other anti-valentines music, and frustrated to find there is no "My Bloody Valentine" on the system.

In the meantime I am plotting my return to blogging. There will, I promise, be a cornucopia of posts over the coming weeks to bring us up to date. I have tales to tell and you lot to share it with. Just give me a few more days to sort through the stories and I promise you, it will be worth the wait.

Now there's nothing like building yourself up for a fall, is there?

Now, Slick Dick needs me shortly for my celebrity news slot. Mad-dog Madonna, sad old U2 and the Grammys all in this next bulletin. Poor ol'Rihanna, obnoxious little Miley Cyrus and Wacko Jacko with his flesh eating superbug in the last one... Better go and get on the mike...

Til tomorrow...

Radio Ga-Ga

2009-01-15T15:16:00.002+03:00

I have lots to tell from our two weeks off and various adventures and misadventures up and down the country but:

a) all my photos are on my hard disk at home
b) for other, confidential reasons, some stories are best left untold. For now.

Until then feast your eyes on the faces for radio that are Slick Dick and Dorothy Spank.

You may remember that Rich signed up to do a once a week radio show, beaming out to all of Kampala, and some of Jinja, on 95.9 on Touch FM. He practised for months. I stood behind him and pointed a bit. And then we were allowed live on air.

It seems that the only rule was "Don't swear on air, or play a record with any swearing in it". If we do, the station can lose it's broadcasting license. Seeing as all I do is write and read the celebrity gossip news, I would be okay. Unless I actually wrote any swearing into my bits, I should be fine.

But Rich has to concentrate very hard not to say anything dodgy when he's having a rant about various things, or indeed when he's playing the music. Luckily he knows his music pretty well, so there have been moments where he's played a track, only to have to hover over the decks, waiting for the moment of cursing and quickly dip the faders on it to avoid causing our radio career to be the most short lived in history.

However bad swearing is, it seems innuendo is fine. We were only a week into training in the practice studio when we stumbled across two jingles that you wouldn't get away with in the UK:

Touch FM. Playing sexy tunes that will keep your knob still.
Touch FM. Playing tunes that will make your boobs drop off.

I can see the double entendre in the first one, what with the FM dial knob etc, but the second one is still quite gratuitous and odd, whichever way you look at it.

Our first broadcast was mid October last year. For which we needed to decide upon a radio name each.

Rich's Slick Dick was born out of the process of him being trained in the 'cheesy DJ' style, i.e. actually being slick, and yet him wanting to do a calmer, less Smashey and Nicey and more John Peel style of delivery. As some of you may remember John Peel playing records at the wrong speed, you'll know he was not known for his technical brilliance. So, in the early days of learning the decks, R would forget to bring up a fader in time, or play a jingle over the top of something else by mistake. At these moments he would adopt a cheesy DJ pose and declare himself to be 'Slick Dick'.

It stuck, and when we began discussing his broadcasting name with the station controller, Slick Dick was sanctioned as being perfectly acceptable. It's not considered rude at all, which surprises us, but there you go.

As for my on-air name, the station controller was less bothered to pin that down early on. So much so that it got to the first broadcast and we were five minutes away from being on air before realising we needed to decide. I came up with Dorothy Spank as a suitable name to face off Slick Dick (as it were) but I distinctly remember mooting that I should have a different silly name each week.

Sadly, when it came to week two, noone else remembered this, and I was told that Dorothy Spank was it.

So there you go kids, there's a lesson there for us all. If you're deciding on an innuendo laden faux newsreader name, make it a good one as you'll be surprised what sticks...

Anyway, last weekend, when C&C were still here on the last day of their holiday, we had them as guests in the studio and they did a very kind thing and took some photos of us doing our, usually less kind, thing.

Treasure Island

2008-12-25T15:13:00.007+03:00

I completely forgot to write this post before.

And now it's Christmas Day, and everyone has cleared out and the camp is quiet, I finally have a chance.

Back in November, with S&J visiting, we travelled to Banda Island, one of the smallest Ssesse Islands just south of the Equator in Lake Victoria.

Banda is the stuff of backpacker myth and legend. You see it written about online, with equal measures of outrage and awe, depending almost entirely on whether or not you get on with it's owner.

Yes, it's a privately owned island. Privately owned by Dom, its muzungu owner. Dom is famous for purposefully offending people he does not like but some people love him. Where would we fall, we wondered?

The place is, in fact, a perfect cross between The Beach and Lord of the Flies. Dom does what he likes, and why not? He does own the place after all.

The accommodation is very basic, but clean and very reasonably priced. We stayed in a small twin banda overlooking the beach, with a box latrine loo and a bucket shower up the track in the forest.

It's full board (or in Dom's words, "very full board" - he throws in all sorts of extras including a rather lethal homebrewed banana based moonshine) and the food is spectacular. Well, apparently not so spectacular if you don't get on. If he hates you it slips right back to beans and rice. On our second night we were upgraded to Pumpkin and Coconut Soup, Fish Paella, Green beans and bacon in soy and ginger, and a lot of the afore-mentioned rum... All the cooking is done on these funky looking solar parabolas.

So I think it's safe to say we got on. We even had a tour around Dom's pineapple patch and Banana groves.

There is little to do there other than eat, drink, sleep. And read. And maybe if the weather's right, take a kayak out or borrow a fishing rod. But you can amaze yourself with how long you can sit and stare out over the lake for.

We spent one twilight looking out over the lake from the roof of Dom's castle. He's been building a rock tower, with a massive great hall style dining room at the bottom. The man is king of his island, and now he has his castle to match. We had sundowners on the roof, watching the sunset and then the lights of the fishing boats come out in the gathering darkness. It reminded me of Goa.

The next morning, I woke early. It was around 4.30am and dawn was breaking. Normally I'd dive for the covers at that sort of time, but I found myself out and about with the camera instead.

They have a resident hippo, that sometimes walks up the beach. When we were there, the hippo came to see us off on our final day, blowing bubbles and rolling around in the water just off the beach.

Banda is a wildlife haven - hundreds of bird species and lots to look at, even if you know nothing about that sort of thing.

Getting there is an adventure in itself. You can get there via the main Ssesse Islands, but the most direct route is via local lake-taxi from Kasanji.

These are essentially massive canoes, seating around 100 people, piled higgledly-piggledly on top of sacks of rice and cartons of water that are getting transported to the islands.

Banda is the first stop, and you hop off into Dom's leaky dinghy to be ferried ashore. On your way back, when you get to Kasanji again, the canoe is instantly surrounded by porters whose sole income comes from earning money carrying belongings AND people on and off the boats. It's 500 shillings a go, which is what we paid, but only after our porter had the cheek to try it on, asking for 20,000 shillings.

I don't mind paying a little over the odds, but that much over the odds? Needless to say, 500 shillings it was.

So if you feel the need to chill, disappear to Banda for a few days. Just be careful to leave yourself plenty of time. It's a hard place to leave.

A Chilli Christmas

2008-12-25T12:11:00.006+03:00

So I’m lapsing into bad blogger behaviour and it’s been almost three weeks since my last post. So much is going on, and so much of it is worth talking about, but blame it on the season, blame it on the undersea cables, I haven’t found too much time to get online.

I have spent much of this month up a ladder, in an attempt to finish the painting in the bar. We repainted the bar and restaurant and courtyard areas (it was much needed, with paint peeling in the corners before). On top of the fresh coats of cream and terracotta red with ebony coloured borders I’ve done some ethnic African renditions of animals and fish from the region. Ethnic African Art as interpreted by a Muzungu that is.

We have a giraffe, an anteater (or armadillo depending on your point of view), a large, domineering snake, a gecko, a Nile perch and an antelope (or just plain goat as all the staff seem to prefer). Soon to be added are a tortoise and a crested crane.

The other thing we’ve been busy with on a personal basis is adopting a new cat. We have Panda, our three-legged moggy, and as readers saw earlier this year, we started feeding a wild cat that was remarkable for the colour of its fur. It was blue. The poor thing had been trapped in some building when it was fumigated, or had, in some other way, come into contact with some blue-fur-making chemicals.

Shortly after starting to feed her, we realized why she was hungry. We found her nest of three kittens in between two cottages on the bottom compound. Blue Cat had some children, and thankfully they were not blue. She moved them all into the store in our yard, and we would see them early in the morning through the kitchen window, asleep in a big furry bundle of limbs and pink noses, on top of a single chair in the store.

As the kittens grew up, it became clear that one of them was braver than the others. He would follow his Mum into our house for extra eating opportunities, ducking underneath the mosquito door frame, leaving his brother and sister outside Miaowing plaintifully.

Their mother will always be Blue Cat to us, but we gave the three kittens names. The brave one became Mandu (as in Cat Mandu), the other white one Chairman (Chairman Miaow), and the skinny, scared black one Galore (as in Pussy).

(I know the puns are terrible, but we have to amuse ourselves somehow out here).

One of our ex-housekeepers took Chairman off us the other week, and may yet take Galore (if we can catch him). But we now have a strong relationship with Mandu, who lives in our house most of the time, nestling on our shoulders when we watch TV, and trying to work out how to jump onto a bed that is closely surrounded by a mosquito net. He’s a cute kitten, and Panda has just about accepted him. There’s still the occasional grumpy hiss, but nothing followed up with claws, and sometimes he looks positive pleased to see him.

What with a new kitten, and our other animals, we have quite a growing menagerie. We gained two piglets (male and female – we want more piglets!) a couple of months ago. They are growing fast, but no sign of piggy babies yets. We gained a hen and a cockrel back in September. The hen starting sitting on her eggs and produced seven chicks. The six surviving chicks (one got taken by a black shouldered kite) are growing quite large. The cock may have to go though – he’s taken to roosting outside one of the rooms and we’ve had some complaints about his incessant crowing.

The goats have been doing well, if not a little confused about life. Max, the surviving goatlet of the summer’s twin birth, is a stocky little thing. He and his mother, who we nicknamed Dave, were joined by another female at the end of August. She was christened Nigel by R and I, tho the staff called her Clare. The idea would be that come Christmas, Dave would hit the barbecue for the staff party, and that Max would fall in love with Nigel and make more goat babies to continue the Red Chilli line.

Sadly, nothing so simple has transpired. The teenage Max, despite still occasionally taking milk from his mother, has also been insisting on trying to take her in a completely different sort of a way. Nigel would look on, clearly feeling a bit left out. And recently, Nigel, despite being very much a girl goat, has been mounting Dave – also a girl goat. All this sexual deviancy is upsetting the staff (you have to remember homosexuality is considered downright freakish in this country) and as a result, Nigel/Clare has been slaughtered this morning for the Staff Christmas Barbecue. The pot is full and the staff are licking their lips. Goat, steamed Matoke (plantain), and Irish fried in eggs (Irish is shorthand for potatoes to you and I). That’s a Christmas meal right there.

Back in the kitchen, the staff have been sweating over a Christmas menu targeted at Muzungus. Roast Chicken with homemade pork, apricot and walnut stuffing, gravy, roast potatoes, caramalised pumpkin and carrots and green beans with cranberry sauce. A vegetarian Nut Roast made from pistachios, hazelnuts, almonds, cashew and of course, the ubiquitous G-nut (groundnuts, or peanuts to you and I). Or oven-baked lemon and herb tilapia fillets if you’re feeling fishy. And of course, mince pies for pudding with home-made mincemeat and double cream.

(Image is of Jennifer, one of our kitchen assistants, being camera shy)

I have a feeling we’ll be eating these dishes for days though. The equivalent of leftover Turkey sandwiches. There are people staying – the camp is technically half-full and two nights ago we were full – but it feels like a ghost town – there is no-one around. A lot of people staying are visiting friends or family in Kampala and are off with them for the day. And everyone else, bar a few stragglers, is out of town on safari. Our colleagues up in Murchison are frantic.

So R and I had a roast dinner last night, Nut roast for lunch today, some of the goat as an afternoon snack, and I’ll try the fish tonight. At least that won’t go bad – it was always to be cooked to order anyway.

Either way, we’ll end up as stuffed as we always do. No change there then.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Q: How do you know when you've rats in your office?

2008-12-07T18:04:00.002+03:00

A: Footprints on the keyboard*

Living in equatorial Africa does bring with it some new challenges. Including an elevated level of pest control skills required.

Last week we caught two rats in the office with two mice traps, then we caught two mice in one rat trap. We also tried to use something rather nasty called rat glue. You stick a load of glue in a circle on a bit of cardboard and a piece of ham in the middle. Then the next morning you have to be prepared to bash the rat that's now stuck to the cardboard over the head with a iron bar. You tend to do this round the back of the building, out of sight, and it tends to mean you'll skip breakfast. It's cruel but it's generally a more effective way to catch them than the traps.

Only trouble was, when we laid the rat glue trap, we didn't catch any rats or mice. We came in the next morning to find a slightly confused looking gecko, who was wondering quite how his little feet had become so stuck. The gardener looked at him sorrowfully and suggested we free him by cutting around him on the cardboard. I'm not sure he'd quite thought through the whole gecko-on-a-cardboard-plinth look. So we took him round the back and.... washed his paws gently in some soapy water and released him.

Geckos are our friends - what did you expect?

*This is of course, because we have no glass in the windows and the keyboards are always coated in a fine layer of red dust.

The Bag Man

2008-12-05T16:14:00.003+03:00

For months I've been mulling a plan for running a fair trade craft stall out of the Red Chilli compound. The basic idea is to find a suitable third party we can trust to run it, as long as they promise to pay a fair price for the goods, and plough any profits back into the stall and the community.

In the course of this, I have a list that's getting longer every day, filled with people who have approached me about their community group, their crafts, their products.

One of those people is a guy from the UK called Rick Benfield, who, with his friends, has set up a small charity called Wanna Be Amazin'?,(yes, even he admits the syntax is rather self-consciously twee), and has been working in the field in a small community called Badjo, about an hour north of Kampala.

They are establishing education and health based programmes in the local community there, but one of the things Rick has been trying to set up (the man worked as a consultant for Accenture in the UK) is an income generation scheme for the community based on the handicraft skills they have.

Some of the women weave lovely baskets out of banana grass (as do many communities here in Uganda) but one of the things that makes the Badjo group special is the bag man.

Nathan, the bag man, is a guy who has been making beautiful bags for years. He had previously just made them by himself, and they are made from strips of woven palm leaves interspersed with barkcloth - a material which is uniquely Ugandan and comes from the fibres of the fig tree. It looks a little like tan coloured suede in appearance but feels closer to fibrous paper in texture. It used to made into clothing, and still is for traditional ceremonies of the Buganda.

Nathan's bags are so special, that even I, who had not been in Uganda long when I first saw them, recognised the potential. I'd not seen anything similar in the craft markets here.

Anyway, Rick brought Nathan the bag man and his friends to town a couple of days ago, and I promised to introduce them to some people I knew. The first group is a large Muzungu run North American NGO famous for helping Ugandan women lift themselves out of poverty by making paper beads and selling them internationally. More on them later if this deal with the craft stall plans come good.

The second meeting was with less of a group and more of a friend. Suni is a Kenyan born half-Scottish, half-Hungarian whirlwind expatriate businesswoman, whom I know through the owner of Red Chilli, my boss Debbie.

Suni set up the beautiful Mihingo Lodge overlooking Lake Mburo National Park, and also set up and runs the highly successful Banana Boat chain of craft shops that specialise in fair trade crafts from all over Africa. Anyway, she happened to have five minutes to spare and I wanted her to see Nathan's bags and the potential they had. Potentially.

So on Wednesday, I ended up in meetings with people giving Nathan some highly constructive advice on finishes, labels, descriptors, pricing, etc. It was fascinating, and really rewarding to see people in the craft business have a similar reaction to the bags that I had.

It made me see how much fun, but also how incredibly complex it would be (not to mention how much extra work), a fair trade craft stall would be if we ended up doing it ourselves and didn't hand it over to a third party.

It's tempting, but we have too much on our plates. In the meantime, I'm hoping a certain group will say yes to a joint venture on the stall, and that we'll be able to stock some of Nathan's bags ourselves soon.

No news is good news

2008-11-21T20:35:00.003+03:00

Most of the time when I mosey through this new life in Africa, I am very much in blissful denial when it comes to what happened in the twelve months preceding this move to Uganda.

Of course, the vast majority of those reading this know what happened.

