Friday, 16th August, Entebbe Time: 8:31pm
Well, here it is. My last blog entry from Uganda. I’ve just returned from town where I enjoyed a final meal of the suitably Ugandan dish “chipsgoat” before wandering around Entebbe in search of some last minute supplies. My first stop-off was at the groceries store where I thought I’d buy some chocolate for the trip. As I browsed the chocolate selection, I noticed a moustached Indian man beckoning me over and pointing to some biscuits. He told me that I should buy ‘glucose’ biscuits, because they were very cheap. Assuming he was one of the shop staff, I asked him how much the packet of ‘fruitella’ that I was holding cost. He told me not to worry and that he’d buy them for me. Noticing something was a little wrong, I turned and raised my eyebrows. Just as I my head turned, I noticed his left hand making a beeline for my balls. I jumped back and caught the tail end of the attempted grope square in the goulies. Beating a hasty retreat, I trotted quickly towards the checkout and bought the fruitella without thinking. I didn’t really want fruitella…
Somewhat rattled from my brief encounter with the amorous Asian, I drifted towards the local pharmacy in search of some sleeping tablets to help shorten the plane journey. “Do you have anything that would help me sleep”, I asked. A bottle of valium was thrust into my hands. Inquiries into whether they stocked anything “a little weaker” met with a blank stare. To be honest, I was sorely tempted just to buy just a couple of tabs and wake up in blighty. If it worked for Anna Karenina and Eminem, why shouldn’t it work for me. Upon further reflection I realised that valium abuse had resulted in a terminal visit to a train terminal and that train wreck of an album “Recovery” respectively. I left empty handed and wandered back to the guesthouse.
And, well, here I am, waiting for a final snack before I turn in for three or four fleeting hours sleep before the taxi to the airport. Hopefully by the time I’m on the plane I’ll have recovered suitably from the sexual harassment and will be ready to face the rigours of the horrifically long voyage to the UK. And that’s it from me. I hope you enjoyed the blog.
So long, Uganda, and thanks for all the Chimps!
Thursday, 16 September 2010
Lakeside Mother-something-or-other.
Thursday, 14th August, Entebbe Time: 7:58am
Being in Entebbe feels like I’ve left Uganda already. The town was, until the English buggered off in 1962, where the colonial administration of the protectorate was based, and it shows. The whole place feels quite a bit more like an English village than an African town and wide streets, quiet little gardens, mown lawns and country manners abound. These peculiarly anachronistic ‘anglicisms’ are, of course, interspersed with palm trees, men balancing two-tonne calabashes on their heads and those horrendously ugly marabou stalks. The place is jarring and beautiful in fairly equal measures.
Yesterday I wandered around ‘town’, if a single street of shops quite can ever merit that title, and then headed down to indulge in that traditional Ugandan experience of pizza and masala tea on the edge of lake Victoria. The lake was really beautiful, though the banks are crammed to bursting point with bilharzia snails. None the less, this didn’t stop a few foolhardy (or undereducated) families from splashing around in the schistosomiasis infested shallows. One natural danger I didn’t reckon with was the reflective qualities of water and, by the time I’d endured the hour-long wait for tea and pizza and then eaten the pizza, I was the same colour as the tomato sauce. The situation was certainly not ameliorated by the fact that I’d forgotten my hat and my sun cream was buried deep at the bottom of my tightly packed steel suitcase. I’m afraid that I look like a Mzungu no longer, but some more interesting and far redder strain of humanity.
Apart from the Pizza and having my face slowly burned off, yesterdays most remarkable discovery was a drink called ‘Obushera’. As I was walking through a marketplace on the side of town I noticed a small shack with a large bold sign boasting ‘OBUSHERA SOLD HERE!’. Not being one to pass up the opportunity of expanding the realms of personal experience, I made a beeline towards to mysterious vendor and boomed “One Obushera please!!”. The woman behind the counter jumped nearly out of her skin and, once she’d suitably composed her epidermal, mixed up a mug of something that looked like it had passed through the digestive system of a cat suffering from acute food poisoning. With a certain amount of trepidation, I took a gulp. The stuff was delicious! Not unpleasantly gritty, tangy and sweet in fairly equal measures. After some pidgin English probing I gathered that the drink was made by boiling water and mixing it with sorghum flower. Our corn, barely and wheat based economies are certainly missing out – malt drinks are far inferior. On the other hand, Alex’s verdict was ‘it tastes like stomach bile’, so maybe I just have atypical taste buds.
