Uganda Pt.2: Kampala

We left Mbarara Wednesday morning and spent all day driving to the capital, Kampala. The Ugandan countryside is beautiful, and the farther north we got the more different it looked from Rwanda. Rwanda is almost all hills and is very green, will almost all the land occupied by either trees or farms. Uganda, on the other hand, is much more flat, with large expanse of grassland peppered with trees, cacti, and giant anthills leading up to a background of rolling hills. I love those hills. Unlike the hills in Rwanda, there is very little growing on them except for grass, so you can see all the folds and rolls of they way they are shaped, as if a wave had just risen up from under the earth and created them.

By the time we got to Kampala it was too dark to see much of it, but I could tell it was a crazy city. It was much dirtier and more crowded than Kigali, which is exceptionally ordered for an African capital. Kigali has also outlawed street vendors, but there were stalls lining the sidewalks in Kampala selling everything from clothes to food to dishes and jerrycans. And the traffic was insane. As much as I say I would never drive in Kigali, I would certainly drive there sooner than I would in Kampala. Our bus actually got into a small wreck with another, smaller bus on the way to our hotel. It was the other driver's fault, but he got out of his bus and starting yelling at our driver, wanting him to pay for the damage to his bus. Too bad for him that everyone from the other bus thought it was his fault too, so they all got out and started yelling at him to shut up. In a matter of minutes a crowd had assembled and everyone was shouting. Someone had called the police, but they hadn't arrived yet. After a few minutes, Selena, one of our staff members who is from Uganda, got out of the bus and joined the fray. She looked alarmingly small in the middle of all the shouting men, but I don't think she was out there for five minutes before she had the matter settled. The other bus driver was going to pay for the damage. Getting back on the bus, she looked at all of our alarmed faces, and, laughing, declared, “This is Uganda!”