But people I meet here for the first time have no idea. They don't look at me and see the stuff that went on little more than a year ago. My hair, whilst I'm still frustrated with it, is longer and looks more intentional than 'chemo patient in recovery'. My scars have healed and look like they could be years old.

So if they have no reason to suspect it, there is no reason it should come up. So I don't talk about cancer much, and for me, I think it helps. While I will no doubt be using this blog as a place to vent some very deep-seated fears come March and my year 2 scans, I will, between now and then, probably not think about it much.

And that is a good thing.

But for two of our customers, who drove in the Red Chilli gates a couple of weeks ago, it's all too front of mind right now. They were on their way round a major tour of Africa, driving their UK registered Discovery with no plans to go back to the UK before February next year.

But the whistle has been blown for S&J. S's mother was diagnosed with early stage breast cancer a couple of weeks ago, and they've been thrown into a whirlwind of skype video calls to find out what's what, when it will all happen, and last but certainly not least, how her mother is and how the rest of the family are coping and responding.

R had got chatting to them about cars, only to discover their news, and he told them about me. The next morning I sought them out to sit down with them for a five minute chat to see how S's mother was and to give her my best wishes and any feelings of confidence I could muster for them about the situation.

Two hours later, three strangers had got to know a lot more about eachother. We talked of her mother's situation, how the lump is small (8mm across) and the fact mine was 15mm across. I think the size thing gave them comfort - at least I hope it did - the fact that my lump was twice the size and I was sitting talking to them in Kampala eighteen months after diagnosis, apparently all okay. We then talked of operations and options, radiotherapy and chemotherapy, and the politics of the situation. The fact that S's father had worked up until recently at the same hospital as her mother would be treated at, but that he was reluctant to accompany her for appointments and treatments as he had been forced to leave due to a personality dispute with several of the staff that would be treating to her. Phew... What to do about that?

The maelstrom of questions, discussions and emotions took me right back to the day I was diagnosed and the increasing stages of fall out and implication as it hit various areas of my life and I announced it to all my friends and family.

S&J were also weighing up their plans versus the urge to go straight home to Mum's bedside. S, in fact,was a physio who helped breast cancer patients recover movement in their arms after doctors had severed muscle and nerves in the course of removing lymph nodes in surgery, so she really wanted to be there to help her mother for that part of the process.

To make matters worse, they were just a few days short of their gorilla permits - they were due for gorilla tracking last Sunday at the cost of $500 each. The timing meant they probably did not have time to re-sell the permits, and S's mother was urging them to stay for at least that part of their trip. They were considering going home for a few months to see her through the surgery and initial treatment, leaving their car with us in the car park, to pick up again on their travels when the worst was over in the Spring of next year. Or the alternative of staying to finish their trip, but missing out on the part of the process that S felt confident about genuinely being able to help with, as well as lot of other key moments she wanted to be there for.

I talked to S a lot about the way I had felt about how people had offered support, and when they did. I received a lot of support, but it is true that like many people going through similarly dramatic problems in their lives (divorce, childbirth, illness, death of a loved one) everyone crowds you and cares for you at a point when you're still in shock and processing information, and it's only the few and the brave who stay it for the long run and know that actually, it's towards the end of the process that you need support the most.

In the course of the last week the two have made some big decisions. They went and saw gorillas, including two 15 week old baby gorillas, but they have decided to cut their trip short for good and they are now en route to Kenya to see about shipping their car home before jumping on a flight at Nairobi.

I feel terrible for them, but hopeful for S's mother's eventual prognosis. I was also plunged into a day of feeling really emotional - all the insecurities came flooding back. At the same time another breast cancer blogger, a few months ahead of me in terms of treatmemt and recovery, got in touch again and I updated myself on her life by reading her blog. She's in and out of consultant waiting rooms still, on various hormone treatments, having all sorts of scans, which have thankfully all led to good news.

Or at least, as is the best we can hope for post breast cancer, the absence of bad news.

Which is all I can ever hope for come March myself. And all we can ever hope for anyway.

So I wish Bette the continued absence of bad news, and S's Mum. Any myself. And everyone else.

Lets all have no more bad news, ever again.

Please.

Saddle Up

2008-11-14T17:50:00.010+03:00

In early November we had a couple of days off with some friends of R's who were over, enjoying their first African experience.

One of the activities we indulged in was a riding safari down the banks of the Nile in Jinja, courtesy of Nile Horseback Safaris.

The company set up some time ago, by a great woman called Natalie who used to be a safari guide and overland truck driver. When she was pregnant with her daughter she decided that heading off on safari was possibly no longer a practical career choice but investing in a bunch of horses and doing guided horseback rides around Bujagali Falls in Jinja would be.

Now her daughter is two and a half years old, she has 16 horses (each of whom she schools at least 3 times a week), several others to help her guide the rides, and a thriving business.

Having said all that, it's still not something most people do when they head to Jinja for a few days which is a shame. I know I have ridden all my life, but I was with three others who hadn't and they were put on perfectly well behaved horses and had a great time.

R had ridden a few times but all before the age of eleven. He's forty next year so it's a while ago now. The other two had never ridden before, except maybe a pony trek once in the dim and distant past.

They were riding good looking, well fed and healthy horses (always a pleasure to see at a commercial operation) who were incredibly well schooled but not 'old riding school nags'.

As for me, I was on an impeccably behaved but slightly more spritely three year old who had only just been broken in the previous six months.

And the ride was fantastic - two long hours through bush and river-side scenery, riding through narrow paths through maize fields and cassava plots, past the beaten red earth backyards of local dwellings filled with chickens, goats and smiling children, up hills for dramatic views of the river and Lake Victoria, glistening in the distance.

Again, I'm romanticising the poverty on display at every turn. But it felt less voyeuristic than passing through local villages and mudhuts has done before, for two reasons.

Firstly, we were clip clopping softly along the red earth tracks and not speeding past in a 4wd, belching diesel and sending wildlife and livestock bleating to the sides of the road.

Secondly, because the stables put back in what they take out, and more.

As my young steed twisted his neck to tear off a passing maize stalk, I winced in embarrassment and asked Nathalie how they offset the potential damage caused to crops by riding through the fields. Apparently they buy pretty much all the maize from this area, as well as buying up the maize leaves and stalks - a part of the plant that normally gets wasted and is usually burnt. The horses love it (as my mount proved, time and time again, trying to snatch the bit away from me so he could grab a quick mouthful) and it proves a good substitute for grass in the dry seasons. And the farmers love it too - suddenly being able to command a price for what was previously a useless part of the harvest.

The goodwill from the locals was evident, with women, elderly men and young children smiling out from doorways and gardens. Children shouted "Jambo!" (we were further East than Kampala so more young kids will be much more likely to speak Swahili). And the rides are always accompanied by a local rider and guide who can speak to the children in Luganda (or Swahili) and warn them if they crowd a horse known to kick, or behave in any other way which may be dangerous.

The guide we were with had only been riding for two years but had the look of a really experienced, confident rider. I asked him what his family thought of him riding horses for a living. They thought he was a little bit crazy, apparently. Ugandans don't have a heritage or culture of riding, the horse is not a common animal here. The idea of someone riding one is very unusual.

So much so, that when the horse I was on was first out on a ride, local people mistook it for a cow.

But then it is a skewbald, i.e. a 'coloured' horse, as the Western world terms it (oh how these terms sit awkwardly with me now), with large brown and white markings.

Not dissimilar to certain breeds of dairy cow.

Anyhow, here are some of the photos. All in all, it was a great afternoon and something I would highly recommend. A beautifully serene way to see the countryside and byways of Bujagali Falls.

City Lights

2008-11-14T17:08:00.005+03:00

When darkness falls over Kampala, darkness falls properly.

Whilst one part of the city looks like the skyline of some mid-western US city - a clutch of modest skyscrapers topped with neon lights, advertising the local beers - another is lucky if one in ten households have electricity and relies on a combination of paraffin lamps and candles to light their homes and businesses.

It's a romantic sight, but probably less so when you're the one straining your eyes to see and all you have is a candle in a jar.

But it does makes for great fun when you're bored on the way back from Jinja with an automatic camera and you're messing about with the effects you get from light trails...

(The yellow lights are generally paraffin lamps, candles and single energy saver bulbs in shacks lucky enough to wired to the mains. The red lights are boda boda brake lights, or perhaps a car's sidelights. The blue lights? Search me - there must have been some neon in there somewhere...)

The Wild West (cont)

2008-10-18T13:29:00.008+03:00

So, back to reporting on our travels. As I write this we've just got back from eights days upcountry, babysitting Red Chilli Rest Camp in Murchison Falls National Park, so there will be more tales of the road to tell.

But for now, it's back to day two of our travels out West at the end of September. We'd stayed overnight at CVK, a budget community focused tourist spot on the edge of one of the crater lakes south of Fort Portal.

We left CVK after a walk round the lake shore, heading for Kibale Forest National Park.

Just down the road, past lines of tea pickers working the plantations, we entered the forest.

Tall trees towered over either side of the rocky track, and as R looked for potholes in the dappled shadows on the road, I peered into the greeny black darkness either side of us to look for monkeys.

Kibale has probably the highest concentration of primate species in the world, so it was just as well that we were eventually rewarded with the sight of a big black shaggy Uganda Mangabey sat on a branch overhanging the road. He swung away into the trees before I could get the camera out, so here's a shot from wikipedia.

We then headed for the sumptuous Kibale Primate Lodge, tucked away behind the Uganda Wildlife Headquarters at Kanyanchu, where the ever popular chimp tracking starts out from.

Given R and I are on local salaries, we chose not to stay in the $280 luxury en suite tents offered by the lodge. Instead, we'd booked ourselves in the $30 a night treehouse, hidden 800m away down a dark forest track. We sat among the real guests, amused at how our Nissan Micra squared up against their shiny stretch Landcruisers, as we waited for our escort to the treehouse.

Advised to bring a minimum of stuff for our overnight belongings, we settled on a bag containing our key valuables, clean pairs of pants, a pack of cards, our torches and our toothbrushes, and set off after our man down the track. It twisted and turned through dense canopied forest. We heard a monkey shriek to the left, and some chimpanzees hooting in the distance somewhere ahead of us. Winding our way through the trailing trees, we crossed boggy patches filled with huge round waterlogged holes. So uniform in size, could they have been the footprints of forest elephants? There are certainly meant to be elephants in the park, although probably not the small, hairier, more agressive forest elephant species, but nonetheless, elephants in a forest, and that's enough for me.

After about 800m of the tiny track, suddenly it opened out into a small clearing with a far bigger, lighter, forest clearing to the right of us with clumps of tall palm trees dangling weavers' nests like a Christmas tree dangles baubles, and bright green, chest high grass which was gently moving in the pre-storm breeze.

A basic wooden ladder stretched up above us to our room for the night. Twenty metres up, with grass mats for window blinds and a roof, was a tiny room for two. Inside it smelt of tree and contained nothing more than a single bed, a second mattress, a narrow bench with a paraffin lantern, mosquito nets and bedding.

It was perfect.

Rolling up one side of the treehouse's window covering gave us the most exotic view out over the forest clearing. If we were going to see forest elephants anywhere, this would be it.

We didn't.

See forest elephants that is.

But nonetheless, this was it, and it was great.

We whiled away the afternoon gazing out over our forest, playing cards, reading and snoozing. The evening came and saw us splurge $20 each on a four course meal back at the posh lodge. The equivalent of spending two hundred pounds back on a meal for two in London, this felt like true decadence... and it was worth it. It was one of the best meals I've ever had in Uganda. Tomato and herb bruschetta to start, followed by a warm and spicy pumpkin soup, with fillet steak, roast potatoes and vegetables as a main, finished off with what they called 'apple crisp' but what I would have called a crumble.

It was now about 9pm and long dark. We got chatting to Amos, the owner of the lodge, who must have assumed we were staying in a $280 tent. As after twenty minutes of polite chit chat, when we let slip we were in the treehouse, a look of panic crossed his face.

You must go now! he said, looking around wildly for someone to help us.

If you are in the treehouse you must go there soon. Otherwise it will be too late!

What? Why?

It's okay, it's okay. But the elephants. If they come, they come at night. So you must go soon. And I must find someone to go with you.

Okaaaay.

A man with a stick was duely located and we trooped off again, saying our goodbyes, feeling like children being sent to bed early. We had assured Amos we would be fine making our own way there - we had torches after all and could listen ahead for sounds of elephants. Surely elephants marauding their way through a forest would not be that quiet about it?

But apparently, the man with the stick was an essential accessory for late night forest walks, and once on the tiny jungle track we were actually quite grateful. It certainly seemed a lot further at night, and the turnings and twists looked different under torchlight.

Nevertheless, elephant-free, we made it safely to the treehouse and up the ladder. Once inside we lit the lantern. A warm glow lit up the dark corners of the little room, suspended above the forest floor. Then a periphal flutter caught our attention. We had a bat for company! The tiny creature flew around our heads for a monent or two as we raised the grass mat shutters and gave it an escape route, which it found after only a couple more circuits of the roof.

Then we pulled the shutters tight down, preferring to spend the rest of the night bat-less, and tucked in for the night.

And despite all the weird and wonderful sounds, and waking up several times to the pitter patter of feet on the roof (birds? monkeys? elephants?), we both enjoyed one of the best night's sleep we have ever had.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

2008-10-04T16:19:00.004+03:00

Vervet monkeys, over breakfast, on a crater lake rim.

Black and White Colubus Monkeys at Sebitoli forest campsite, Kibale NP.

A Frog In The Bog and Other Stories

2008-10-01T15:15:00.004+03:00

So, our holiday last week saw us cross Kampala in our little white car and head out west on the Fort Portal road.

Our guidebook told us the road was really good up until Mubende, a town roughly halfway between Kampala and Fort Portal, whereafter it became so bad, the town was nicknamed Fort Pothole.

Of course, the guide being a few years out of date, the road West of Mubende is now smooth as silk, with a camber that's pleasing to the soul.

It's the 160km stretch to get there from Kampala that's now falling apart.

Never mind, the Nissan, because it's so small, has some advantage in it's ability to swerve around holes and fit through ever decreasing narrow passages of tarmac sandwiched between the encroaching corrugations, rocks and dust of the earth either side. But we know if we misjudge a hole we're going to come off a lot worse than our fellow road users in their Toyota pick-ups and Landrovers.

We eventually passed Mubende at around lunchtime and pulled over on a side track of long grasses to have a 'comfort break'. A swift and subtle pee in between the tall grasses and the natural alcove created by opening both left-hand side doors of the car at the same time. Veterans of many old banger rallies through Africa, I know how to relieve myself quickly and discretely.

(And a quick pee in the bush is always preferable to one in the stinky, mosquito ridden long drops you find round the back of Africa's village highway fuel stations.)

We were both eating our pack lunch when it quickly became apparent that the overgrown track we were parked on was a major pedestrian cut through to some un-seen village.

And everyone who had to pass up the track seemed to favour the side of the car where I had just left a small puddle. In this searing heat there is no way it would be mistaken for rain. And what's more, most people were barely shod. One old lady was barefoot.

Horrified, we had to jump up and block their path, motioning them round the other side of the vehicle to keep my shameful secret, and to keep their feet dry...

After lunch, the wide shoulder of the road ahead urging us on to Fort Portal, we made good time and hit the town at around 3pm.

Little more than one main street connected by a couple of roundabouts, Fort Portal is small but compact. With unpredictable weather. It lies at about 1500m altitude, at the feet of the Rwenzoris, which you can see on a clear day.

It was not a clear day. The blistering heat of our lunchtime stop had gone, the temperature dropping about ten degrees in the space of ten kilometres. The Rwenzoris where hidden behind black clouds sat on the horizon and the wind was cold enough to make us wind up our windows. I burrowed in my bag for a fleece - the first time ever I've had to wear one in Uganda.

As we took the Kamwenge road south towards the Kasenda crater lake cluster, the rain started. The road was unsealed, and our windscreen wipers were short of useless, so we made extremely slow progress as we peered to see the holes. Taxis and bodas sped past us, hooting and flashing their lights.

Never mind we thought. We'll have a suspension system tomorrow - they won't.

An hour later and we made it to CVK - our first stop of the trip. A budget traveller's hangout perched on the steep banks of a crater lake, overhung with lush, dense tropical forest and alive with frogs, birds and monkeys. In fact, CVK is on Lake Nyabikere - which means Lake of Frogs. You could certainly hear them, and it wasn't even dark yet.