After quite a lovely day, I headed into our rather ‘cozy’ tent for a lovely nights sleep. No such luck. There was a guy sitting about 50 meters away with a CD player blasting out low-quality indie rock at a very high volume. After a quarter of an hour or so, I decided that I’d try reasoning and wandered up to him. I noticed that he was sitting in front of a lighted candle in the centre of a scruffy pentagram. Somewhat nonplussed, I pressed on.
“Sir, your music is a little loud”. I ventured.
“Yes.”, He replied in a deep Ugandan accent.
“Could you turn it down?”
“Yes.”
He pressed the volume dial once, so that the music was imperceptibly less horrifically loud.
“That… sir that is still quite loud!”
“Yes.”
‘Do you have headphones?”
“No.”
“Do you know what time you’re heading to bed?”
“When I finish.”
“Do.. do you know what time you’re expecting to ‘finish’”?
“No.”
“Could you try and turn it off in half an hour or so.”
“Yes. ‘Try’”.
At that, I gave up and headed to bed and resigned myself to a late evening of god-awful music. My taciturn friend’s battery ran out a few minutes later. He obviously forgot to include Duracell in his deal with the devil.
Being in Entebbe feels like I’ve left Uganda already. The town was, until the English buggered off in 1962, where the colonial administration of the protectorate was based, and it shows. The whole place feels quite a bit more like an English village than an African town and wide streets, quiet little gardens, mown lawns and country manners abound. These peculiarly anachronistic ‘anglicisms’ are, of course, interspersed with palm trees, men balancing two-tonne calabashes on their heads and those horrendously ugly marabou stalks. The place is jarring and beautiful in fairly equal measures.
Yesterday I wandered around ‘town’, if a single street of shops quite can ever merit that title, and then headed down to indulge in that traditional Ugandan experience of pizza and masala tea on the edge of lake Victoria. The lake was really beautiful, though the banks are crammed to bursting point with bilharzia snails. None the less, this didn’t stop a few foolhardy (or undereducated) families from splashing around in the schistosomiasis infested shallows. One natural danger I didn’t reckon with was the reflective qualities of water and, by the time I’d endured the hour-long wait for tea and pizza and then eaten the pizza, I was the same colour as the tomato sauce. The situation was certainly not ameliorated by the fact that I’d forgotten my hat and my sun cream was buried deep at the bottom of my tightly packed steel suitcase. I’m afraid that I look like a Mzungu no longer, but some more interesting and far redder strain of humanity.
Apart from the Pizza and having my face slowly burned off, yesterdays most remarkable discovery was a drink called ‘Obushera’. As I was walking through a marketplace on the side of town I noticed a small shack with a large bold sign boasting ‘OBUSHERA SOLD HERE!’. Not being one to pass up the opportunity of expanding the realms of personal experience, I made a beeline towards to mysterious vendor and boomed “One Obushera please!!”. The woman behind the counter jumped nearly out of her skin and, once she’d suitably composed her epidermal, mixed up a mug of something that looked like it had passed through the digestive system of a cat suffering from acute food poisoning. With a certain amount of trepidation, I took a gulp. The stuff was delicious! Not unpleasantly gritty, tangy and sweet in fairly equal measures. After some pidgin English probing I gathered that the drink was made by boiling water and mixing it with sorghum flower. Our corn, barely and wheat based economies are certainly missing out – malt drinks are far inferior. On the other hand, Alex’s verdict was ‘it tastes like stomach bile’, so maybe I just have atypical taste buds.
After quite a lovely day, I headed into our rather ‘cozy’ tent for a lovely nights sleep. No such luck. There was a guy sitting about 50 meters away with a CD player blasting out low-quality indie rock at a very high volume. After a quarter of an hour or so, I decided that I’d try reasoning and wandered up to him. I noticed that he was sitting in front of a lighted candle in the centre of a scruffy pentagram. Somewhat nonplussed, I pressed on.
“Sir, your music is a little loud”. I ventured.
“Yes.”, He replied in a deep Ugandan accent.
“Could you turn it down?”
“Yes.”
He pressed the volume dial once, so that the music was imperceptibly less horrifically loud.
“That… sir that is still quite loud!”
“Yes.”
‘Do you have headphones?”
“No.”
“Do you know what time you’re heading to bed?”
“When I finish.”
“Do.. do you know what time you’re expecting to ‘finish’”?
“No.”
“Could you try and turn it off in half an hour or so.”
“Yes. ‘Try’”.
At that, I gave up and headed to bed and resigned myself to a late evening of god-awful music. My taciturn friend’s battery ran out a few minutes later. He obviously forgot to include Duracell in his deal with the devil.
