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.
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