The place seemed deserted. We were shown to our room by a single member of staff. To get there we slid down some steep, moss-covered steps - a lawsuit waiting to happen - fearing we'd end up in the lake if we mis-judged things. We left our things in the room and went to take a seat on the main verandah, feeling like we were the only people there.

But we were wrong. Within half an hour, an Israeli couple turned up. They recognised us as had been staying at Red Chilli only a few days before. Then a girl joined their table. It was dark by now and we couldn't see her face - but her voice sounded familiar. When she popped over to confirm it was us we realised she was a regular guest at Red Chilli - a dutch woman who would stay at ours in between research trips to 'her village'. Which turned out to be a village a few miles down the road from where we were staying.

So there we were, listening to the frogs croak and the rain drum on the roof, on holiday 300 miles from home, talking to the only other three guests in the hotel who were three people who knew us from Kampala, one of whom was trying to persuade us to adopt an abandoned puppy she'd found...

We then met the owner of CVK - a lovely woman called Pelusi. Her husband was or is the head of Agricultural studies at Makarere University and set up a field station out here for research. It was then that they saw the potential to build a community tourism based site on the edge of the crater lake. The water pumps they have installed pump water from the lake to the site, and also to the village down the road. The crafts for sale come from the local basket makers and carvers, and there are other projects they are involved in which are inherently community focused. They have planted lots of fruit trees in amongst the tropical forest on their lake shore which has attracted all sorts of monkeys and birds back to the area, including the odd family of chimps. The place has a great soul to it, but we got the sense Pelusi and her husband were ready to retire. They're certainly looking for a Manager to run the place, if anyone out there's interested.

Later that night, after the torrential storms had finished (this week I heard of an overland truck crew I know who had to abandon setting up camp down the road in Queen Elizabeth National Park that night because the hailstorms were too ferocious...), we disappeared to our room. I popped to the en suite bathroom quickly, only flicking the light on at the last minute before I was about to plant myself on the loo.

But before I did I noticed we had a surprise visitor. It seems water was not the only thing pumped up from the lake that night. I was eye to eye (and almost cheek to cheek) with a long legged black lake frog.

We stared at eachother for a moment and with a sudden plop, he disappeared round the U bend.

What to do? I couldn't go to the loo, knowing he was around the bend in the pipe. But I couldn't fish him out as he was hiding around the bend. R and I figured that a quick flush would hopefully see him back somewhere, if not where he originally came from. It was only once we'd flushed that we realised, like every other sewage system in Uganda, this pipe probably led to a soak pit.

Poor Froggie...

Watch Those Hemlines, Girls!

2008-10-01T15:06:00.002+03:00

This was recently sent to me by a friend in the UK (thanks Rosie) as a story from the BBC website, and it's also been covered here in Uganda's own national press.

Uganda seeking miniskirt ban

The minister said wearing a miniskirt was akin to going naked
Uganda's ethics and integrity minister says miniskirts should be banned - because women wearing them distract drivers and cause traffic accidents.

Nsaba Buturo told journalists in Kampala that wearing a miniskirt was like walking naked in the streets.

"What's wrong with a miniskirt? You can cause an accident because some of our people are weak mentally," he said.

The BBC's Joshua Mmali in Kampala, the capital, said journalists found the minister's comments extremely funny.

Wearing a miniskirt should be regarded as "indecent", which would be punishable under Ugandan law, Mr Buturo said.

And he railed against the dangers facing those inadvertently distracted by short skirts.

"If you find a naked person you begin to concentrate on the make-up of that person and yet you are driving," he said.

"These days you hardly know who is a mother from a daughter, they are all naked."

Vice list

According to the minister, indecent dressing is just one of many vices facing Ugandan society.

"Theft and embezzlement of public funds, sub-standard service delivery, greed, infidelity, prostitution, homosexuality [and] sectarianism..." he said.

Earlier this year, Kampala's Makerere University decided to impose a dress code for women at the institution, our reporter says.

The miniskirt and tight trousers ban has yet to be implemented, but our correspondent sought the opinions of women on campus about the minister's opinions.

"If one wants to wear a miniskirt, it's ok. If another wants to put on a long skirt, then that's ok," one woman said.

But others had more sympathy with Mr Buturo.

"I think skimpy things are not good. We are keeping the dignity of Africa as ladies and we have to cover ourselves up," one woman, called Sharon, told the BBC.

Cultural differences aside, the best bit for me is the Vice List. The fact that wearing a mini skirt is compared to other vices such as corruption and so on (although there are a few items on that list equally undeserving of inclusion - homosexuality remains hugely controversial over here, not to mention illegal, as you can see).

In our local papers here, the list was extended and wearing a mini skirt was just one of the many ethical problems we had to deal with, including "Corruption and war".

Yep, shorten that hemline and you may as well be invading Poland.

Talk Like A Ugandan

2008-10-01T15:00:00.005+03:00

The spoken language is rich in it's use of local idioms and phrases.

Ugandan English is more distinct from English English than you might, at first, expect. Some of it a stranger can 'get' without the help of a local, some of it is a little harder to fathom.

Like the slang for various parts of the anatomy. The local tabloid (think Sunday Sport but worse), The Red Pepper, has popularised the term 'Whopper' for a certain part of the male body (no guesses for which).

At least the term Whopper makes some sort of sense, even if it makes for an interesting moment when ordering in Burger King.

But then they go and use the term 'Kandahar' for the vagina. Now how on earth would the name of an Afghanistan city come to represent female genitalia?

I thought this might have been an urban myth, but then I picked up a copy of the paper myself and read a story about some prostitutes being rounded up and arrested by local police. There were lines like "The women had been opening their Kandahars for clients for years" and quotes from the ladies themselves saying "I will let whomever I choose enjoy my Kandahar". And other such gems.

So it's not a wind up. It's an elaborate, and unfathomable, but highly effective way for the paper to smuggle in lots of lewd talk and smut, without getting prosecuted for it.

But it gets better.

There is another popular slang word for the vagina.

Some time back, the play called The Vagina Monologues came to Kampala. It had a short-lived run and was taken off the stage in a flurry of controversiality.

Ever since then, I'm told, the word monologue has been slang for a lady's bits.

But sometimes, when they can get away with it, the tabloid press here still favour the direct approach. Thanks to some spurious story about a local Pastor's sexual shenanigans, the Red Pepper newspaper managed to get the words "BUM SEX" into their front page headline every day for a whole week.

That's dedication to the art of shlock journalism, that is.

Westward Ho!

2008-09-23T20:01:00.003+03:00

Finally, some days off.

We've been stretching them out, bit by bit, because we've been waiting for a medical insurance policy to kick in. Before we're fully insured, did we really want to take to the roads in a tiny Nissan Micra when everyone else is driving massive trucks or Landcruisers?
Probably not.

So, now we are insured with days owing, we're heading West.

To Fort Portal and the crater lakes of extinct volcanoes. On the tea-growing slopes of the Rwenzoris we will spend a few idle days, enjoying floating across the lakes in a dug out canoe, or trying to spot chimps and forest elephants from a treehouse.

Jealous yet?

Beware The Evil Pumpkin

2008-09-21T18:09:00.002+03:00

I've often wondered what would cause me to visit the local hospital for the first time.

Would it be a case of malaria?
Bilharzia from being immersed in practically any body of water in sub-Saharan Africa?
Or a road accident, given the standard of driving around here?

No, nothing so typically African as all of the above.

Strangely, having spent all my life with no known allergies, the first thing that caused me to visit a local clinic here (A&E at 2 in the morning, nonetheless), was none other than an innocent looking pumpkin.

It all started when a colleague mentioned they'd cooked a Pumpkin and Peanut Curry at our other camp, up at Murchison. I'd been thinking about trying to find a suitable vegetarian curry dish, and I love both pumpkin and peanuts, so this felt like a really good idea. A swift google later and I had an adapted recipe from a Channel 4 cookery site using red chillies, ginger, coriander, garlic, peanut butter, lemon zest, coconut milk and of course, lots of juicy pumpkin to complete the recipe.

Together with the chef on duty, we prepped and chopped all the ingredients. When I cook at home, I wash my hands less, but when I'm cooking in the Red Chilli kitchen, I'm fanatical about my hands and scrub them clean before, in between, and after all the different stages of cooking, all to aware how easy it is to tuck my hair behind my ears, or scratch my nose, or something that a professional chef should not really be doing at all. Plus, I was the one chopping chillies, so taking care not to touch any part of me whilst doing so, I washed my hands once again the moment the little red chillies were all done.

Then, we tackled the pumpkin. Godfrey quartered it, then halved the pieces again, the slice becoming slippery with orange sap. He then took charge of peeling the green skin off, and passed me the orange hunks to dice into smaller pieces.

At one stage I held up my hands, dripping in orange sap, like I was Lady Macbeth.

It looks like you have murdered someone whose blood runs orange said Godfrey.

When we were done, I washed my hands even more furiously than before. The orange had stained my nails and was working itself into my pores.

Whilst we then cooked the curry together, I felt a tingle start. My hands were buzzing slightly, the way they do when you've been for a long cold walk and you come back to the fireside.

When the curry was done, I carried a tray with two steaming plates of the stuff down to the house for Rich and I to have for our dinner. Where the plates made the tray hot, the tingling got worse. So much so that I had to put the tray down in a hurry once I got inside.

Twenty minutes later, as we finished dinner, the sensation was escalating rapidly. Now it felt like my hands were scalded. I fetched a bowl of water to place them in to cool them down. It worked fpr a while.

An hour later, and now having to refresh the water every five minutes for some relief, I was starting to worry. This is not a normal reaction.

Did you chop chillies? Richard asked.

No, this isn't chillies I said. I know it sounds daft, but I know the sensation of burning caused by chilli oils. This burning felt different. More internal somehow. And was far more intense then any chilli mishap I'd ever experienced before.

It even followed the pattern where the pumpkin juice had trickled down the inside of my right wrist. On the inside of my arm there, there was a pink 'V' of pain. It felt like I had been properly burnt on my palms, under my nails, and down my wrist. But this caused by pumpkin juice?

It was crazy. I'd chopped plenty of pumpkins and squash before. Never in Africa, granted, but loads in the UK. I'd hollowed one out and sliced scary Halloween face masks in them. How could I possibly be reacting to something that had never had this effect on me before?

I had frozen a wet towel in the freezer. Wrapping this around my hands I went back to the office to try and internet-diagnose my problem. Turns out, some tropical species of squash can cause an intense dermatological reaction. I found pages where some latin name was mentioned for this effect, and recipe blogs where women swapped surprise at their unusual reactions to chopping pumpkin.

Mind you, most of them were complaining about suffering taut, dry skin with skin peeling off on day two. Nobody mentioned feeling like they'd suffered second degree burns.

By now I'd graduated from a frozen towel to a pair of ice blocks. Which I was holding bare-handedly.

Three hours later and I couldn't get to sleep. It was one in the morning and I was meant to be getting up at 6.45am to do a stock transfer and see the trips off.

An hour later and the pain was getting worse, not better. I caved and woke up our tame taxi driver to ask him to drive me to the 24 hr emergency room at The Surgery.

The Surgery is reknown in Kampala amongst ex-pats and travellers. It's founder and main doctor, Dr Stockley, is a trained as a British GP but has been here in Kampala doing his thing for years. He writes on tropical disease for the Bradt guide, as well as local publications here and lord knows what else. He also had a hand in The Last King of Scotland - I believe he helped scout or broker locations - and actually played the role of the Times Journalist sent to interview Amin's doctor.

But of course, at 2am, you don't get the film stars treating you. You get a perfectly nice and competent local doctor, who was very perplexed by my condition. He felt my hands and remarked on how cold they felt. This would be the ice blocks. They felt so hot to me, so sensitive to heat, that when I just placed my palm lightly on my arm I had to lift it off after 30s because the searing hot sensation of burning got too much to bear. Yet there was no scald marks, no blisters, no sign that anything untoward was going on. Apart from the fact that immersing them in water or holding them against melting ice packs was making my fingers as wrinkled as if I'd been lying in a bath for hours.

Both the doctor and I happily agreed i was a freak, I got pumped full of hydrocortisone and given anti-histamines and it still had no effect. He offered me one last option but advised that I would need to have someone awake, watching over me, if I wanted to follow the option.

He said the only painkiller he could give me for nerve pain like this was amyltryptiline. It would numb the pain and make me zonk out for several hours. Only trouble is, that if the allergic reaction left my nerve endings and travelled into my blood, it would start to shut down vital systems, which normally, would be noticed by someone who was awake. But because the drug also makes you sleep, I wouldn't be aware of this, hence the need for someone to watch over me.

I weighed up the pros and cons of waking R in the middle of the night, when at least one of us should be fresh for the morning. If I got him up he'd be grumpy (wouldn't anyone?) and then he'd only half a night's sleep as well. We'd both be rubbish come 7.30am and work.

So I politely declined the doctor's offer of such a massively scary sounding drug and decided I'd far rather stay awake all night with my hands in a bucket of ice than risk vital organ failure and an irate partner.

Plus, this reaction had to stop sometime.

So, back at home, I watched re-runs of So You Think You Can Dance on Mnet and Mega Jellyfish on Natgeo with the sound turned right down. Whilst still painful, the burning started to subside around 5am and I fell into a half sleep wrapped in a blanket with a soggy patch forming on my chest where the ice blocks sat. In my stupor my mind was filled with vivid flashes of Cat Deeley, of divers harpooning gigantic jellyfish and of evil looking pumpkins.

It was a strange night, but at seven am the next morning, as Rich left for the stock transfer (he gallantly confirmed I'd made the right decision in not waking him), I popped two sleeping pills and took my hands to bed.

It was thirteen hours after pumpkin chopping and they were still tingling.

But the curry was delicious and is now a regular feature on the menu here.

The chefs now wear surgical gloves when they are chopping it, rather than ending up in The Surgery...

Two Unexpected Guests

2008-09-07T20:23:00.004+03:00

Tonight we walked the dogs for a long way.

We left at about 6pm, wandered past a couple of stray goats that had escaped their plots and were dragging their ropes behind them as they caused havoc crossing the road.

Hmmmph we thought.

Those goats are going to get run over.

Then we turned down the hill past the petrol station, leaving someone else's goats behind us, crossed over the road, past the car wash and the rubbish heaps, along the track past a car set up with speakers and a keyboard and a couple of very bad gospel singers and beyond the football pitch. We turned right and headed to Bugolobi through the back streets of local bars, past shacks with small children sitting in the dirt in front, over a rickety bridge made out of nailed together planks of wood, (the dogs looking askew at us as they crossed - You want me to walk over this shit?) and then through a highly contrasting neighbourhood of high walls, security guards and wrought iron gates.

We turned around and headed back down into the swamp valley, through the maize plots, on hardended crusts of earth that line the ditches and irrigation alleys, then turned left and jumped over or through the stream depending on whether we were human or canine, and climbed up the hill back to the football pitch, the game now dwindling in the twilight, and back towards home past the gospel singers.

All of this took nearly two hours.

It was getting dark.

When we turned into the road leading to Red Chilli the goats were still there. Perfectly happy but bound to get themselves run over or stolen under cover of darkness. Their owners were nowhere to be seen.

I handed Jimmy's lead to Rich and picked up the dangling rope of one of the goats.

A local guy helped by picking up the rope of the other one.

We've taken them in for the night. Two male goats have joined us as guests of Red Chilli for tonight. Tomorrow we're going to get the guards to secure them on the other side of the gate. The local guy who helped us, and our staff, will put the word out locally. We hope to reunite these goats with their owner.

In the meantime, I do hope they will pay us for bed and board by impregnating our two lady goats.

Advice For Life

2008-08-27T19:18:00.001+03:00

We bought some paint thinner the other day.

On the instructions / how to use label on the back of the 1 litre jerrican it said:

Keep Out Of Children

Good advice for life, not just for thinning paint, I'd say....

They Giveth, And Then They Taketh Away

2008-08-27T19:14:00.004+03:00

We watched 30 Rock. And enjoyed it.

And then we woke up the next morning to find out that the two new channels were off limits again.

It was just a fleeting gift.

But, we have a cunning plan. We've heard from one of the satellite engineers that free subscriptions are given to journalists and radio presenters.

R has been published in Uganda and we're probably going live on the radio in a few weeks time.

Can you see where this is going?

30 Rock My World

2008-08-26T18:49:00.003+03:00

We made an exciting discovery the other day.

