The bus from Soroti to Kampala featured the same scenery that we had already seen on our way from Jinja to Soroti, so instead I'll devote five lines to describing Soroti town under this post as I did not do so before. Soroti town is effectively a two-street (!) town (in comparison to those oh so many one-street towns that we have mentioned until now). One of the streets features banks, tailor shops and hotels, and the other street hosted fast food restaurants and the entrance to the local market in addition to more tailor shops and hotels. I could have of course just left this unmentioned, but I like to paint at least some kind of picture of each place we visit. So there.
Kampala the beautiful, Kampala the livelyWe have a habit of arriving to cities after dark and we didn't let ourselves down this time either. Luckily the bus drove along a street off which our planned place of stay was situated, so we just knocked on the inside wall of the bus in the local way as a sign of wanting to get off and rocked up at the New City Annex Hotel. To our surprise, the prices had been inflated quite significantly from what the Bible had told us, so we decided to stay for only one night and called the Aponye Hotel the same night to reserve what was a far better deal starting from the next night. The warm shower and the tasty curry on offer at the New City Annex did, however, make a very welcoming package for our first night in Kampala.
Our four days in Kampala were somewhat overshadowed by all the reporting and official embassy business we had to get done before we could head up north towards our next project. We spent a lot of time by the laptop and the free wi-fi provided by the Aponye hotel writing and sending reports from the previous projects and skyping with our loved ones. We also drew lots about which one of the two embassies where we needed visas from to visit first, the Rwandan or the Burundian one. We set upon the Burundian one because we assumed it to be harder to get Burundi visas from the border than the Rwanda ones.
The very first visit we made was to the French embassy, though, as T wanted to go and inquire about the procedure of applying for a new passport in case he should run out of pages before we got to South Africa – this would not be a very good thing as we have already made plans to meet both sets of our parents in May and June and travel all the way from Malawi to South Africa under a set schedule that doesn't allow for much unexpected delay. The French consul was a very friendly man and we had a very lovely chat with him but the outcome was not very productive in terms of positive news for T. The passport application will take 3 weeks to process, and we don't have that much time in any single one of the countries before arriving to Malawi any more.
Counting up the pages on T's passport, we concluded with the consul that the best way to go would be to just try and kindly suggest for the border guards to use up the smallest free corners left on the pages that had already been used.
The view from the Aponye with Gaddafi's mosque far in the background if you can see it...On the visit to the Burundi embassy, we arrived too late and without dollars and had to return the next day. The next day the situation was slightly different, as can be expected of authorities, and we were asked to provide an invitation letter with our application forms. After a short and cordial inquiry into why this had not been mentioned to us the previous day, our applications were accepted for processing in the end, with a remark that we would be notified by phone if there should be a problem to apply without the letters. Everything went well, we didn't receive any phone call but instead received our visas within 24 hours and for 40U$ each, as is the going rate.
In between all the official and boring duties, we managed to find an Eritrean restaurant where to feed our nostalgia cravings of injera, walk around the centre a few times (one of the streets is called Siad Barre Avenue!) and ride through town on boda-bodas (local motorbike taxis), enjoy some quality Ugandan coffee (this being me of course), find the mandatory Irish pub and have a beer there while watching BBC news, and visit the biggest mall in Kampala where, in the top floor lounge bar, I discovered to my horror that one alcohol measurement in Europe is a double one here.
We also took the time to go see at least one attraction. With the Kasubi tombs (THE main sight in Kampala) torched to the ground less than two weeks prior to our arrival at Kampala, we chose to visit Mengo palace instead. Mengo palace is the palace of the ruler of the Buganda kingdom, or the kabaka. A guide took us around the premises for a small fee to show the eternal fire (kept alive until the kabaka dies or “disappears” like the Buganda see it), the palace building (only from the outside), the back garden torture chamber used under Idi Amin's and Milton Obote's rules (when the palace was seized by the government) and the fake lake where some of the dead prisoners from the chambers were dumped.
The lake. Gloomy past, gloomy skies aboveThe palace compound is set on a hill and makes a good spot to take photos of Kampala's skyline, but other than that it would hardly be worth the visit – if it wasn't for the experience of seeing the torture chamber. It's no Auschwitz and it does not have any torture machines or the like, it is just a concrete bunker with five big cells . But this small piece of corridor was the end of the line for thousands of people who were accused or suspected of anti-governmental actions or attitudes. People were simply left to die of hunger in the cells with their cellmates having to lie in the same cell with the corpses in absolute darkness. Sometimes prisoners would also be made to stand in the corridor leading to the cells and the corridor would then be flooded with water and conducted with electricity. Apparently this was something Idi Amin used to practice if he fancied watching people die, which he did with regular intervals. He definitely did no honour to Scotland by naming himself its last king. Obote was no better, however, with him using the same chamber for the same purposes six more years after overthrowing Amin. There is still a piece of text visible on one of the walls of the first cell written by a prisoner in Luganda language: “Obote, you have killed me but what about my children?” Our guide summed it up by saying that if you were brought into the chamber at any time, you would not come out alive.
The kabaka's palace, just before we got soaked
Amin's torture chamber, which doesn't look any less grim in real lifeAfter reliving even this small flash of the dark times of Uganda, it stroke as a breath of fresh air to walk back into the bustle of today's society where Ugandans live a seemingly more democratic and liberal life than their neighbours. In our opinion, the people in Uganda are also the friendliest we've met since Sudan and Somalia, and there is virtually no cheating in prices or general hassles – or even calls for “Muzungu!” when walking on the streets. To us, Kampala, and Uganda as a whole, has become yet another home away from home.
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