Tuesday, 14 September 2010
Better Lake than Never
Tuesday, 14th August, Semliki Time: 7:08pm
Guess who’s back! Back again! Well. No prizes there. As you might have guessed, its me. I’m back! At least, back in a place with wireless internet. And Sofas.
I’m sure you’re all just dying to know what happened to me over the last week. In fact, the wait probably drove a few of you to an early grave. I’m afraid if you’re looking for anything in depth, you’re going to be a trifle disappointed – I’m completely out of it. I will, however, try to relate a few small bits ‘n’ pieces from my last week in the Mugiri jungle.
Perhaps the most startling affair was last Friday when I was desperately trying to get some important e-mails done with about 30% battery left in the middle of the night. Usually when I wrote e-mails outside the tent I’d be bothered by a couple of moths, and maybe a few hungry mossies, but nothing much more serious than that. On Friday, however, just as I’d pressed the ‘connect’ button, I was attacked by three or four translucent, diaphanous, swallow-shaped insects with huge wings. I put my torch on the table opposite me in order to draw them away, but within 30 seconds, there were not four or five, but about fifty swarming around the light. This number seemed to pretty much double every ten seconds and by the time I’d snapped the lapton shut and made a dive for the torch, I couldn’t actually get to it without grabbing a handful of the unidentified flying insects. When I’d finally managed to rescue the torch and restart the laptop indoors, the darn thing was so confused at being shut in the middle of the long ‘connection’ process, that it refused to link to the internet at all and all further efforts to sesnd e-mails were in vain. The insects themselves, a species that swarms every so often after heavy rain, continued to flutter around outside in their hundreds and, in the morning, we found about 300 dead insects which had each excreted a small dollop of green ooze. Ask no questions, get no answers. I swept them of the balcony. Unpleasant.
Other exciting happenstances from the last week? Well, I was sure there were some, but they’ve slipped my sleep deprived mind completely so I’ll make do with relating our journey to the ‘entebbe backpackers hostel’ where I’m now pleasantly ensconced. Our journey to Kampala from Fort Portal began rather well. We bought some tickets and threw our bags into a minibus with some pleasant smelling, though rather soupy incense sticks covering up some smell or another. They tried to charge us extra for our bags, but we pleasantly refused and settled down ton the cozy seats, waiting for the engine to start. About 20 minutes later, everyone else started getting off the buss. It turned out that another, better bus had arrived for Kampala and people had jumped ship. As the first bus was not going to leave with only two passengers, we untied our heavy bags and trudged to bus number two, which took us all the way to Kampala.
Instead of dropping us in the Kampala bus station, however, we were turfed out in a rather too heavily populated high street opposite Owena market. We were then mobbed by taxi drivers and, upon finding one who said he would convey us to Entebbe for 50,000 ugandan shillings, a pleasant chap seized both of my cripplingly heavy bags and balanced them on his head and sprinted off through the crowds. Dodging past fast moving motor bikes and throngs of people we managed to chase him all the way to the taxi.
At this point the offer of 50,000 UGS was repealed by the taxi driver – something I’d been expecting, and he asked us for 70,000. I smiled and offered 55. He suggested 60k and, as this was the price I expected to pay from the start, I cheerily agreed. We got in and were about to head off, when the guy who had carried the bags on his head also chipped in. I’d assumed he’d been in kahoots with the Taxi driver and was going to split the cost, but he thought otherwise. I told the taxi driver that the 5,000 that the bag-fellow was demanding would should certainly be included in our fare and, in future, to make this sort of thing very clear before the bags were carried. The taxi driver drove off with the poor bag man wailing in his wake. I felt rather guilty. When we finally arrived, we were harangued for the best part of 15 minutes for an extra 5k to pay our bag carrier and, eventually, he got tired and wandered off. As the normal fare to the airport is 52,000, I felt that our driver had got rather a good deal anyway.
Which, fairly much, brings us to now. I’ve been sitting in the lovely, cozy, Entebbe backpackers hostel sampling ‘Ugandan Sherry’ (The final verdict: Not that bad) and giving my laptop the charge of its life. Lake Victoria is lovely, as is the fact I’m sitting on a seat with a cushion and am about to eat something that isn’t beans.
Apologies for the above lack of cogent sentence structure, grammer and, lets face it, semantics. I’m really quite exhausted!
Guess who’s back! Back again! Well. No prizes there. As you might have guessed, its me. I’m back! At least, back in a place with wireless internet. And Sofas.
