Uganda: Stork-tastic

Last Thursday I got back from ten days in Uganda. Obviously, going to Uganda should be fairly interesting and should merit a blog entry, and so it has. But I'm afraid I can't offer a commentary that provides any real insight into local life (no change there then, etc...) as it was a pretty short trip and I spent most of my time working and most of the rest of my time being ill. So a few fleeting impressions will have to suffice.

1) Marabou stork











If you asked me to name one image of Kampala, it would be the Marabou stork. Uganda is a bird paradise, with nigh on a 1,000 different species lurking around - my father, who was a keen ornithologist, would have loved it. Even in the city centre, exotic (to us) birds are flying around all over the place. But the most impressive and ubiquitous, if not the most attractive, is the Marabou stork. I got into Kampala late at night and extremely tired, so I didn't notice anything much on the drive to the hotel, but when I woke up the next morning, there were several of these beauties sat on the roof opposite my hotel window, watching the world go buy with that look of questioning calm. They're massive, easily a metre or more tall, and perfectly at home in urban environments. In fact, they're scavengers, so the detritus of a growing population lures them in increasing numbers into Kampala, where they are welcomed as an extra rubbish management measure. You can see them on virtually every tree and rooftop, and sometimes you even find them accompanying you along the pavement...

2) The Nile
The one day I did have spare, I made the standard tourist day-trip to Jinja to see the Source of the Nile and Bujagali Falls. Its claim to be at the source of the Nile is open to question, as pinpointing exactly where the Nile starts is a matter of some debate, but as the point where the Nile starts flowing out of Lake Victoria on a 6,400 km journey down to the Mediterranean, it's a pretty mindblowing thing to imagine. As for the river itself, well, it's attractive, the nearby falls (rapids would be a better word) are pretty cool and there's lots of wildlife to look at it. But it's a river like any other, and at such an early point in its journey, not a particularly massive one - if you didn't know it was the Nile, you wouldn't necessary pay quite so much attention to it...

3) Rolling hills
Just as people who know nothing about the former Soviet Union imagine that the whole area from Lviv to Dushanbe to Vladivostok is covered in concrete towerblocks and year-round Siberian permafrost (you're half right), people who know nothing about Africa (in which category I include myself) assume that the whole continent is permanently 45 degrees hot, everyone is extremely poor and looks like an emergency appeal video, you can only get anywhere by driving around in a big white Landrover, etc etc. Which of course is utter nonsense, but even when you know it's nonsense, if you don't have alternative images to fill your mind with, the old stereotypes persist without you meaning them to. So it was a pleasure to see Uganda for myself and have something a bit more accurate to call to mind.

Despite being on the equator, Uganda is not a parched desert or savannah. Large parts of it, including the little bit that I saw, are covered in gently rolling hills, and the altitude means that it's nowhere near as warm as it might otherwise be (though it was still in the high 20s most of the time). Kampala itself is nestled among who knows how many hills, and wins because of it. It's probably not that usual to compare Kampala with Sheffield, but just as I love Sheffield for its pleasant up-and-down feel (regardless of what's on these hills), Kampala had the same instant appeal to me.

Like I say, due to the fleeting nature of my trip, I can't really say anything more than that, unless you want my full rundown of the Hotel Africana or a blow-by-blow account of the fun of getting stomach upsets in far-off foreign countries...