We've gained two new satellite channels!!!

Back when we had it installed we weighed up the packages. For $95 a month we could get pretty much everything there was - wall to wall sport channels (which neither of ever watch anyway), all the news channels, all the entertainment and movie channels - more dodgy programmes than you could ever fit into your viewing hours.

For $25 a month we could get BBC Prime and BBC World, CNN, MNet Series, NatGeo and Natgeo world. We would lose a couple we liked - Discovery, History etc - but for saving $70 a month of our salary, it did not seem worth it.

And anyhow, our main criteria was whether we would still get 30 Rock. We had fast become big fans of this new show, and were tuning in to every episode we got. It seemed to be on about 3 channels at once, but was repeated on Mnet Series, which we would still get with the smaller package. So that didn't seem to be a problem.

So we downgraded our subscription.

And they promptly cut 30 Rock from the Mnet Series schedule.

Damn them and their cunning.

But now we have channels which have mysteriously become available again, including Go!, which has 30 Rock on every Tuesday.

We'll have skipped half of the second series so there are bound to be a few moments of confusion, but it's like having a new love come back into town.

We have an extra skip in our step thanks to a fantastic show.

And it starts in 5 mins so I'd best get going...

Truck Slogans

2008-08-24T16:18:00.002+03:00

Uganda has the greatest mottos and slogans painted on every mudguard - whether it belongs to a tiny boda motorbike, or a massive truck.

Here's one we prepared earlier...

Tropical Medicine Eat Your Thigh Out

2008-08-23T18:33:00.004+03:00

Barely a day goes by when we don't get someone asking how they go about seeing a decent doctor.

We usually send them to an English doctor who runs a local clinic. He knows his tropical medicine and doesn't scare the tourists too much with his GP-trained British bedside manner.

Earlier this week I had a guy ask me the predictable question. He'd been in the mountains for a while, and whilst there, had been bitten by something unidentified that had run up his trouser leg in a local shop. The bite had now gone bad, swelling up to a massive boil like lump that was oozing something nasty from behind the small dressing he'd put on it. Apparently he had got a friend to squeeze it for him, and as they did so, some little creature had popped out.

Nice.

Despite feeling quite squeamish by this point, I wanted to follow through and find out what desperate sort of tropical disease or nasty he had picked up, so I sent him off to see the doc with strict instuctions to come straight back and tell us all about it.

Turns out he had been bitten by a brown widow spider.

The brown widow spider has (according to our friends at wikipedia) a venom which is twice as strong as the more famous black widow spider. According to the doctor, the spider had bitten this guy on his upper thigh and deposited some sort of sac just under the skin. Whether this is a stomach sac or an egg sac I do not know - but it may explain the little creature that popped out....

The sac then leaks a neurotoxic substance which eats the surrounding body tissue. Basically necrosis spreads from the site of the bite. The spider sac had hollowed out a little cave like hole underneath the skin and had it been left there, would have continued to do so. Some wounds can get to be inches wide if left unattended.

The doctor excised the wound and stuffed it full of gauze. He was due for another appointment that evening to check on it.

I was concerned about the possibility of infection - really hard to prevent with open wounds in tropical, dusty climates. Especially when you are travelling all the time. But apparently that's very unlikely. Because the tissue is dead, there are no live cells to get infected. Every cloud, etc, etc.

The poor bloke. Two weeks in the mountains and what does he get? A massive necrotic cavity in his upper thigh. He seemed remarkably upbeat about it.

A Tale Of Two Cities

2008-08-23T14:44:00.006+03:00

Kampala. It conjures up visions of a typical African city. Doesn't it?

All of us have preconceptions.

You may have heard that Kampala was built on hills, originally seven of them, like Rome.

Or Sheffield.

You may have heard that Kampala is greener than expected. Which is also true.

But you may also have expectations based on other African capitals.

Low-slung buildings, never more than one storey high (apart from the obligatory Sheraton hotel which towers over every African capital like some Colossus, sucking in the NGOs and pampered diplomats), seperated by narrow streets of dirt, or tarmac if you're lucky, flanked either side by wide open sewage ditches blocked with a thousand plastic bags.

You may think of Paul Theroux's description of a typical African city, calling them the last place on earth you can experience the sensation of a medieval city. The market streets in Bamako; the Djemma El Fna in Marrakesh; the fish market in Nouakchott; densely packed squares and souqs and alleys; where the whores hustle, and the hustlers whore.

Wandering through the melee of money-changers, water-sellers, food vendors, street performers, pick-pockets, pimps and street urchins, you get a feel for what wandering through medieval London may have been like.

But then you arrive in Kampala.

And you see tall, shining, mirrored office buildings. Kampala, unlike some other one-storey African cities, has a skyline. A Skyline which, while not quite NY or London, definitely means business.

And while the traffic can be punishing on other routes, there are wide open three laned highways leading out of the city to the West.

Ugandans line up next to you at the lights. Albeit they may be cutting you up and crossing lanes, but a good deal of them are driving very shiny brand new Pajeros and Land Cruisers.

So you are surprised, pleasantly, at this city you did not expect.

This is a guilty thought. You didn't expect an African capital to be so, well, civilized. How patronising do you feel now?

But it's true. Kampala is incredibly sohisticated as a city.

Then you settle in and get to know the other side to this city.

A wrong turn takes you towards the old Taxi Park. Battered old minibuses line the street.

Hawkers hug the pavements, piling up their wares. A man pushes a bicycle past you. On it are tied around fifty live chickens, looked rather dazed as they dangle by their ankles. Great dark red legs of meat hang from open hatches where butchers stand in dirty white aprons.

A man is eating fried grasshoppers from a newsprint cone, wiping stray green legs off his greying stubble. A large lady waddles past, swathed in colourful cottons and balancing a woven basket of bananas on her head. Ugandan women are bent double at the waist, bottoms raised, sweep the front of their stalls out to keep their wares free from dust and debris.

A hundred different beats blare from cheap tinny speakers in shop fronts and minibus cabs. Horns honk, babies cry, people shout, and every now and then, a marabou stork shrieks from a rooftop.

This is the Kampalan symphony orchestra.

This is the Kampala I see behind the skyscrapers.

Kampala truly is a Tale of Two Cities.

A Bad Day In Bongoland

2008-08-16T13:48:00.003+03:00

On the way back from badminton on Thursday night we got pranged by an errant truck cutting across us at the most hellish roundabout in Kampala. He clipped the edge of the bull bar on the work landrover and pulled it up and forward and off its mounts. He did this all at about 20mph and sped off into the darkness. Nice.

The landrover now looks like it's raising its eyebrows at us.

But that was just the start of a series of unfortunate events.

The next morning, yesterday, I noticed one of our Shambas pick up the baby girl goat. Something was wrong. She normally runs away from anyone trying to approach her, let alone allows anyone to pick her up.

Her breathing was fast and shallow, her eyes were glazed, and her normally pink tongue looked pallid and grey.

All the staff reckoned she had malaria. They 'have' malaria about once a month. It's like their version of the common cold. Good for a duvet day.

Handily, we had vets on site. A Spanish couple who normally worked in Soroti were staying and one of them came and looked at her straight away. But just in the time we were with her, the baby goat lost the ability to stand and collapsed on the ground. She was limp in our arms when we tried to pick her up. She was deteriorating so rapidly we agreed to take her straight to the local USPCA.

The Spanish vet had donated a jumper from her baby daughter which we dressed the baby goat in to try and keep her warm (I will add a photo when we get them downloaded from the phone), and we bundled her into a cardboard box and took her straight up to the USPCA.

We got a strange look at reception when we checked in our patient. When we announced it was a goat, the receptionist tried to write 'dog' on the patient details form.

It's a GOAT, not a dog, I repeated.

The receptionist's eyebrows raised like the bullbar on our landrover.

I think we may have been the only people in Uganda ever to have brought a ruminant to the vet's.

Once inside, the nurse started to check the basics as we waited for the vet. We wrapped the baby goatlet in a blanket and gave her a hot water bottle. Her ears and legs had started to feel cold and her breathing was getting worse. Every three or four breaths she seemed to convulse slightly and I was getting a very bad feeling.

Sure enough, her breathing slowly stopped and eyes went dead. I tried to feel for a pulse as the nurse was out of the room. Where do you check for a goat pulse? The neck?

Nothing. Or if it was there, it was very faint. The vet confirmed this when she arrived a second later by checking with her stethoscope. The poor thing had just died.

From the symptoms, the vet reckoned she'd suffered a toxic reaction to something. It hadn't been an infection - there was no temperature.

But what could have infected her? Snakebite? Scorpion? A poisonous plant? Eating lead paint peelings off the walls? A guest feeding her chocolate, or worse, beer?

(Not that this last possibility has necessarily happened - but guests do funny things with animals - a few years ago two guests killed a duck by drunkenly playing catch with it and then wondered why everyone else, especially the duck, was so upset by their behaviour...)

So I pulled the blanket over the baby goat's head and left the surgery with one less goat than when we'd come in, suddenly really depressed.

And then once we got back to the office, we discovered one of our most trusted barmen might have been stealing from the company. But I'm only saying might for legal reasons - on questioning he admitted all. He's too honest and couldn't lie, but had casually pocketed dollars intended for the till as commissions from business partners we take bookings for. To him, this wasn't really stealing. To us, it was.

When the good guys turn bad, it turns the world on its head.

So what to do? A car crash, a baby goat death, and a good barman turned bad. Africa so rarely deals such negative blows - life here is normally up and positive. And if it isn't up it's at least different.

So fix the car, mourn the goatlet and dismiss the barman.

But it's still sad to see the goat wandering round with only one kid. And it's weird having to say goodbye to a previously trusted member of the team.

It's been a bad day in Bongoland.

A Family Wedding

2008-08-11T13:49:00.004+03:00

My brother is engaged. To the Canadian I have not yet met.*

Best bit about this news?

When they get to doing the ceremony, civil or not, whoever is officiating will have to read out his and her names.

Her name?

Courtney Love.

I'm not kidding.

Apparently she hates sharing her name with a now-she's-sober-now's-she's-not widow of one of the most iconic names in indie music.

But I think it's hilarious and cannot wait for the invetibale tittering in the audience at the wedding-to-be.

Does that make me a bad sister?

*This is not a photo of my brother's wife-to-be. This is a photo of the other Courtney and comes courtesy of gofugyourself.

Kids Say The Darnedest Things....

2008-08-08T15:30:00.003+03:00

Breezing through the Red Chilli inbox in a quieter moment, I am busy reading what the Ugandan Tourist Board has to say for itself in one of their email newsletters and stumble across their version of an 'And Finally...' style anecdotal news item.

And I quote:

In a rare case of mistaken identity, recently a family of American tourists visited Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park. Mum, Dad, and five children, in search of the prized "Silverback" gorilla.

As luck would have it, or so they thought, the children were stunned by what they thought were Mountain Gorillas and rushed to break the news of their find to their equally excited parents.

To their disappointment, the 'gentle giants' turned out to be bare-chested locals who were clearing the bush around the Gorilla resort...

The parents must have been mortified at their children's mistake.

Mistake some Africans for gorillas? How politically incorrect can you get? But to a Ugandan, this is just a humourous tale about some stupid tourist gaffe.

But we Muzungus are so sensitive to this stuff.

Most of us have grown up knowing what constitutes acceptable terminology when referring to the colour of someone's skin. We've all winced at a grandparent's use of phrases like "Nig-Nog" or "The Blacks".

In and out of fashion swam politically correct terms like "Coloured", "Ethnic Minority", "Black" and so on, but whatever the currently accepted term of reference was, there is no way anyone would ever want to be found guilty of mistaking a local Ugandan for a Mountain Gorilla.

But Ugandans have a different perspective. They say what they see, with little self-consciousness about the implied meaning we would overlay on similar statements.

I have inwardly winced at things members of staff have said about eachother:

You two look like a pair of monkeys, you look just the same!
He is so tall, just like a gorilla!

It may be similar to the phenomenon of it being fashionable among certain members of the American black community to call eachother Nigger. It's okay for a black person to say it about another black person, but not for a white person to say it - that sort of thing.

Or, perhaps we need to regain some perspective.

It's obviously not okay to call people derogatory names, whatever the reason or current fashion.

But maybe it's okay to tell an anecdote freely, wihtout fear of being perceived as racist, about some silly mistake your child made on holiday. Imagine if the rustle in the bushes had turned out to be a white tourist - the story would have been repeated and regaled far into the future as "The time we mistook so-and-so for a gorilla".

But I bet you all the Gorillas in Uganda they're not telling this story back home on the ranch. The implied racism innate in the tale would be too much for the audience of the 'folks back home' to cope with.

Unless, of course, the family were from Alabama.

White (Wo)Men Can't Jump

2008-07-29T20:51:00.006+03:00

One of the volunteer groups staying with us at Red Chilli invited us to participate with them in a local sports tournament with their local partner organisations.

We extended the invitation to our housekeepers and shambas - most of whom have a general knockabout with a ball at the end of each day anyway.

It felt like a perfect plan - the boys and girls deserved an afternoon out - they have been working extra hard during this busy season - and it was a chance for R and I to integrate into some real local life.

As for the sporting element we thought it would friendly, amateurish fun. Jumpers for goalposts, that kind of thing...

Oh how wrong we were.

We turned up at the grounds near St Paul's Church in Banda, a small local town off the Jinja Road. Drums were beating down by the football ground. A PA system was blaring out Lugandan match commentary over a musical beat. Team buses sat parked up a vertical bank of grass. Groups of strapping young men in different colours of shiny nylon were tying the laces of their football boots. Towering young women with netball skirts flapping around their long, glowing limbs were stop-start-turn-leap-running across the length of the netball pitch. Shouts rang out and children cheered.

This was no sunday league. These people took their playing very seriously indeed.

With a certain amount of intrepidation, I squeezed myself into a tiny netball bib that squished my tits flat and tried to remember the rules. Suddenly I realised,

I have not played this sport since 1989.

Who was I trying to kid?

Ten minutes after the first whistle blew and it was clear. I had forgotten the rules. I could not keep up with the fit local women always one step ahead of me, nor could I match the stamina and speed of my team-mates - a bunch of mainly 17 year olds from near Manchester and the odd cleaner from Red Chilli.

By the end of the first quarter, I'd swapped with Annet, one of our housekeepers, who went on to play a far, far better game than I ever could have.

By the start of the second quarter, the white faces had turned pink and one ankle had been turned on the rough ground. The opposition, a team from the local HIV Outreach Clinic in Mbuya, were trouncing us. Two goals to Nil.

We were getting plenty of shots at the hoop but none of them were getting in.

Demoralised but determined the team soldiered on. Another fifteen minutes in the blistering heat, sun beating down on the hard red baked earth. The crowd were sat silently in the shade, lulled into a stupor by the heat that was punishing the players so hard. But the Outreach team were leaping past us every time, passing the ball down the line with impeccable timing, getting their ball through the hoop one shot in every three.

Finally, in one of the last minutes of the second quarter, K scored a goal for our side.

Everyone erupted with noise. The crowd lining the top of the bank, sat beneath the maize stalks, the captain of the opposition, the children with the big goatskin drum - all whooped and hollered and cheered and roared at our success. It may only be one goal against the four scored by the opposition, but they were every bit as jubilant as we were.

Half time was spent visiting the boys - a team of black and white shirted players flailing, in a dignified way, against the polish athleticism of another local team. They scored a goal from a penalty kick whilst we were watching and made the score Three-One.

A few of our shambas swapped in and I looked on as Ronnie, Pascal and Godfrey all took their turn on the ball. Aisha, the tiniest of our cleaners but a keen footie player, was sitting frustrated on the sidelines watching the boys. I encouraged her to join us girls as we headed head back to the netball ground, to our own battle.

The third and fourth quarter, now we had our eye in, saw a lot more goal scoring. Suddenly the gap had narrowed and it was Five-Four to them. I stood at the sideline and roared support, along with a small boy who had two lengths of wood he was clapping together to show he wanted our team to win too.

But the other side were simply better. Better athletes, better practised as a team, and better shooters. The game ended on a respectable Seven-Five and the teams, pink-faced and dripping with sweat, lined up for photos.

The people driving home in the Landrover were better friends than before. Suddenly we had history together that spanned more than just the workplace.

Annet was so fired up, our netball queen, that she's asked for permission to try and set up a regular Red Chilli netball team. I'm all for it, if we can recruit enough players.