I’m sure you’re all just dying to know what happened to me over the last week. In fact, the wait probably drove a few of you to an early grave. I’m afraid if you’re looking for anything in depth, you’re going to be a trifle disappointed – I’m completely out of it. I will, however, try to relate a few small bits ‘n’ pieces from my last week in the Mugiri jungle.
Perhaps the most startling affair was last Friday when I was desperately trying to get some important e-mails done with about 30% battery left in the middle of the night. Usually when I wrote e-mails outside the tent I’d be bothered by a couple of moths, and maybe a few hungry mossies, but nothing much more serious than that. On Friday, however, just as I’d pressed the ‘connect’ button, I was attacked by three or four translucent, diaphanous, swallow-shaped insects with huge wings. I put my torch on the table opposite me in order to draw them away, but within 30 seconds, there were not four or five, but about fifty swarming around the light. This number seemed to pretty much double every ten seconds and by the time I’d snapped the lapton shut and made a dive for the torch, I couldn’t actually get to it without grabbing a handful of the unidentified flying insects. When I’d finally managed to rescue the torch and restart the laptop indoors, the darn thing was so confused at being shut in the middle of the long ‘connection’ process, that it refused to link to the internet at all and all further efforts to sesnd e-mails were in vain. The insects themselves, a species that swarms every so often after heavy rain, continued to flutter around outside in their hundreds and, in the morning, we found about 300 dead insects which had each excreted a small dollop of green ooze. Ask no questions, get no answers. I swept them of the balcony. Unpleasant.
Other exciting happenstances from the last week? Well, I was sure there were some, but they’ve slipped my sleep deprived mind completely so I’ll make do with relating our journey to the ‘entebbe backpackers hostel’ where I’m now pleasantly ensconced. Our journey to Kampala from Fort Portal began rather well. We bought some tickets and threw our bags into a minibus with some pleasant smelling, though rather soupy incense sticks covering up some smell or another. They tried to charge us extra for our bags, but we pleasantly refused and settled down ton the cozy seats, waiting for the engine to start. About 20 minutes later, everyone else started getting off the buss. It turned out that another, better bus had arrived for Kampala and people had jumped ship. As the first bus was not going to leave with only two passengers, we untied our heavy bags and trudged to bus number two, which took us all the way to Kampala.
Instead of dropping us in the Kampala bus station, however, we were turfed out in a rather too heavily populated high street opposite Owena market. We were then mobbed by taxi drivers and, upon finding one who said he would convey us to Entebbe for 50,000 ugandan shillings, a pleasant chap seized both of my cripplingly heavy bags and balanced them on his head and sprinted off through the crowds. Dodging past fast moving motor bikes and throngs of people we managed to chase him all the way to the taxi.
At this point the offer of 50,000 UGS was repealed by the taxi driver – something I’d been expecting, and he asked us for 70,000. I smiled and offered 55. He suggested 60k and, as this was the price I expected to pay from the start, I cheerily agreed. We got in and were about to head off, when the guy who had carried the bags on his head also chipped in. I’d assumed he’d been in kahoots with the Taxi driver and was going to split the cost, but he thought otherwise. I told the taxi driver that the 5,000 that the bag-fellow was demanding would should certainly be included in our fare and, in future, to make this sort of thing very clear before the bags were carried. The taxi driver drove off with the poor bag man wailing in his wake. I felt rather guilty. When we finally arrived, we were harangued for the best part of 15 minutes for an extra 5k to pay our bag carrier and, eventually, he got tired and wandered off. As the normal fare to the airport is 52,000, I felt that our driver had got rather a good deal anyway.
Which, fairly much, brings us to now. I’ve been sitting in the lovely, cozy, Entebbe backpackers hostel sampling ‘Ugandan Sherry’ (The final verdict: Not that bad) and giving my laptop the charge of its life. Lake Victoria is lovely, as is the fact I’m sitting on a seat with a cushion and am about to eat something that isn’t beans.
Apologies for the above lack of cogent sentence structure, grammer and, lets face it, semantics. I’m really quite exhausted!
Tuesday, 7 September 2010
Putting the 'big' in 'bigamy'.
Tuesday, 7th August, Semliki Time: 7:57pm
Once more unto the blog dear friends, once more. Tragically, this morning our solar battery, which has been on its last legs pretty much since Alex and I got here, finally gave up the ghost, joined the choir in heaven and started pushing up the daisies. This has wrought various tragedies and calamities on the camp. We no longer have the luxury of taking mobile phones into the jungle, our GPS rechargables can no longer be recharged and, horror upon horror, I only have enough juice on my iPod to listen to another 2 hours of the BBCs ‘From our Own Correspondent’. 2 hours to last me a whole week. Jesus wept. The crowning tragedy, dear readers, is that I will no longer be able to charge my laptop. Among other things, this means no more blogs for Semliki as I will be using the remaining power for e-mails only. Here, then, unless some kind of resurrection occurs, is my last blog entry from the Semliki national park. It occurs to me that, even if there is a resurrection, I’ll be gone before the 12th day. We leave on Wednesday week.