Since the match I've given our boys and girls some print outs of the better shots of them. I caught them pouring over them in their lunch break yesterday.

Barbara pointed to a shot of Pascal driving the ball up from mid-field and said admiringly,

You look like you are playing in North London!

Other than the banana trees lining the pitch, of course.

You Know You're A Local When...

2008-07-26T12:24:00.002+03:00

...you know intimately the shape of the holes that pepper the local roads and recognise when a pothole is getting larger, or has recently appeared.

We know our local potholes so well we've considered naming them. Clearly, we've settled in.

Welcome To The World, Baby Goatlets

2008-07-25T12:27:00.003+03:00

We were practising on the mixing desk at the radio studio when I got the text.

One goatlet out, one to go

It was happening!
And it was twins!
And I wasn't there!

I left R practising his fader technique and leapt in the car to drive back to Red Chilli. Whilst racing back through rush hour traffic I got another text.

The second one is breached. We're trying hard to get it out but it's a struggle.

Oh God - Poor Dave.

(R had nicknamed our heavily pregnant goat Dave for a joke - his sense of humour still has the staff wondering what he's on about sometimes...)

I got back to Red Chilli and raced down to where she was. In between two cottages in a dark earthy patch of garden, there she was. With two babies and a crowd of admiring midwifes - three shambas, one housekeeper, a manager and a guest.

It turns out the other manager had tried to aid the breached baby by slipping a hand in to help it out. But his hands were too big. So he raced up to the bar area to find a non-squeamish guest with slender hands. The poor thing had been stuck with it's little head poking out for nearly half an hour.

After a while of watching them, the firstborn boy goatlet had cottoned on to the idea that there was food inside nipples, but the other, baby girl goatlet, was still shivering and shaking from the exhausting business of being stuck for so long.

Until a Dutch lady called Karin stepped into the breach. Literally.

Light was failing and we decided it would be best to move them to our backyard overnight. They could leave meeting the compound dogs, cats, monkeys etc until tomorrow and just spend a peaceful night in an enclosed space.

The shambas (our gardeners) gingerly picked up a kid each and carried them, bleating away, waiting for Mum to follow. Dave looked momentarily confused, and circled the area where she had just given birth, sniffing the ground for her babies. Then Pascal, one of the shambas, set one of the kids down on the ground for a moment and she recognised his shape and ran after him. In twenty yard bursts of setting a goatlet down, and waiting for Mum to catch up, and then picking them up again to go through the process another twenty yards away, this strange procession eventually made it to our backyard.

There the housekeepers had lain an old curtain or two, and I had added water and some foliage to keep Mum going through the night.

The shambas and everyone else left and I watched the new family of goats for a minute. The second-born was still having trouble feeding. She had worked out, just about, how to stand in a wobbly sort of way, and was jabbing her muzzle in the high recesses of her mother's hocks, too high for the teat which was dangling below. Her brother was a whole stomachful of milk ahead of her at this point and I was concerned she would weaken if she did not learn how to feed soon.

Never having grabbed a goat's teat before, this was a new experience for me, but kinda special. I held Dave's teat and directed it a little higher, level with the little goatlet's hungry mouth. Then I lured her little damp curly haired muzzle closer to the teat by getting her to attach to a finger on my other hand.

It was like what mid-air refueling for airplanes must be like. Three botched attempts and then success - she latched on and started suckling for her life.

I watched over them a few more minutes and then left them to it.

As you can see from the pictures, the goatlets look a lot more acceptable the morning after birth, so we have let them out on their unsuspecting public today. Now tourist are snapping pictures of baby goatlets as well as monkeys.

Hurrah for the Red Chilli Petting Zoo.

On Our Walks

2008-07-23T17:00:00.005+03:00

Around and about Red Chilli, there are winding tracks and clod-ridden pathways of red earth that take us on our daily walks through the Ugandan property food chain.

At one end you have the smart shiny compounds with rust-free gates, ornamental flower beds and uniformed guards. In between you have new build plots with stalacmites of metal rods stretching up beyond rough plaster columns and crooked twisted scaffolds made straight from the tree, and local bungalows that may have mildew eating the concrete and broken panes in the windows, but nevertheless have running water and several rooms.

At the bottom end of the food chain, but where you find most signs of life, are the shanty town slum quarters filled with people living out their lives on the side of the path.

Here, life does not go on behind closed doors or high walls. It's there, right in your face, as you wander past.

On our walks with the dogs we sometimes wander through the local slum quarter and are always amazed at the vitality of the place. There's a woman washing her children at the end of the day; there's a guy roasting meat on a stick; there's a child playing with a bicycle tyre and a stick; there's a litter of puppies gambolling in the dust; there's a grandmother sitting on the stoop; there's ten children running amock, some with clothes on, some without; there's a chicken squawking in the rubbish heap; there's a lady walking with her bundle balanced high on her head.

Everywhere in the slums the children shout Muzungu and make woofing sounds as we pass with the two dogs.

(Which sound more like Ra Ra than Woof Woof if you're Bugandan and under six years old.)

This is the universal white experienc in Africa - crowds of kids appearing wherever you pause, all to come look at the sight of a passing stranger with pale skin.

It's weird, I took a few pictures the other day and felt slightly unsettled - that other universal tourist experience in Africa. If you take pictures of poor people does that make it poverty tourism? There is a sense of voyeurism in the whole exchange.

But one fact remains as the chants of Muzungu follow us everywhere we go: we are as much, if not more, of a novelty for them, as they are for us.

Two white people walking two big scary dogs? Quick - tell everyone you know to come look!

True Blue Baby

2008-07-23T16:51:00.002+03:00

I promised you we had started to feed a stray cat, which was actually blue, and I wasn't lying.

Here he is in all his blueness.

Latest theory, courtesy of the USPCA vet (who was told about him, not shown him - picking him up would be ambitious - he can be vicious!) is that he may have been trapped in a store room or something somewhere when the owners fumigated the place, and the insecticide, or whatever may have been used, turned his coat blue.

Poor thing.

Not sure our adoption plan with him is working very well either. Panda tried to jump him the other night when he poked his head through the door for a look, and most importantly, when R had been gently stroking him, perfectly happily for a few minutes, he suddenly took a swipe at him and hooked a chunk of finger.

But we can at least try and feed him up, even if he doesn't want to be adopted full time...

The Business Of Uganda

2008-07-21T19:13:00.004+03:00

When we arrived here and started our jobs we could not work out why most of the week was taken up shopping, and only at supermarkets.

Granted there are some decent supermarkets in town but you still have to sit in traffic for almost an hour there and an hour back, and spend ages waiting for store staff members to go to the stock room and fetch you whatever gargantuan quantities of the things tourists eat and drink.

It just seemed silly that we didn't get more stuff delivered. At wholesale prices. To our doorstep.

So of late, our quest for moving things wholesale has led to some hilarious moments listening to R's side of the conversation as he tries to tell local distributors and manufacturers that he has some easy business for them.

Hello, is that Company X?
...
Is that Company X?
...
Do you sell Product X?
...
Excellent. Can I speak to your sales department please?
...
The sales department!
...
No, I mean sales. Please can I speak to the manager responsible for selling Product X?
...
Hello. This is R from Red Chilli in Mbuya. I'd like to enquire about buying Product X from you wholesale. How much do you charge per carton?
...
No, don't come now. Just tell me how much you charge and then we will make an order.
...
The price. I want to know the price. How many shillings is it?
...
Okay. If we buy some from you, can you deliver them free of charge?
...
No, don't come now. I do not need any yet. Just tell me if you deliver, when I need some...

And so on.

On the one hand, you could argue this country is crying out from some whipsmart entrepreneur to launch a customer sales training centre - where local sales staff and telephone staff can be skilled in how to turn a quick sale.

Sales techniques can seem to be alien to those in business here. Most of R's time on the phone is explaining to someone that he actually wants to give them some money, if all they could do is just tell him how much their goods cost and how he can get hold of them.

It has been said that the Indians "ran" this place back in the day, and now that many have returned after the Amin-forced exodus, it seems many of the more 'customer-focused' businesses are, indeed, Indian-run.

However that would be doing a dis-service to what we ultimately came here for. A different pace to life, a different attitude...

Ugandans like to do business in person. They seem to resist this remote, developed-world work ethic where everything is conducted by phone or email.

They come by to the office, face to face, bringing samples or visiting our emises, just to suss us out. People trek halfway across town just for a chance meeting to do business from, or to make an application. A price list always has to be brought, never emailed or simply given out over the phone. Sometimes it's typed, but some of our best and most reliable wholesalers come with scraps of handwritten paper. And sometimes it take three members of staff to bring it.

It's not the most efficient way to do business, but there is a warmth and humanity to it that you don't get elsewhere. When you find a good supplier, he's still a good supplier, whatever the telephone manner of his staff was in your initial conversations with the company.

And just as many of them are Ugandan Ugandans as well as Asian Ugandans.

And as for us, R's daily struggles to make himself understood make for an amusing interlude to the day.

Big Pink Caravan Of Love

2008-07-21T17:45:00.002+03:00

Guess what just turned up?

Two massive big pink buses called 'The Pink Caravan'. Originally from Sweden, these buses (and more like them around the world) offer Scandanavians the chance to tour exotic lands in style.

In big pink style.

Given my former status as a Pink Lady, driving a much smaller but equally pink van all the way from London to The Gambia, I enjoyed the sight of these truck pitching up.

(The driver told me the traffic in Kampala had been really good to him on the way through this afternoon. I reckoned it might have been the colour. Even the most bloody-minded of Kampala's matatu drivers might hesitate in shock and awe long enough to let an overland bus driver pull out at a junction.)

Super Star DJ

2008-07-19T14:15:00.003+03:00

One of the weird things about Africa is that it really is the new land of opportunity.

It shows in some of the ex-patriate types you get in Kampala, who run mini-empires in whatever industry they decided they fancied a pop at. Some of them have a genuine skill and talent for their chosen field, whereas a scarily sizeable proportion of them wouldn't last a minute 'back home'.

At it's most dangerous, Africa is a tempting playground for expats to indulge their whims.

And we are no different.

For while we do have, mostly, suitable CVs and good experience for doing the jobs we do, there is no way on earth we could claim to be well-qualified for jobs as Radio DJs.

Thanks to no more than us showing an interest and willing to give up some of our free time every week, we will be starting a new sideline career here as radio DJs. On a local station called Touch FM. With a slot every Saturday from 4-6pm.

Well, to be more exact R will be the main DJ. I am taking on a role as his Producer, Posse, Sidekick, whatever you want to call it.

Mainly because he is the biggest music fascist and would not let me near the music choice.

And because I'm good at ordering him around. When he lets me.

So, super-star DJ status awaits. Just as soon as manning the faders becomes second nature.

Given that the last time I was in front of a mixing desk was at University studying radio journalism when they still used reel to reel technology, it may be some time before we're allowed to go live. But we can dish out autographs early if you want to be first in the queue.

Lost and Found

2008-07-13T20:09:00.004+03:00

Three weeks ago tomorrow we took ownership of our three legged cat, Bent nee Panda.

We spent ten days habituating him and getting him used to where his new home was. This we did by keeping him cooped up in our cottage most of the time, letting him out only for brief, accompanied 'walks', where we'd pick him up and park him back next to our cottage if he tried to stray too far.

After a week he seemed to grown in confidence, wanting not to come back in after ten minutes and miaowing all night to be let out. Nevertheless we kept up the walks, wanting to make sure he really did know where his new home was.

After ten days of this routine, several times a day, we decided he must know where he lived by now, and hearts in mouths, we let him out one Wednesday morning, watched him hobble/slope off in the undergrowth, and wandered up to the top compound to our day jobs.

Come lunchtime, we popped back down to let him back in, expecting him to be miaowing at our heels by the time we arrived at the last cottage.

Ominously there was no sign of him.

Half an hour later he hadn't appeared. After another hour or two in the office R abandoned his desk to search for Panda around the compound. No joy.

At 5.30pm we tooks the dogs for their walk around the lanes and alleys behind Red Chilli, asking at every neighbours' gate if they had seen our cat.

Have you see our cat? He's easy to spot, he's black and white and has only three legs.

We quickly learnt that noone in Uganda knows what you mean if you say 'cat' - they don't use this term. They call the animal a 'pusscat' - and this phrase makes all the difference. Heads nodding, they then start to take in the other information. And the three leg thing has everyone exclaiming in disbelief or simply laughing out loud.

Three legs? No!

Sadly, their hilarity does not detract from the blanks we draw everywhere and the miserable fact remains - we have lost our cat.

The next day we make some signs with the one photo we had time to take of him. We put them up around the compound, outside the perimeter fencing. and even three miles away around his old neighbourhood, wondering if maybe he had tried to walk back to his old house, in some weird cat homing device type way.

One man told me he had seen our cat - but he thought at the time it was a leopard.

Sadly, Panda looks about as much like a leopard as I do.

Lots of people promised to search for him, the incentive of a reward tempting their interest. Our staff thought it was hilarious that we could get this concerned about a pusscat - a three legged one at that - but nevertheless I saw their eyes light up at the thought of finding him and collecting a reward.

From Wednesday to Saturday we searched, only to find ourselves losing hope. People don't look at cats too kindly in Africa - they are chased away with stones and shouts, or worse. And as for other animals - we were sure Panda was one of the less streetwise of them. There were plenty of very hungry stray dogs around, and busy roads with drivers who would not so much as look twice if their tyres were heading for a cat's head.

By Saturday morning we were despondent and feared the worst. He'd been hurt, run over, attacked or eaten. Or simply lost his way and become, inadvertently, yet another stray.

But then a shout went up. It was early Saturday morning, R was still in his pants, I was about to jump in the shower. But outside the house, on our normal peaceful compound, there was commotion. Barbara and Annet, two housekeepers, had spotted the cat and were making chase. Panda saw two screaming women running towards him waving their arms, shouting Miaow Miaow loudly and laughing hysterically, and legged it. Well, legged it best as he could given he only has three of them.

Straight over the wall to the neighbouring compound - with three guard dogs and plenty of strays and many many places to hide (it's a disused factory). How were we ever going to find him there? We cursed ourselves for not having thought to give the staff a training course in how to lure cats towards you (instead of scaring them away) before we offered anything so exciting as a reward.

R climbed over the 8 ft wall (I have the bruises on my shoulders to prove it) and went cat hunting. I stayed, calling Panda's name, sporting a T-shirt on inside out, flung on in the hurry to get out to rescue the cat from the scary cleaners.

Half an hour later and Panda arrived back home, in a taped up cardboard box. After a pee and a poo in the litter tray, three bowls of milk drunk in quick succession, and a whole heap of biscuits, he sat down, licked his three paws and looked like nothing had ever happened.

Except he's not even tried to go out since. He's had his fill, for now, of the big bar world out there. He's had enough adventures for now and is a confirmed house-cat.

Which is just as well as we're trying to adopt another strange cat. This one is a stray who started coming round for food whilst Panda was missing. He has all his legs but he has a peculiar disability of his own.

He's blue.

Not Persian blue - the kind of blue dog and cat owners say when they really mean grey, but proper blue. Not kidding.

Photographic proof will be provided just as soon as I can work out why blogger is not letting me upload photos...

Something Old, Something Bling...

2008-07-07T17:32:00.002+03:00

My friend who got married is now safely trekking the Indian Himalayas (or should that be Himalaya?) and so probably won't see this for a while so I get away with publishing it.

Ladies, if you want to get a little Footballer's Wife-like on your honeymoon, here's the perfect thing. And if you happen to have been a Pink Lady in a former life, there's nothing better to make you feel at home

A "Hollywood Pink" bikini with diamante lettering on the back of your bum spelling out "Just Married".

As seen on Mrs Rooney and my friend C.

She secretly loves me for it. Honestly.

Feels Like Home Again

2008-07-04T20:11:00.004+03:00

In the last week, I have made two international journeys in excess of 24 hours travel time, driven halfway across England and back, gained a three legged cat in Uganda whilst I was gone, made a speech in front of 80 people, watched a best friend get very happily married, and got back to find my boyfriend may become a local radio DJ in his spare time.

Now I'm three days back into the swing of Red Chilli life and it feels (in a good way) like I never left.

Before leaving for the UK, I suddenly got pangs of concern.

What about the craft stall we are trying to set up with some Acholi women who are making paper beaded necklaces but have nowhere to sell their wares?

What about the new chef and barperson we need to recruit?