Something that’s been noticed by geographers, sociologists and anthropologists alike is that families who live in poorer areas of the world or inhabit less affluent ‘socioeconomic strata’ tend to have a greater number of children than those with more resources. This seems to be the case across humanity and regardless of access to birth control. The extent of the differences in regional fecundity was hammered home hard yesterday during a cheery conversation with Muhindu, the deputy manager of the Semliki safari lodge. I mentioned that my father, over the course of his somewhat dazzling span, had sired five children. Muhindu smiled, winked and said “Aha, a real man!”. I was inclined to agree. From a Darwinian perspective, my dad has done pretty well for himself. Provided, at least, that he can convince his children to breed. Curious, I asked Muhindu how many children he had himself – only four, Dad was still winning. Muhindu said that his brothers, however, had managed more than ten. I was impressed – any more than that, I said, and one would have to be a monster of a man. He then went on to tell me that he had 17 siblings. I almost spluttered on my tea. “Sure, one or two died”, joshed Muhindu, “but we’ve still got a whole lot left”. My father’s own contribution to the gene pool seemed rather pathetic in comparison. Muhindu’s dad’s motto, apparently, is “family planning is family killing”. Truly a man.
Another eye opening curve ball that Muhindu span my way was that he often joked with his wife about polygamy. If they had an argument, he would threaten to marry another wife. This wasn’t what shocked me though. No. It’s a well known fact that bigamy happens frequently in Africa. What did give me pause was the revelation that, in this part of Uganda at least, it is customary for the husband not to tell his first (or second, or third) wife of his plans to marry again. If a man gets bored, he is entirely at his liberty to swan off and marry another woman. The first (or second, or third) wife will only get news of the partnership through her friends. With only one girlfriend and few children to speak of, I felt really rather emasculated. It all sounds rather too much like hard work, but I’ve promised myself one thing. If I do chose to marry two women at once, I’ll make sure to at least tell wifey number one before saying my vows. Till death do us part. All of us.
Once more unto the blog dear friends, once more. Tragically, this morning our solar battery, which has been on its last legs pretty much since Alex and I got here, finally gave up the ghost, joined the choir in heaven and started pushing up the daisies. This has wrought various tragedies and calamities on the camp. We no longer have the luxury of taking mobile phones into the jungle, our GPS rechargables can no longer be recharged and, horror upon horror, I only have enough juice on my iPod to listen to another 2 hours of the BBCs ‘From our Own Correspondent’. 2 hours to last me a whole week. Jesus wept. The crowning tragedy, dear readers, is that I will no longer be able to charge my laptop. Among other things, this means no more blogs for Semliki as I will be using the remaining power for e-mails only. Here, then, unless some kind of resurrection occurs, is my last blog entry from the Semliki national park. It occurs to me that, even if there is a resurrection, I’ll be gone before the 12th day. We leave on Wednesday week.
Something that’s been noticed by geographers, sociologists and anthropologists alike is that families who live in poorer areas of the world or inhabit less affluent ‘socioeconomic strata’ tend to have a greater number of children than those with more resources. This seems to be the case across humanity and regardless of access to birth control. The extent of the differences in regional fecundity was hammered home hard yesterday during a cheery conversation with Muhindu, the deputy manager of the Semliki safari lodge. I mentioned that my father, over the course of his somewhat dazzling span, had sired five children. Muhindu smiled, winked and said “Aha, a real man!”. I was inclined to agree. From a Darwinian perspective, my dad has done pretty well for himself. Provided, at least, that he can convince his children to breed. Curious, I asked Muhindu how many children he had himself – only four, Dad was still winning. Muhindu said that his brothers, however, had managed more than ten. I was impressed – any more than that, I said, and one would have to be a monster of a man. He then went on to tell me that he had 17 siblings. I almost spluttered on my tea. “Sure, one or two died”, joshed Muhindu, “but we’ve still got a whole lot left”. My father’s own contribution to the gene pool seemed rather pathetic in comparison. Muhindu’s dad’s motto, apparently, is “family planning is family killing”. Truly a man.
Another eye opening curve ball that Muhindu span my way was that he often joked with his wife about polygamy. If they had an argument, he would threaten to marry another wife. This wasn’t what shocked me though. No. It’s a well known fact that bigamy happens frequently in Africa. What did give me pause was the revelation that, in this part of Uganda at least, it is customary for the husband not to tell his first (or second, or third) wife of his plans to marry again. If a man gets bored, he is entirely at his liberty to swan off and marry another woman. The first (or second, or third) wife will only get news of the partnership through her friends. With only one girlfriend and few children to speak of, I felt really rather emasculated. It all sounds rather too much like hard work, but I’ve promised myself one thing. If I do chose to marry two women at once, I’ll make sure to at least tell wifey number one before saying my vows. Till death do us part. All of us.
Saturday, 4 September 2010
Of all the Bars
Friday, 3rd August, Fort Portal Time: 7:47pm
The evening finds me sitting in a dark dingy bar in fort portal. The smell of alcohol wafts through the air and some very loud, very drunk fellows are having a very loud, very protracted conversation about the state of Ugandan politics. Cardinal Julius’ election defeat, subsequent trip to Kampala with “somebody’s wife” and the mystifying “cow of Kasese” have just been mentioned. I am “brother Mzungu”, it seems, and I was just asked to confirm that Kampala U was the best university in sub-saharan Africa, discounting South Africa. I was very willing to agree that it had recently been ranked the second best, after Nairobe and was one of the best. The man yelled “You mean I am right” and I just didn’t have the heart (or the balls) to answer in the negative.
Woh, woh, okay, talking about balls, the man just struck up a conversation with me. He was very keen to hear that I liked Uganda, and I told him that it was a lovely country. He was very pleased and asked me how old he was. “22”, came the reply.
“Do you have children?”
“Why, no!”
“Sir, brother Mzungu! You must promise me! You must promise me!”
“Promise you what?”
“When you are 23, you must have children”.
I was rather abashed at this, and said that I would give the matter some consideration, but that, even if my inclinations veered in that direction, my girlfriend might protest.
“Yes. Yes.”, he sighed “brother, you know castration?”
I raised my eyebrows.
“I’ve heard of it… yes.”
“My wife… my wife…” he wailed with a tone of lugubrious inebriation.
“My wife and I had a third child by accident”.
“Oh dear…” I said, wondering if I had guessed correctly what was coming next. With a few wild gesticulations he indicated that he was talking about his testicles.
“She made me have this castration, the balls, the balls which make the semen. They are gone!”.
“Oh no!”, I awkwardly sympathised!
He then started quizzing my about what I was doing on my computer. Multi-tasking, as usual and, not feeling quite brave enough to tell him that I was transcribing our conversation word for word to amuse the people back home, I told him that I was actually e-mailing the girlfriend in question. He insisted that I tell her that it was very important that I had children soon and, hoping that poor old Lana would also see the funny side, I obliged, with a brief explanation. Satisfied, he interrogated me until he got my e-mail address left me alone.
I was intending to talk about a completely different part of the day, but having been talked to at several intervals, I’ve quite lost my train of thought, and might tell you more tomorrow. Edson has arranged some species of meal – I think it’s fried chicken – and I have really no option but to go and eat it.
The evening finds me sitting in a dark dingy bar in fort portal. The smell of alcohol wafts through the air and some very loud, very drunk fellows are having a very loud, very protracted conversation about the state of Ugandan politics. Cardinal Julius’ election defeat, subsequent trip to Kampala with “somebody’s wife” and the mystifying “cow of Kasese” have just been mentioned. I am “brother Mzungu”, it seems, and I was just asked to confirm that Kampala U was the best university in sub-saharan Africa, discounting South Africa. I was very willing to agree that it had recently been ranked the second best, after Nairobe and was one of the best. The man yelled “You mean I am right” and I just didn’t have the heart (or the balls) to answer in the negative.
Woh, woh, okay, talking about balls, the man just struck up a conversation with me. He was very keen to hear that I liked Uganda, and I told him that it was a lovely country. He was very pleased and asked me how old he was. “22”, came the reply.
“Do you have children?”
“Why, no!”
“Sir, brother Mzungu! You must promise me! You must promise me!”
“Promise you what?”
“When you are 23, you must have children”.
I was rather abashed at this, and said that I would give the matter some consideration, but that, even if my inclinations veered in that direction, my girlfriend might protest.
“Yes. Yes.”, he sighed “brother, you know castration?”
I raised my eyebrows.
“I’ve heard of it… yes.”
“My wife… my wife…” he wailed with a tone of lugubrious inebriation.
“My wife and I had a third child by accident”.