What about sourcing some outsize tupperware for the kitchen to use when they freeze the big batches of sauces, lasagnes, curries, carrot burgers and other staple dishes now that they have a big new freezer to fill up?

What about our ongoing quest to find new, safari-style tents so we can add to our bed count and stop having to turn people away? (We've been full pretty much every night since late May and our trips to Murchison are now booking almost a month ahead).

What about our training the dog's to accept their collars and come for a walk every day? Would R be able to persuade them out the gate without having an extra pair of hands to push/pull them to their well-meaning fate?

And what about the goat? Our lovely pregnant she-goat called Dave? Would she give birth to little goatlets without me? The thought was terrible.

About a month ago, her udders started to swell. "She's ready to drop" we all said.

About two weeks ago, we would find her scratching around in the dirt, trying to make little hollows to nest in. "Any time soon" we all said.

So here I am back from the UK and three days into working here again. After some interviews today we now have a really promising new bar person starting Monday, and a good candidate coming in for a chef's interview.

Two new massive tents have been bought, albeit nylon not canvas, but they were on a deal and are already fully booked for the next few nights and filling up fast thereafter.

The dogs now come running when we pick up their leads and I find one of them, the more needy, insecure hound of the two, waiting outside our front door for us to emerge in the mornings.

The three-legged cat is settling in, and we still can't work out whether to stick with his old name, Panda, or to switch to the new one, Bent. So he's sort of "Panda-Bent" at the moment, in limbo between names.

As for the goat, she's still waddling around, looking uncomfortably fat.

No goatlets yet it seems, but otherwise, I definitely feel right back at home.

Make Falafel Not War

2008-06-23T21:29:00.002+03:00

Tonight we made Falafel.

We have a good menu here at Red Chilli, and a varied one. For a small kitchen, we serve up to 60 meals a shift. And they didn't even have a microwave when I got here.

But even with a variety of dishes that are all pretty well cooked, I run out of stuff to eat.

I can't eat Pizza every day. I came to Africa to lose weight, not pile it on.

I'm not meant to eat red meat as it's actively been linked to breast cancer. So the meat chilli, the spag bol, the beef stew, the burgers, they're all out too.

Truth is, it leaves me with a limited variety of dishes to choose from, day in, day out. So every so often I have the urge to invent something new and add it to the menu.

I generally do this by looking at the ingredients we already have and thinking of new things to do with them.

Now we make our own veggie burgers rather than buy the over-priced and glutinous slabs you get in the local supermarket's deep freeze that are flown in from South Africa. They're carrot burgers and they are delicious. Carrots are plentiful around here and the only non-local ingredient is a cup of Kellog's Cornflakes.

Sadly I cannot take credit for them. It was up in Murchison I discovered them - my equivalent there found the recipe online and introduced it last year and never looked back. Now we serve them at Red Chilli's everywhere. Well, Murchison and Kampala that is.

In a similar vein, I've taught the chefs how to make their own pizza bases and topping sauce, rather than rely on the nasty pre-fabricated bases you can get in the frozen section of the supermarket. So home-made pizzas are now on the menu. We still freeze ours but they are a nice thin home-made base and a rich tomato sauce on top rather than some orange puree.

Sadly it's not always easy to get the staff to follow through on recipes. They are all convinced that pizzas should be grilled, not baked in the oven like I keep encouraging them to do. So our bases come out of the freezer and get slapped under a piping hot grill. The toppings melt and brown quickly enough, the only trouble is the bases come out with the consistency of an undercooked chapatti. It does not matter how many times I suggest the oven would cook the pizzas better, they always end up reverting to the grill when I'm not looking. Old habits die hard and it's how they've always cooked... So when I get back from the UK next week I'm going to lead a little pizza masterclass in the kitchen and demonstrate the difference between a soggy bottomed pizza and a properly cooked oven-baked base.

Anyway, back to the Falafel. Today I investigated a Lebanese shop I saw on my travels and discovered they had falafel mix and jars of some weird pre-mixed hummus. An hour or so in the kitchen later and we have ourselves some fresh falafel balls, with a salad made of grated cucumber, chopped coriander, chopped iceberg and lemon juice and a generous dollop of hummus (the stuff from the can mixed in with fresh garlic, ground cumin, oil and lemon) and some toasted pitta bread.

It may be from a packet in a box, but this falafel tastes like the most exotic and decadent eastern feast.

If the tourists like it too, and it sells, we will add it to the menu and then we can grow to be bored of it like everything else....

Ice, Ice, Baby

2008-06-14T21:02:00.004+03:00

In about ten days time I will be flying home for a brief visit to attend the wedding of a very dear friend indeed.

So back to the homeland, home of big shops that sell things cheaply (namely Tescos) and home of all my wordly possessions that I don't have with me here...

So what is it that I shall be bringing back? What is it that I should have brought, but didn't. Or didn't bring enough of? I agonised long enough about packing to come out here - it will be interesting to see what I forgot.

1. Three quarter length cargo pants. I can't come up with a more English name for this item of clothing but they are designed for this job, this climate, and this place.

I came out with one pair. I need about seven. I live in them. They have lots of pockets for all the bundles of notes and big bunches of keys I have to carry around all the time. They're long enough to hide a pair of legs the wrong side of 30, and they're light enough to keep me cool in the heat.

I shan't be getting seven, but as it was my birthday I have treated myself to three new pairs in various practical shades (the red earth gets everywhere) and will be hoping to convince various members of my family to pay for them in lieu of birthday presents.

2. Thick soled flip flops. I have one pair with me. They're a trusted pair of plain black fabric thonged reef flip flops with an uber-thick rubber sole. Except I've owned them since 2004 and I've put about as much wear on them in the last three months as I have in the last four years. The thick soles are getting thinner. Rapidly. So I've ordered a new pair. God bless the internet.

3. Non-white underwear. The previously mentioned red earth stains everything. And white clothing is possibly the most impractical thing I've brought with me. It's still nice to save the white t-shirts and linen for a sunny day where I don't think I'll be hoisting boxes around, but inevitably I'll be covered in it by lunchtime. Bra straps that were once white are yellowing rapidly. So, to M&S online and some camel coloured bras. I once told a friend I thought that buying flesh coloured underwear was the mark of maturity as it was so goddamned unflattering and said neither virgin nor sinner about the wearer. I was right, as this is a choice driven by practicality over all else, but since when did flesh coloured underwear start being called camel?

4. Basic toiletries. Our starter supply of lotions and potions is ebbing low. We are not fussy. In most cases, own label toothpastes, soaps and shampoos will do it. But to get anything decent here it's five times the price of the Tesco's economy version. About the only thing we're both fussy about is deodorants. Since breast cancer, I've religiously used a stick of aloe vera. Rich has also adopted a non-aluminium option with a rock of crystal. Except he keeps dropping that on our concrete floors and has very little left. Another one for the shopping list...

5. As for my own belongings, I will be picking up my ice cube trays. The first time I used one here it broke in half. I was expecting some flexibility and it did not budge an inch, so my bending the sides simply snapped the frozen plastic. Oh how I longed for my rubbery, press and pop trays that the ice simply slides out of.

Aaah, home comforts...

Faith U Like

2008-06-14T20:29:00.004+03:00

In doing our little tour of Kampala during our last days off, we came to learn a lot more about something we knew very little about.

The Baha'i Faith.

I'd always assumed this lesser known religion was one of the more crackpot belief systems out there. Something crazy but on the cusp of legitimacy. Like Scientology. Or being pro-Bush.

I knew something of the fact it had some followers in Iran. Who had been, or were being, prosecuted.

R even knew someone who was a follower of the Baha'i faith. In fact, even I knew her. Allegedly.

(She was one of the people I met whilst in a chemo-induced stupor and as such, I have no physical memory of her. I've been shown the photos, but you can't prove anything...)

But we knew nothing really about it.

Turns out, it's actually quite a nice religion, as religions go. I mean, don't get me wrong, we're both confirmed atheists, but if we weren't, we both agreed this wouldn't be a bad way to turn.

Their principles just sound, well, lovely. It's an inclusive sort of belief system, one that acknowledges all earlier religions and reckons this is just the latest link in the chain, all stemming from the same source. And they're all for justice, peace and equality. Including that of women, which makes a nice change.

Here are the founding beliefs of Baha'ian faith:

All humanity is one family.

Women and men are equal. Look, it's right up there, number two in the list of priorities... cool!

All prejudice — racial, religious, national, or economic — is destructive and must be overcome. Most religions manifest themselves in prejudice against other religions... so this can only be a good thing.

We must investigate truth for ourselves, without preconceptions.

Science and religion are in harmony.

Our economic problems are linked to spiritual problems.Oh Yes.

Abolishing the extremes of poverty and wealth

The family and its unity are very important.

There is one God.

All major religions come from God.

World peace is the crying need of our time.

You said it... About the only two principles I don't agree with personally are the ones with the word God in them. But hey, that's just me...

So, not only do they have a fundamentally sound set of principles which only leaves you wondering just who would want to persucute someone as nice as the people that practice such beliefs, they only have seven temples in the world and one of them is in Kampala.

A few miles out of town, high up on a green and pleasant hill, amid the birdsong and far from the traffic-choked city streets, serenely sits a round chapel like building that hugs itself to the ground.

We were let in to look around, with strict instructions not to speak once inside. It was strangely empty, except for some austere seating and beautiful Persian carpets. We suppressed the urge to giggle (we'd be crap at being religious) but left feeling generally impressed with the whole Baha'i thang.

Far from crackpot, it seems to be one of the most sane religious movements around.

Water, Water, Everywhere

2008-06-12T16:31:00.003+03:00

When we were in Jinja a few weeks ago, we were tempted by the extreme sports on offer. The town is situated on the banks of the Victoria Nile as it leaves Lake Victoria and makes it's way north to Lake Albert (via Murchison Falls).

It's famous for being a white water rafting centre to rival Victoria Falls and the Zambezi. Around the thriving rafting businesses other extreme sports and activity based operations have sprung up. Quad Biking, Bungee Jumping, Horseback Safaris.

Basicaly, if you can get hurt doing it, you can do it in Jinja.

Sadly, we played the sensible card and decided to pass (we're waiting for our medical insurance to come through and it seemed like it would be tempting fate...).

But we did wander down to Bujagali Falls below our campsite and watched several groups of rafters and kayakers come roaring past, screams optional.

In a month or so's time, once I'm back from my UK sojourn at the end of June, we'll be due some more time off and we'll be going straight back to Jinja to clock up some adventure miles. White water rafting, quadding, horse riding.... about the only thing you won't catch me doing will be the bungee. That's just plain stupidity.

In the meantime, here are some shots of the rafting to whet your appetite.

Death Of A Nissan

2008-06-09T19:09:00.003+03:00

It's a sad day. My ex-car has ceased to be.

It is an ex-ex-car.

R and I got the Nissan off freecycle last autumn, and replaced my old Peugeot with it. We donated my Peugeot to two friends due to take it on some madcap banger rally, some time soon and happily clocked up some miles on the Nissan.

We felt momentarily guilty, enyoying it's relative modernity. The Nissan was a year younger than the Peugeot and much flasher. The car was quieter, better built, with switches that worked, a glove compartment that didn't fall open when you went over bumps, and doors that went clunk in that deep, secure-sounding, reassuring way. The Peugeot had rattled and tinkled on it's way. The Nissan hummed.

We had planned, as much as we ever plan, to drive it until it's next MOT and then take it on a banger rally. Maybe Russia, to see the eclipse, or maybe Africa again.

Then we got the call and the offer of a job in Uganda. Even if we thought it would make Uganda, we didn't have a viable route and most importantly, we didn't have the time. It would take at least a month - a month we would rather have spent painting, renting flats, working out notice etc.

So we couldn't take it with us.

We found the Nissan a happy new owner in our friend Ray. He is a friend through banger rallies and always has at least three cars in various states of dismantlement about his property. Back in March, when we were negotiating new owners for our vehicles, he owned an ageing Landrover, an old shell of a Minor, a Trabant, and was also babysitting a Ford Transit van for a friend. What use would he have of a Nissan Sunny, a relatively mundane vehicle by comparison?

He'd recently met and got engaged to a non-driver. A non-driver he was busy trying to teach how to drive. A non-driver who didn't particularly relish the idea of learning to drive in the various decrepit but characterful vehicles Ray preferred to drive himself.

So what better car to learn in than a 1992 Nissan Sunny? Cherry-red nonetheless...

It is sad then, that we learn of the Nissan's ultimate demise.

Driven into the back of something, very hard by the look of it. The front of the car is crushed, and in Ray's words, "I was tempted to get a few big hammers out and see if it could be saved... however there's just 2 weeks MOT left and the fuel tank is empty so there isn't really any good reason to try!".

Before you think he's being too hasty, this was a car that was going to need a lot of spurious welding done pre-MOT. Despite being posher than the Peugeot, the thing was badly rusting away around the rear wheel arches.

And so, rust, running into the back of someone, and an empty fuel tank have combined to write the death warrant for this valiant little car.

RIP J88 VHK.

Dirty Money

2008-06-04T21:38:00.004+03:00

For weeks the bank has been refusing to give out any 1,000 notes.

Worth about 30p, these notes go through the wars.

When we get a 50,000 note, it's usually in relatively good condition. Chances are, as a higher value note, it has led less of an active life. It's probably been carefully slid in and out of leather wallets, handed over to pay for something luxurious in some air-conditioned environment.

1,000 shilling notes, on the other hand, have been folded up into tiny little origami packets and shoved inside of shoes, bras, even underpants. No offence to the locals but it's the denomination I hate counting. I feel so dirty after it.

The notes come to us with rips and tears and holes in. Some feel gravelly, like they are coated in sand. Others have been patched up with staples, duct tape, sellotape, whatever materials were to hand.

Because of the state these notes get into, the bank has to reissue them regularly to replace and replenish the tired old currency in circulation. So for weeks they have been smilingly accepting all our old 1,000 notes we deposit but refusing to give any back. We've had to beg and borrow bags of coin change to make up for the lack of notes. It's been a tiresome business.

But today R left the bank with an extra spring in his step. The new notes had arrived!

Four bundles of pristine 1,000 shilling notes. It was like looking out on a clean, snowy landscape, yet to be plastered in dirty, slushy footprints.

Here's a shot comparing the filthy old money to the virginial new notes and you can see just why we got so excited...

Avoid Morning Sex

2008-06-04T18:10:00.004+03:00

We saw this sign painted on a shack near Bujagali Falls.

I asked a local what it was all about.

It turns out it's a local practise, a sort of contraception myth.

Morning sex will get you pregnant. Allegedly.

Afternoon and Evening and Night-time sex? Go for your life...

African Time

2008-06-04T12:48:00.002+03:00

There are lots of jokes among travellers and expatriates about the concept of African Time.

Attitudes to time here are relaxed. Most people we call in for odd-jobs, plumbers and electricians etc, tell us confidently "They are coming". When we ask when they are coming, they reassure us they are coming now. They can arrive between 5 minutes and five hours later, depending on your luck, the time of day, the weather, and whatever else is going on in their lives.

We had a new employee starting the other day. He was asked to be here at 8am. At 11.17 he turned up in the office.

Then, the other day, whilst browsing an English-Lugandan phrase book, I discovered one possible explanation for this relaxed attitude to time-keeping.

They tell time differently here.

I'm not kidding. It's not just a question of lax time-keeping, it's an entirely different approach to dividing the day into hours.

A Lugandan will divide the day into two portions of twelve hours, just like we do. Except they don't start counting in the middle of the night. Their twelve hour sections represent night and day (the luxury of living on the equator where sunrise and sunset happen at the same time every day). So, a Lugandan will wake up with daybreak at seven o'clock in the morning (as we would express it) but they will call it one o'clock, as it's the first hour of daylight. So midday, in our terminology, becomes six o'clock Ugandan-style. Twelve o'clock, for a Lugandan, is six p.m. in our world, the twilight hour at the end of the day. Then at seven p.m. (our time), a Lugandan starts counting the next twelve hours of darkness.

What a head-f***! No wonder we all confuse eachother and noone is on time anywhere.

I'll Tell You No Lies

2008-05-31T14:47:00.005+03:00

So we're sunning ourselves on the banks of the Nile in Jinja on a couple of much deserved days off.

In the meantime, our personal statements of truth, a la my previous post, have been published online. So here we are:

Richard, and myself, both being very un-profound.

Top marks to Steve for getting there before I'd even posted the link...

You Can't Handle The Truth

2008-05-26T19:27:00.003+03:00

We have a really interesting guest staying at the moment. She is a writer, who has been travelling around Africa for the last couple of months, interviewing people from all walks of life for a project she has created called uTruth.

The idea is to find personal statements of universal truth from all sorts of different people, be they profound, inane, funny, or sad.

Her website can be found here, and she plans to compile the best contributions into a book.

Most people have worked really hard to contribute a statement that has great meaning, and many are very spiritual or religious in nature.

She has asked Rich and I to contribute, which sadly means we will bring down the tone with a couple of silly statements from our particular worldview... But I think she genuinely doesn't mind, and is looking for all sorts of comments.

Which is just as well.

(I shall link to our posts on her site once we have made them...)

Wobbly Moggy

2008-05-26T19:14:00.002+03:00

We're getting a cat.

What's more, we're getting a cat with only three legs.

The local Muzungu supermarket of choice, the monolithic Shoprite down at the Lugogo Mall, has a noticeboard where ex-pats advertise house sales, cars etc and so on. When people leave the country they shed belongings. We're new and don't seem to have enough belongings.

So every time we go we study the board.

And we weren't planning to get a cat. But when we saw an ad for a three-legged cat that needed a new home ("and was a very good hunter, despite having only three legs") we just knew we had to have him.

Panda, as he is currently known, comes to us in early July, just before his current family leave the country.

We want to rechristen him with a name more uniquely him and have come up with two possible names.

Bent or Wobbly.

There is something quite hard-nosed and streetwise about Bent, but Wobbly is quite cute.

Votes or post your own suggestions on a comment please!

(Please note, the picture is not actually of Panda/Bent/Wobbly, but is of a similarly afflicted but hopefully far more savage moggy).

A typical day?

2008-05-24T20:42:00.003+03:00

Running a backpacker's lodge in Kampala is quite different to most things I've done before but less strange than some.

Less strange than sourcing whole cod with heads on in the Uk for a photo shoot. Could you get fish with the heads still on them in the over-sanitised world of the modern day supermarket? Not back in 1998 before Jamie Oliver et al made whole fish cool again.

Less strange than having to interrupt a well-known chef from his frequent sojourns to the lavatory in between takes on an ad shoot. Weak bladder? I don't think so. Not with all the frantic sniffing going on...

Less strange than interviewing bingo players around the country on why they enjoy the game.

I could go on.

But this job does have it's moments.

We've split up fights between staff. We've fired someone for spreading malicious gossip about someone else being a prostitute (when they weren't...). We've barbecued a goat. We've been woken up by hippos. We've chased off monkeys. We've shared an office with a goat, and a pregnant one at that. We've travelled on boda bodas, in matatus and driven our selves around in the landrover. We've had to warn people against stealing. We've made a badminton court. We've mended safari tents. And I've learnt a few new moves in excel...

A typical day does have it's routine. But it also has plenty of the above thrown in when you least expect it.

Famous For Fifteen Minutes

2008-05-14T21:28:00.004+03:00

Ten days or so ago, Rich and I represented Red Chilli at an off-road driving event that was held in aid of the Chimp Sanctuary on Ngamba Island in Lake Victoria.

The event was held at a specially designed off-road driving training area, and we had a whale of a time. We slid through mud-holes, bumped through potholes, screeched round corners, drove up near-vertical hills, and balanced a fully-grown Landrover on a giant see-saw. And all through this we miraculously never got stuck once.

It was great.

What was even more great was our then winning a prize at the end of the day.

Not for being any good, you understand.

But for being enthusiastic and well brought up (we thanked all the marshals politely at the end of each event and played by the rules at every turn).

We get to go back and have a free one-day off road training course by the professionals. Which given our natural interest in mucking about in cars was very welcome, even if it was for being class swots of the day.

And what was even greater was getting a call from a colleague three days later.

"You're famous."

What?

We were the car pictured in The New Vision's coverage of the off-road event. Check out the white landy on the left. That's us.

If you squint really, really hard.... you still can't see us through the windscreen.

But it is us, I swear.

Look, here we are again, in colour!

Lost In Translation

2008-05-14T20:58:00.002+03:00

A friend asked the other day, are you having any language difficulties?

He was joking. At least, I think he was.

Ugandans, growing up in an ex-British Protectorate, speak very good English. They also speak among them a multitude of different tribal languages, including the most popular, Lugandan. But that's only spoken by about 17% of the population so English has become a pretty universal tongue round here.

But having said that, the little differences are the ones we notice most. As I wince inwardly at the American pronounciations of Aluminium, or get easily riled by an over-zealous software spell checker underling words like favourite and odorous just because I've kept the 'u' in them, so I strain against a few idiosyncratic Ugandanisms under the pretext of the English language.

People don't pick up their kids from school here. They pick them from school. Weirdly, the verb 'pick' also seems to be used when talking about someone dying unexpectedly. As if some heavenly force had 'picked' one from life.

And a couple of times I've had to ask the staff to describe what they mean when asking me for something from the shops. Our head of housekeeping came up to me this morning and asked me if I could buy them a "forcing cap". I laughed and asked her to explain what she meant. She demonstrated visually as she described unblocking a loo or a sink.

Aaah, you mean a plunger I thought.

Except I didn't quite think that because at that precise point in time, thrown off by the abstract description of the object, I could not rightly remember what we English actually called those long handled rubber vacuum seal thingummies.

Give me a few more weeks and I'll be speaking pidgin.

Finally, one language barrier which got a Ugandan quite angry was when I was in the Post Office to get a new stock of postage stamps for the bar to sell punters for their postcards. The denominations I wanted were 1200 shilling stamps - enough for a postcard to Europe.

Hello, can I have one hundred twelve hundred shilling stamps please said I.

The lady behind the counter stared at me in disbelief.

Madame, please say again what stamps you want

(I am forever shocked at being called Madame but find myself addressing other women of all ages here in the same way, as is the custom.)

Back in the Post Office, I thought my request for so many stamps was vexing her. I slowed down a little and repeated myself, trying not to over-articulate like some Brit in a Spanish beach bar.

One hundred of your twelve hundred shilling stamps please. Or fifty. Or whatever quantity you sell them in. We need them for our business.

The lady rose up behind the counter glass and puffed up her chest.

You mean one hundred One Thousand Two Hundred stamps she said sternly.
You must NOT say twelve hundred, Madame. When you say twelve we think you mean twelve thousand. You must say One Thousand Two Hundred.

Oops. I'd crossed the line in spoken number etiquette.

Despite twelve hundred being marginally less hassle in getting the syllables out, this is a country which counts in thousands.

Not hundreds like some low-denomination Western state.

So the burning issue is, how do Zimbabweans count? Here's a picture of someone holding a Fifty Million Zimbabwean note, back when that was unusual. Last week, I saw a picture of someone holding a Two Hundred And Fifty Million note.

Open Wide

2008-05-05T17:33:00.002+03:00

This amused me. It was sent to me by my friend Marie, she of Stalking the Wild Dik-Dik fame (see post from a few days ago about playing postie).

A friend of hers sent it to her as she shares my obsession with hippos. In fact, I believe her next book will be titled something like 'Curse of the Hippo'.

Anyhow, the image comes from a blog where people were invited to submit the most inappropriate or incongruous film remakes of classic games or stories. So this is what the children's game Hungry Hippos would be, should it ever get the Blockbuster treatment...

Roar Nature

2008-05-02T19:07:00.008+03:00

I have to confess, this title is stolen from a couple of people we met recently who have set up a safari company with the same name, except spelt 'Raw Nature'. I prefer to spell my puns out and have gone for the more obvious option.

And I also have to confess, this post also feels a little showy-offy. But honest, it's only because my flickr uploader fails to work with our intermittent internet connection that I am forced to showcase the photos here in such a smug fashion.

So, here are some more safari shots from a great game drive. I'm hoping this blog will settle into some more insightful stuff about everyday life here once we get on top of the hours (at the moment they are still on top of us...). Until then, I'm making like a tourist...

I went on a game drive and I saw...

Actually, I didn't even have to leave the camp and I saw...

One large snouty warthog, bedding down in the afternoon sunshine...

Two curious buffalo, who stared us down as we drank our coffee one morning overlooking the escarpment...

A scraggy old maribou stork. They really are ugly looking buggers...

And here is what I think is an Abyssinian Stork. Or something like that. My bird brain fails to remember bird species and the book is down at the house...

A baboon, seen, along with the stork, on the way into the park.

A Ugandan Kob and her young, in long grass on the northern banks of the Nile.

A male Kob. About to run.

Continuing the hoofed variety, here is a Jackson's Haartebeest. With eyes on stalks. But don't think this one is merely a little surprised to see us - they all look like that, permanently.

And now to my favourites. The lovely elegant giraffes. They are so serene looking. I love 'em.

A baby giraffe once chewed my fringe, when I was a production assistant on an TV ad shoot for Marwell Zoo in Hampshire. That was a pretty special experience. So was this, just with less chewing.

And here we re-visit the mighty buffalo, an animal I cannot take seriously since a friend once told me they remind him of Dutch Milkmaids. But they can see off lions, when in number (and humans when old, solo and cranky), so they should be given a little respect.

(But even when wiping the milkmaid reference from my mind, I then only see the similarity between them and a rather bovine pony my sister used to ride...)

Here's a dutch milkmaid taking a mud-bath!

And on to even bigger game. The might Oliphant. Here's an old bull who's not really that pissed off with us. We were some way away and I was on a 300mm zoom, taking a million shots to try and get one of him with his ears out akimbo. However, shortly after this was taken we did move on. There is only so much patience you'll willing to test when facing a beast twice the weight of your vehicle.

(As an aside I was told a horrifying story about a recent game drive gone horribly wrong. An Indian family were visiting relatives in Uganda and went on a game drive. Not realising that African Elephants are somewhat less docile than Indian Elephants, the small child with them rushed out of the car to run up to the first big elephant they saw. The father followed. I'm not sure whether the father was running to warn the child, or to greet the Elephant with the same naive enthusiasm. Either way, the Elephant ignored the small child and focused on the adult. He reportedly picked him up with his trunk, tossed him in the air like a matchstick, and caught him on his tusks. So relaxed as we thought this elephant was, it was probably best we moved on when we did...)

Here's another elephant. As another aside, I also have heard (from more than one source) that there is an elephant at Murchison who does not have a trunk. I didn't see him. But I did see a hippo without an ear.

And finally, the big cat sighting of the trip. We actually saw three lions, this old geezer and two younger cubs. But the latter were so far off they were lost as far as camera opportunities are concerned. As for the leopard, he proved evasive. The game drive two days before ours saw one and didn't realise how lucky they were. They usually come out at night, and although numbers are growing, they are rare to sight in Murchison. Our boss has lived in Uganda for ten years and has never seen one here. She said she'd fire us if we came back having seen one on our first game drive.

So just for the record Debbie, no we did not see a leopard. Honest.

Here's our only big cat moment of the day... Look, no leopards!

But if you really closely, you can see the Blue Mountains of the Congo in the background.

Hippo-Hippo Hooray

2008-05-01T13:51:00.003+03:00

On the theme of the last post, here are some more hippo action shots taken whilst up in Murchison the other week.

Along with a classic hippo yawning shot, though annoyingly the sun had disappeared by then so the whole thing came out a little subdued on camera... Ooh, listen to me and how spoilt I sound...

A Goat In The Office (And Other Perks Of The Job)

2008-05-01T13:25:00.003+03:00

(As I type, there is a goat poking her head into the office).

Two weeks ago, whilst in Murchison, fast asleep in a little banda (a round hut) I woke to Rich nudging me through my twin bed's mosquito net. It was pitch black.

Do you want to see a hippo? he whispered.

See a hippo? I could already hear it. A loud munching emanated from just the other side of the wall.

What time is it? I asked, still whispering, whilst fighting to get out of the mosquito net.

It was 4am, and when I eventually extricated myself from the netting, I stood by the window and looked out in the moonlight to see a hippo and her calf grazing just two yards in front of me.

I didn't want to breathe in case I disturbed her.

Would they charge a building? I found myself thinking, as I stared at her great grey bulk.

I don't know why I thought our whispering would disturb her. She wouldn't be able to hear me over the megaphone-like molar action going on. A hippo can chomp with the best of them...

The next night I saw three more, along with a tourist who was casually stalking them around the bandas to have a closer look. I was desperately whispering "Be Careful!" warnings at him through my banda window.

Sadly, because a flash may well have caused her to charge the banda, I have no photos of the hippo sightings. But here is a photo of what happens when you disturb a hippo, taken on the other side of the river from the Red Chilli Rest Camp, and published last year in the Daily Monitor. The guy in the picture managed to dive out the way and somehow escape, but you can see why I was trying to warn the over-enthusiastic tourist...

A Moment's Peace

2008-04-25T22:12:00.005+03:00

So, after another hectic week in Kampala, where we're getting quicker at tackling the daily tasks of running this place, but therefore more confident at taking on longer term projects (and it's only week three!) I finally get a moment to post on here....

Apologies for the drought of blogging of late, but as we settle into a routine here it is hard to find that necessary downtime. It's not that we don't get time to relax - we do. It's just my only internet connection is in the office and when sat there I get permanently interrupted.

Change for the bar, requests for stock from the food store, handymen needing payment, cleaners wanting room keys, even guests have the temerity to say hello occasionally - the stream of people popping their head round the door is non stop. I welcome the bustle, honestly - we are both loving the job - but it makes it hard to find a moment to write up some of the stories I'm longing to tell.

Random stuff that hits you day to day:

Like staring out the window of the minibus on the way to Makarere to see a sign on a lamp-post that said 'Hips Gain' with a local mobile number under it. I mused for a second thinking, what could that mean? HIPs? Home Improvement Packs? What?

The reverse of the lamppost had a similar sign with the same mobile number. This time it became clear and the chasm between perceptions of beauty in affluent European cultures versus perceptions of beauty in East Africa suddenly opened up.

The signs were similar to ones you say dotted around English towns on lamp-posts and traffic light poles. Except back there they say "Lose weight fast" and "Drop a Dress Size". Here, they urge the opposite. Big is beautiful, big is bootylicious.

And here I am, hoping the new 'run around' job will help me drop pounds. I aim to be the ugliest girl in town...

To end, another road side sign. This time a stark reminder of the divide between rich and poor. From what I've seen of other parts of Africa, and because we are on the outskirts of a big old city here, Kampala seems to support a comparatively large middle class. But you can still turn down one street to find massive mansions behind security gates and high, barbed fencing, only to turn another corner and find altogether a different type of ghetto.

So this then, a sign which says something about a country, when there is such a market for companies that make security fencing that they promote themselves with lines you'd actually expect to find in some washing powder commercial.

Uganda's most trusted fencing? Mmmmmmm.

Talking of washing powder, I saw a massive global branding faux pax earlier this week. Driving through a hardware district of town, sadly without the camera, each building is painted with the colours and logos and slogans of some of the bigger brands out here. Omo, the washing powder we know better back in Blighty as Persil, is the subject of one of these hand-painted ad hoardings. Only they have made the strange decision to pursue an ad line they recently launched in the UK.

In the UK, everyone washes clothes, and if you have a major market share already, what's your best strategy? Persuade people to wash more frequently of course, by adopting a campaign celebrating getting dirty. The Persil "Dirt is Good" campaign featured happy, but filthy children, making mud pies and rolling around in the garden.

It might work in the UK, but plastering "Omo - Dirt is Good" all over a shack in Africa, where diseases spread by unhygienic conditions are still a problem in some areas, surely is a bit of an oversight by some dim media type in London, Brussels, or New York?

Playing Postie

2008-04-24T15:04:00.003+03:00

A year ago, when we were due to go out and work at Red Chilli Rest Camp, up in Murchison Falls, a bit of judicious googling led me to discovering that a fellow blogger had lived right behind the camp for a few months back in 2005.

Marie Javins had lived there whilst writing up her first travel book on crossing Africa and used to head over to the Red Chilli bar for a cold soda at the end of the day. She befriended a man called Celsius, appropriately named for being the chief electrician for the park. He told her folk tales, amongst other stories, one of which ended up in her book "Stalking the wild Dik-Dik".

When she and I started to exchange emails about living in Uganda, she asked me if I wouldn't mind delivering a copy of her book to Celsius when I got to Murchison.