“Oh dear…” I said, wondering if I had guessed correctly what was coming next. With a few wild gesticulations he indicated that he was talking about his testicles.
“She made me have this castration, the balls, the balls which make the semen. They are gone!”.
“Oh no!”, I awkwardly sympathised!
He then started quizzing my about what I was doing on my computer. Multi-tasking, as usual and, not feeling quite brave enough to tell him that I was transcribing our conversation word for word to amuse the people back home, I told him that I was actually e-mailing the girlfriend in question. He insisted that I tell her that it was very important that I had children soon and, hoping that poor old Lana would also see the funny side, I obliged, with a brief explanation. Satisfied, he interrogated me until he got my e-mail address left me alone.
I was intending to talk about a completely different part of the day, but having been talked to at several intervals, I’ve quite lost my train of thought, and might tell you more tomorrow. Edson has arranged some species of meal – I think it’s fried chicken – and I have really no option but to go and eat it.
Friday, 3 September 2010
Let them know its Christmas time!
Friday, 3rd August, Fort Portal Time: 1:59pm
So, again, I find myself sitting in the gardens restaurant, watching the denizens of Fort Portal wander past and listening ‘the winner takes it all’, which is being blasted from a nearby but concealed speaker. One of my favourite things about Africa…. and this might sound trite… but one of my favourite things about Africa is the wonderful collection of clothing on display. Fantastic as the traditional garments are, I’m not talking about the brightly coloured, high shouldered, interestingly tailored African clothes. No, I’m talking about the western clothes that seem to have ended up here by accident. Firms like Oxfam and Unicef have done a laudable job at supplying the continent with our cast-off t-shirts and coats and, I’m sure, have kept a great number of poor rural labourers and impoverished slum children dressed and warm. What they’ve also done is created one of the strangest spectacles of cultural juxtaposition I’ve ever experienced. As one drives through the rural hillside farms and winds one’s way through the patchwork-agricultural-valleys, one sees young children herding African long-horn cattle and sporting garments emblazoned with pictures of late 90s stars such as Eminem, Michael Jackson and Ali-G.
More jarring still are the seasonal hats and the ladies coats. More than three times on the two hour journey here, I saw grizzled old villagers with huge unkempt beards ensconced in extraordinarily effeminate, thigh-length women’s trench coats. Twice I’ve had to double take people swerving up hills with huge bunches of bananas on the back of their rickety bikes and fluffy Santa hats on their shaved heads. If I’d been driving, I would have crashed the car and sent both myself and the African saint Nick to an unexpected and untimely demise.
Best of all, though, are the of-cast shirts with strange slogans that seem to have made their way here in huge quantities. Today I saw a rather humble looking man with a shirt that said “I am always right!”. Last time we visited fort portal, there was a young boy in a tie-die shirt which bore the inexplicable slogan “Sexy Crab’s Shack of Fish” and, when I first got here, I saw an old, old man in a rather ragged “Condoms, not Bombs – I want to score, not go to war” tee. So, if you’re ever thinking of throwing away some clothes that are just too bizarre or inappropriate to wear, make the world a weirder place, donate them to Oxfam!
So, again, I find myself sitting in the gardens restaurant, watching the denizens of Fort Portal wander past and listening ‘the winner takes it all’, which is being blasted from a nearby but concealed speaker. One of my favourite things about Africa…. and this might sound trite… but one of my favourite things about Africa is the wonderful collection of clothing on display. Fantastic as the traditional garments are, I’m not talking about the brightly coloured, high shouldered, interestingly tailored African clothes. No, I’m talking about the western clothes that seem to have ended up here by accident. Firms like Oxfam and Unicef have done a laudable job at supplying the continent with our cast-off t-shirts and coats and, I’m sure, have kept a great number of poor rural labourers and impoverished slum children dressed and warm. What they’ve also done is created one of the strangest spectacles of cultural juxtaposition I’ve ever experienced. As one drives through the rural hillside farms and winds one’s way through the patchwork-agricultural-valleys, one sees young children herding African long-horn cattle and sporting garments emblazoned with pictures of late 90s stars such as Eminem, Michael Jackson and Ali-G.
More jarring still are the seasonal hats and the ladies coats. More than three times on the two hour journey here, I saw grizzled old villagers with huge unkempt beards ensconced in extraordinarily effeminate, thigh-length women’s trench coats. Twice I’ve had to double take people swerving up hills with huge bunches of bananas on the back of their rickety bikes and fluffy Santa hats on their shaved heads. If I’d been driving, I would have crashed the car and sent both myself and the African saint Nick to an unexpected and untimely demise.