Well, here he is, proud as punch to discover he is actually in a book.

It may be a year later than planned but Celsius finally got his delivery, just like I finally got to Uganda.

More on our week in Murchison soon, and other aspects of Ugandan life. It's just finding the time right now!

Here's What You Could Have Had

2008-04-13T15:01:00.004+03:00

Our initiation into how the Kampala operation works is almost complete. So now we are off, bright and early tomorrow, accompanying three minibuses of tours, all the way to Murchison Fall National Park in the North of the country.

Up there, Red Chilli has a sister operation - Red Chilli Rest Camp - a site typified by safari tents and several small brick built bandas (detached little two or three room bungalows).

We're looking forward to it. We've heard so much about this place. And not just because it's our 'sister' site.

It was the place we were going to be working, this time last year.

It was the job we had to turn down a month before we were due to be flying out there, because of my sudden and unexpected diagnosis with breast cancer in late March 2009.

So it will be strange to go up there tomorrow, when a year ago we'd imagined ourselves living there, managing that camp, when we're actually now living in Kampala, managing the main operation here.

It's not envy, or bitterness. Far from it.

In fact, getting the job in Kampala suits us down to the ground. For a start it's not leaning towards 50 degrees every lunchtime, we have electricity 24 hours (most of the time) and I just bought some mouthwash and some soy sauce down the shops. I couldn't do that in Murchison.

And this won't be our only trip there. We'll pop up from time to time to cover J&T's time off (the Murchison Managers).

The feeling I have is more a strange sensation of false familiarity, a little like deja vu.

Murchison is the place we spent two months fantasising about, and then nine months trying to forget.

And who could forget it, when it looks like this?

It's just great to be here at all, in so many ways.

And to be living in a little oasis of greenery and calm within spitting distance of the city, but with the ability to go 'up country' occasionally, is just perfect.

Home Sweet Home

2008-04-12T19:06:00.002+03:00

This is our new abode. The Management Cottage. Down the bottom of the "new" compound, this is the last of ten two bed cottages that sit either side of a long drive, surrounded by tropical plants and lush grass borders.

The monkey troop seems to hang out down here on cool afternoons. But they didn't appear for me when I went walkabout with the camera so no photos today.

But the goat posed nicely for me. This is the nanny goat. The billy goat is quite agressive and headbuts people if they antagonise him. The billy goat was won by Hennie, another Manager here, in a sort of derby day goat-racing event. Apparently it's due to take place again in August and as he has full intentions of winning another goat, we'll have to find a pot big enough to fit the current goat in.

And we have some interesting trees in the gardens of the place. This is a tree in the main compound, bursting with massive avocadoes. Further down the garden is a jack fruit tree - the big smelly fruit well known in these parts. We've yet to try it but have earmarked a slice next time one ripens...

And here's work. The office is just behind all the frantically typing guests, trying to use the free internet before the electricity dies!

Africa From The Air III

2008-04-12T18:53:00.003+03:00

Into Uganda now, and there are signs the land is getting more fertile. A river snakes below us again but this time, the banks are covered in greenery.

Further South again, and the land is changing colour completely with great swathes of forest visible between the open savannah.

Once the plane starts it's descent over Jinja before banking West towards Entebbe, the fields are laid out below me. This is a fertile country. For a moment I glimpse the Victoria Nile and the Bujagali Falls. But I was not quick enough with the camera for that one!

Finally, we come into land at Entebbe and the plane banks right over the shores of Lake Victoria. It stretches out in front of me into the hazy distance, towards Tanzania in the South and Kenya in the East.

Finally, I am here. Welcome to Uganda.

Africa From The Air II

2008-04-12T18:38:00.003+03:00

After leaving the parchedness of central Ethiopia, the brown earth remains but rivers start to appear. Or riverbeds. They don't appear to be that full of water at the moment...

This large river snaked under us as we were served a light snack by the Emirates airline crew. A Chicken Tikka and Lettuce roll with a cheesecake and cheese and biscuits to follow, accompanied by any free drink of your choice (except champagne... they actually charge you for that). The calm and comfortable plane environment felt at odds with the lives that might be played out below us.

The river then found an outlet - one of the large lakes on the Northern Kenya / Southern Ethiopia borders. A look on the map suggest it may be Lake Turkana.

And here's an island seen in the middle of Lake Turkana. If my Lonely Planet East Africa serves me correctly, it's Central Island National Park. Rising from the depths of Lake Turkana, it features a volcano in it's centre which has thankfully been inactive for three decades. It's a Unesco World Heritage Site and it's lakes are full of Nile Crocodiles...

Africa From The Air I

2008-04-12T18:30:00.002+03:00

I took some pictures from the plane. This is leaving Addis Ababa.

The Africa of Ethiopia was very brown.

This scared me. A shot of carefully tended patches of land, a patchwork of fields. In varying shades of brown and grey.

This is the Africa of little rain.

Fly Me To The Moon

2008-04-12T17:56:00.002+03:00

I landed in Uganda on Monday, after a smooth and uneventful journey. Rich landed in Uganda on Tuesday, delayed by 24 hours and held up by blizzards and bureaucracy. His first connecting flight to Frankfurt landed half an hour after his scheduled flight to South Africa took off. So Lufthansa put him up in an airport motel.

The next day he attempted to board a flight to South Africa. He was originally scheduled to fly with a Lufthansa flight leaving at 10.30pm. The Star Alliance people wanted him on a South African Airways flight instead. He didn't mind which he was on as long as his luggage accompanied him, but each airline claimed the other had his bags.

Then, once he'd finally confirmed that South African had his bags, the check in clerks insisted they could not let him leave for Uganda on a one way ticket without proof of a work permit, enough funds to demonstrate a certain lack of vagrancy, or, at worst, buying an onward ticket!

Despite the paperwork from Red Chilli confirming the job offer and a pending work permit application, they were insistent that things were not in order. Indeed, when I arrived in Uganda I was told that they had called Hennie, our colleague here at Red Chilli, to ask him if he could provide a letter by fax from the Department of Immigration. He just laughed loudly and said "This is Africa. Things don't work like that here."

At that, Frankfurt airport bureaucracy conceded defeat and let him on the plane.

At Jo'burg, with only enough rand in his pocket to buy a cup of tea, he was dismayed to find the baggage collection was beyond immigration and he would have to get a visa. He could see his rucksack going round on the carousel and feared he'd be held up by the same questions about one way tickets.

Thankfully, South Africa gives their visas away for free, and R and his bags were reunited for a free brief hours before finally flying on to Entebbe.

I met him there, feeling only slightly smug about the difference between our journeys...

Leaving On A Jet Plane (Or Not)

2008-04-06T19:47:00.002+03:00

So here we are at Heathrow. The last two weeks of frantic final preparations and last minute jobs behind us. We felt relatively organised and in control an hour ago, when we first arrived.

Except R is on a different flight from me, and in a different terminal. This was always the plan. He had a chunk of air miles to use within the Star Alliance network and could save a bundle by therefore flying with South African. And my best available deal without air miles was to fly Emirates.

So while I'm now safely through check in (4 kilos over on a 35 kilo allowance - my parents' bathroom scales are obviously on the 'flattery' setting), have trudged through security and am safely ensconced in T3 departures, R is still in T2, in a long and very stationary queue for his first Star Alliance flight - a connection to Frankfurt with Lufthansa.

He was always worried he'd be pushing it with an hour between planes in Frankfurt. Now he's worried that he may not even make it on to the Frankfurt flight. His queue has moved 100 yards in the last hour, and they've just cancelled the flight before his. Fights are breaking out and nobody is giving anybody any information.

After calling Lufthansa who confirm that the 1905 is 'as normal' for the moment, I am now online trying to find out any more I can. But everything suggested all is on time and scheduled, and noone has any advice for someone stuck in a queue with no way of abandoning a trolley full of bags.

Somehow, I think it will need a miracle if he manages to join me in Kampala tomorrow night. I suspect he'll limp in the following day, suitably grumpy after 48 hours of travelling hell.

Poor Rich.

Lucky Me.

Torn between pity and a smug relief I remind myself there is still plenty of time for Mr Cock Up to wreak havoc with my own itinerary. Here's to hoping at least one of us gets there on schedule.

Nomad, no problem

2008-04-01T12:30:00.003+03:00

I have recently become homeless, bikeless, carless. Now, finally, I am jobless too.

This shedding of possessions and responsibility brings with it a certain feeling of lightness. I am back to living out of bags and off my wits.

A nomadic existence can be very freeing. It's not that it has its downsides, but the opposite can be far more stifling. Living in the lap of London luxury, racking up the new 'things' on a weekly, monthly basis. I was never a fan of waste and over the last few years, the rise of sites like freecycle have helped me get quite 'responsible' by London standards. But I still have several mountains of clothes that are pretty excessive and will lie, unused, in boxes for the indefinite future. Unless, like the time I was living in Turkey, a mouse decides to make a nest by chewing right through my expensive winter coats.

So here's to paring down, and paring down again. I'm not some new age hippy, but I do recognise that a girl only needs so many pairs of black shoes.

Even if some of them are works of art.

The Power To Surprise

2008-03-28T22:02:00.005+03:00

Sorting out some photos I came across this one, taken by a friend at a reunion with some school friends last autumn.

Even now, one year on from diagnosis, stumbling across a photo of me at the peak of my baldness still shocks me. It's not like seeing me. I know it IS me, but it feels more like seeing a close friend or relative much changed after years apart. Changed by age or illness, but dramatically different in a very wrong way.

The girl on the left called me today to apologise for not having got back to me on something. Turns out she's busy dealing with cancer herself.

Her father's cancer has got worse. It's spread to his spine.

I remember him from parent's evenings - the elegantly tall, good-looking Kenyan doctor whom all the teachers giggled and flirted over like they were the schoolgirls. Of all men, this man cannot be dying, surely?

Once again, I feel the vitriol rise and I curse cancer. In all its forms.

Leo on May Hill

2008-03-28T22:02:00.001+03:00

DSC_0170.JPG, originally uploaded by annemariew.

And this one is Leo. Leo the Lion.

I will miss them in Uganda but R has promised me we'll get a pet leopard instead. Called Dave.

Ozzy on May Hill

2008-03-28T22:01:00.001+03:00

DSC_0159.JPG, originally uploaded by annemariew.

Sorting out Flickr I came across some shots of my parents' dogs, out on a walk on May Hill.

This one is Ozzie. Or Ozzy. I'm never quite sure how it's meant to be spelt.

How Many Call Centres Does It Take To Answer A Phone?

2008-03-27T20:00:00.005+03:00

I call my bike insurance company to cancel the policy. Customer Services put me through to the Cancellation department (apparently cancelling a policy is not deemed a customer service). Fifteen long minutes of bad classical music later and the Customer Services gimp comes back on the line, offering me a callback service.

Distrustful of anyone who purposefully employs too few people to handle cancellations so that people are forced to delay the cancellation I stubbornly stay on the line. Ten minutes later and the same lady is back on. They apparently will call me back and are apologetic about the delay. I remain sceptical...

Next up in British Telecom. After twenty minutes I eventually get through to someone in Delhi. Twenty minutes? I thought outsourcing call centres to India meant that they could afford more labour, not less. You'd think a telephone company, of all people, would have someone free to answer the phone.

The council tax people are swifter - they take me only 4 mins to get through to a human being and then another 6 mins to sort it out.

The Electricity company is all full of weird automated sequences again but is quite painless by comparison and only takes a record 3 minutes! I'm on a roll and decide to take on British Gas immediately to try and capitalise on my current good fortune.

I'm sorry. All our operators are busy at the moment. Your call is important to us....

Aaargh! I'm getting what they call phone rage. There was a whole hour of documentary making dedicated to this new phenomenon recently and I now know how they feel. Being on hold and dealing with automated phone systems is part of modern life but it IS totally rubbish.

Whilst I listen to the British Gas choice of hold music (16 minutes into the call and being transferred to the right department at last) I am reminded of the other day, when I was on my way to catch a train that I was almost definitely going to be too late for. So I called the train timetable number to get the times of the next departure. Their automated system is one of those designed for ultimate public embarrassment where you need to shout words out in answer to their questions. What's really bad about it is that you find yourself unconsciously doing that vocal imitation thing and mimicking the voice and intonation of the automated robot on the other end. Add that to speaking just a bit too loudly and over-articulating and you sound like a robot trying to order a meal on the Costa Del Sol.

This was our so-called conversation...

(Robot Voice)

"Yes"

Lengthy information is read out to be peppered with rather obvious and contrived sounding attempts to 'market' the service to me. Finally we get to the 'When Doo You Want To Tra Vel?' question?

"Too-Day"

Oh Lordy. Here we go again with all the unnecessarily patronising baby talk. "What Sta Shun Are You Leaving From?

"Lon-don Bridge"

Was that Lun Dun Bridge?

"Yes"

Blah Blah Blah

"Eeasttt Grin-Sted"

Am I A Noy Ing You Yet?

"Yes"

"Five Thur-Tee"

(Normal voice, exasperated)

"Oh, shut up you stupid cow!"

At this point, to my utter surprise, the robot did actually cut short her recorded message repeating the words I'd already heard several times within the context of this so-called conversation and cut straight to the chase. It seems they teach them to recognise phone rage and speed things up accordingly.

Which means machines are really not that far off from taking over the world after all.

Puppet On A String

2008-03-27T03:00:00.001+03:00

Puppet On Strings, originally uploaded by tacksoon.

I've been too high on good results to dwell on the boring side effects of cleaning.

My "hand-job" on the carpet as a result of my vacuum biting the dust (couldn't resist that pun) led to my arm complaining. It started off sore, in the muscles in the upper and lower arm, with pain when I extended it fully or raised it above shoulder level.

I rode down to my bike test, feeling my arm complain at the buffetting it took when just holding the steering straight whilst driving down the A3 at 50 mph.

I try and stretch it every other hour or so in a series of attention-grabbing moves which look like I'm about ten, in a classroom full of kids, and desperate to answer the teacher's question.

Later that week I realise it's getting worse, not better.

Looking down I realise it's now fully swollen. On the inside of my wrist on my (good) left arm I can see the raised profile of my veins. When I bend my hand towards me, they become even more prominent: like a pair of raised train tracks running parallel on a sloping bank.

But when I look down at my inner wrist on my painful right arm I see nothing. Just rounded flesh. Puffy and white. Crooking my hand towards me makes no difference either - it just hurts. As I look up the arm towards my elbow I can see the rising lump formed by my swollen flesh.

And if I stick my fingers in my armpit or the hollow of my elbow, it is not only agony, but I can feel a palpable string or two of hard, painful muscle. Like I am a puppet on a string, but my strings are pulled a little tight.

Yes, it seems this is cording. Proper, proper cording.

The swelling may even indicate a little bit of lymphodema. I keep checking the fingers but the puffiness seems to stop at the wrist.

I am frustrated by it but by taking a LOT of ibuprofen I am starting to see a vast improvement in the swelling. I've also made up my mind to try and stretch it a little less. I don't want to cause more inflammation by overdoing it before it's ready.

But when will it be ready? Most cases of cording are reported within weeks of the original operation but some are said to recur months afterwards. This is obviously falling into the latter camp. Websites talk of it disappearing 'of it's own accord' but patients sometimes needing physio and antibiotics to help it on it's way.

I'm about to disappear to East Africa. Starting a course of physio really isn't viable. But somehow the good results of the scans, the stuff that really matters, seems to make this latest, lingering side-effect of the cancer (that I first felt a year ago yesterday), pale into insignificance.

And do you know what, until I wrote that last sentence, I had forgotten about yesterday's cancerversary. A year to the day that I lay in bed and made R wake up to feel my right boob.

It's significant that I forgot to remember the date, I think. I'm finally losing touch with the notable dates of last year's cancer - a good thing.

From now on, we're writing a new calendar.

The Icing On The Cake

2008-03-19T16:23:00.003+03:00

Two good results in two days.

Yesterday I 'passed' my year one scans with flying colours.

Today, I am the proud owner of a pass certificate on my new bike license.

But in case you thought the universe was being particularly kind to me, rest assured balance has been restored. R has already been on the phone to pronounce our ailing old banger officially terminal.

Ah well, it was to be retired to a friend for him to take on an old banger rally soon anyway. It won't make it to Russia, but it will make it to the scrapyard and I will be £50 richer, so it's not the end of the world. At least it got me and my last possessions out of the flat last Friday night.