Best of all, though, are the of-cast shirts with strange slogans that seem to have made their way here in huge quantities. Today I saw a rather humble looking man with a shirt that said “I am always right!”. Last time we visited fort portal, there was a young boy in a tie-die shirt which bore the inexplicable slogan “Sexy Crab’s Shack of Fish” and, when I first got here, I saw an old, old man in a rather ragged “Condoms, not Bombs – I want to score, not go to war” tee. So, if you’re ever thinking of throwing away some clothes that are just too bizarre or inappropriate to wear, make the world a weirder place, donate them to Oxfam!
Thursday, 2 September 2010
Check your e-mails, Parents!!
Odd blog entry I know - Ma, Pa, if you're reading this, hit your respective inboxes!
Wednesday, 1 September 2010
Chewing the Crud
Wednesday, 1st August, Semliki Time: 7:26pm
Considering that so many animals and insects flit and fly around it, the jungle seems to be quite free of yummy things to each. Maybe us folks at the top of the food chain are a bit picky, but the Saba florida munched by the chimps is a bit too sour for my tastes and everything else either wriggles away, bites or is made of indigestible plant cellulose. Without going away and putting a concerted effort into evolving several more stomachs or a large caecum, I think I’d have considerable trouble living as a hunter gatherer and it's a wonder that humans managed to do it for more than 99% of our history.
Still, today, I did give hunter-gathering a shot. Just a try, mind you. Just a we dabble. As we were squelching through a thicket in our rainy-season sodden walking boots (the waterproofing helps keep water in in these conditions) my guide, Moses, pointed to a though looking thorny green vine that was hanging in front of the path. I almost managed to pop a thorny stem in my mouth before Moses grabbed my arm and shook his head. Nono! You eat the roots. Well, of course! He pulled out the bayonet of his Automatic Kalashnikov and set to work removing the soil from the base of the unfortunate plant.
After a thorough rinse in not-quite-opaque water the dish was ready to be eaten. The taste was somewhat indescribable, but I’ll try. The first flavour that hit you was a little like sucking the dirt off a pine cone. About half a second later, this was replaced by a taste not unlike marzipan with a hit of liquorice and a dash of peppermint. Then the plant started to taste like those artificial sugar lumps that you put in coffee if you’re weight conscious or diabetic and, finally, the taste was overwhelmed by the slightly unpalatable sensation of chewing fibrous grit. After you’d swallowed, a cold, lingering ghost of the flavour stayed on the tongue for a good five minutes.
I was unable to elicit the name of this peculiar creeper – Moses only knew it in his local language- but apparently its sold at markets and eaten by chimps. If anyone knows the species that I spent half an hour munching perplexedly, spill the beans, do.
Considering that so many animals and insects flit and fly around it, the jungle seems to be quite free of yummy things to each. Maybe us folks at the top of the food chain are a bit picky, but the Saba florida munched by the chimps is a bit too sour for my tastes and everything else either wriggles away, bites or is made of indigestible plant cellulose. Without going away and putting a concerted effort into evolving several more stomachs or a large caecum, I think I’d have considerable trouble living as a hunter gatherer and it's a wonder that humans managed to do it for more than 99% of our history.
Still, today, I did give hunter-gathering a shot. Just a try, mind you. Just a we dabble. As we were squelching through a thicket in our rainy-season sodden walking boots (the waterproofing helps keep water in in these conditions) my guide, Moses, pointed to a though looking thorny green vine that was hanging in front of the path. I almost managed to pop a thorny stem in my mouth before Moses grabbed my arm and shook his head. Nono! You eat the roots. Well, of course! He pulled out the bayonet of his Automatic Kalashnikov and set to work removing the soil from the base of the unfortunate plant.
After a thorough rinse in not-quite-opaque water the dish was ready to be eaten. The taste was somewhat indescribable, but I’ll try. The first flavour that hit you was a little like sucking the dirt off a pine cone. About half a second later, this was replaced by a taste not unlike marzipan with a hit of liquorice and a dash of peppermint. Then the plant started to taste like those artificial sugar lumps that you put in coffee if you’re weight conscious or diabetic and, finally, the taste was overwhelmed by the slightly unpalatable sensation of chewing fibrous grit. After you’d swallowed, a cold, lingering ghost of the flavour stayed on the tongue for a good five minutes.
I was unable to elicit the name of this peculiar creeper – Moses only knew it in his local language- but apparently its sold at markets and eaten by chimps. If anyone knows the species that I spent half an hour munching perplexedly, spill the beans, do.
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