January 2010

Happy New Year!

At the end of December we went on our safari in western Uganda. It was a long, long trip there and back, but it was nice to see more of the countryside and some parts looked quite different to what we are used to.
We took the ‘top road’ on the way there which was fairly slow as they are repairing large portions of it, but mainly the roads were OK. We had had our shock absorbers replaced – they take a bit of a battering here – as I couldn’t face a long trip on bumpy roads with shonky shock absorbers.
We stayed in Kampala with friends the night before as that reduced the journey by two hours, but it still took us eight and a half hours from theirs.
We stopped on the way at a café. On the menu we saw they were selling ‘fruit scorns’.
Anyway we arrived in the evening on 30th, and asked about going on safari the next morning.
“You need to have breakfast at 6am then go on the game drive at 6.30am” they said, “as the animals sleep in the afternoon.”
We were far too tired to get up at 5am the next morning so had a sleep-in, had breakfast, then arrived at the National Park around midday on 31st.
The entry fee was198,300/- , so we gave them 200,000/- in notes. “Don’t you have the correct money?” asked the man.
We took our own car on the safari and managed to find a ranger who accompanied us on a game drive, showed us the best routes to take and explained about the animals and birds we saw. It took three hours to drive round.
Later in the day we also went on a 2-hour boat trip and saw lots more animals. We even saw a hippo doing a barrel roll - it rolls onto its back with its legs up, then rolls onto its front again. Jordan managed to get a shot and is very proud of it. We saw hippos, elephants, lions, kobs (like antelopes), a baboon, crocodiles, buffaloes, warthogs, banded mongoose and lots of birds.
Safari parks talk about the Big Five – hippos, elephants, lions, leopards and rhinos. This park has the Big Four (no rhinos) we saw most but we didn’t get to see the leopards.

There were many, many kobs, and they have a mating ground there. The males stand in a big circle and the females come to look at them. If they don’t think a male kob is good looking enough, they move onto the next one. All the kobs looked exactly the same to us, so I don’t know what criteria the females use!

As the entry fee gave us 24 hour access to the Park, we decided to go again in the morning, so in the evening (New Year’s Eve) we went to bed early, in order to get up at 5am for another game drive. We used the same ranger to show us round, who not only had been celebrating New Year, but also his birthday and hadn’t got to bed till 4am. He was wide awake while we were all too tired to really appreciate it, and the children even slept through a large part of it! Mind you, we actually got to see fewer animals than we did the afternoon before, so it wasn’t too bad.

It was quite different to the safari I did in Kenya many years ago in the Maasai Mara, and Jon and I were a tad disappointed. As we drove around on designated paths it felt a bit like being in a big park in the UK….
The safari lodge we stayed in is new and uses solar power. Unfortunately the weather was uncharacteristically overcast for the week around Xmas, which meant we had no hot water or electricity. Given that the lodge was about 2km from the equator, and January is the hottest month of the year, you would have thought we’d have had a pretty good chance of the solar power working!
There were also no power points in the rooms, so everyone had to charge their cellphone in the dining area (which must have been on mains electricity).

We drove back on the ‘bottom’ road and went through a beautiful area called Ankole. It’s probably the most attractive part of Uganda we have seen.
Fortunately we stayed with friends in Kampala again, which helped us hugely as the trip back took 10 hours this time. We couldn’t have faced a further two hour drive to Jinja.

We crossed the equator twice – once near our safari lodge, and once on the way back. On the way back, a little trading area has built up around the equator, with very nice gift shops and café. An enterprising Ugandan has set up three sink-like bowls, one on the equator, one slightly north and one slightly south, to show the different ways that water goes down the plughole. I would have asked him to demonstrate, but he was charging 10,000/-. Having lived in both the northern and southern hemisphere, I’ve actually done the experiment myself, and it isn’t that exciting!

As we reached the outskirts of Kampala, I texted our friends to say we had reached Kampala. Traffic there is appalling, so after an hour and we hadn’t arrived, they phoned us up and said “Which Kampala did you go to?”

I spent some time looking through the Uganda travel guide to see where else we would like to visit before we leave. There are not many places. A lot of the country is long roads with small towns or villages which offer little for tourists.
One of the more touristy things is a trip across one of the lakes. On one side of the lake is a tiny town with two places you can stay in. As the better of two places to stay costs $1.50 a night including breakfast, we thought we may give it a miss.
For those who want to cross the lake, there is a boat which seems to travel once a day at random times. If you happen to miss the boat and it’s evening time, they recommend you go to Police station and ask to sleep on their floor.

Earlier in the month we were invited to a party where the children had to go in medieval costume. Jordan had made some Crusaders armour out of cardboard and painted red crosses on it. For Kira I designed a top and long skirt, bought some royal blue satin material, and we had it made up by one of the sewing ladies who has a treadle machine on the pavement. I then sewed silver braid on it and made her a pointy hat with a ribbon of material coming down from the top. She loves it. The people hosting the party had made a tree house that looked like a castle; had made some stocks and had got wet sponges to throw at people in the stocks; someone had painted a huge sheet with the family’s coat of arms on it and someone else had painted a huge picture of a dragon. They had made a sword for all the children, and had made a birthday cake in the shape of a castle. Very impressive!
Kira wore the outfit the next day when we went to a restaurant. The owner saw it, was impressed, and so brought some chocolate cake over for everyone at the table.

I went to the shops with Jon as he wanted to buy some new trousers. He found some he liked but they were about an inch too long. The woman in the shop said “I will take them to the tailor” and zoomed out of the shop. She will have taken them to one of the many males who also sit on the pavement with a sewing machine. We wandered around the other shops for a few minutes, came back and they had been shortened. The tailor only charged 1,500/- (48p, $1.10), and he even ironed them as well.

As we were wandering around the shops we spotted one of the Pineapple Men. These are people who sell pineapples from a big wooden wheelbarrow. You can either just buy a pineapple as it is, or you can get him to ‘peel’ it for you. It’s very impressive how they do it – he holds the top of the pineapple, and using a very sharp knife cuts all the peel off. Then he puts 8 slices in it like a cake, from the top down. Then he places the pineapple into a plastic bag, bottom first and as he does this he cuts off the top off which leaves 8 slices of peeled pineapple in the bag for you. Much easier than struggling to peel and cut it yourself.

The children started back at their respective ‘schools’ this month. The boys Jordan is homeschooled with went on a homeschool conference for a week in Kenya. They have worked out some alternative lyrics to the film Highschool Musical and have called it ‘Homeschool Musical’. It’s very funny.

While they were away Jordan had a golf lesson as his weekly sports tutoring. He asked me to join him, so I did. It’s only the second golf lesson I’ve had and I enjoyed it, despite the blistering heat. My shoulders were aching the next day though.

Last year Kira’s school had seven pupils. One has left, we think to go to Italy, and another has been abducted by a family member in another country! This leaves five. Two are overseas until February and one decided to start back in the second week. This meant that in Week One there was only Kira and one other girl.
Not only that but the teacher was on a course, so we had a replacement teacher. This teacher loved everything about the school, and the children liked her, so everyone was happy.

A couple of little boys, Dan and Kennedy, live in the school’s compound with their mother in the ‘boys quarters’ at the back. They are nice children and sometimes I give the older one, Dan, a ‘driving lesson’. They both come in the car. Kennedy sits in the front seat, Dan sits on my knee and I let him steer the car. The roads round there are very quiet and you rarely see another vehicle. He loves it and tells everyone he can drive. I took this photo and showed them it. They both laughed!

I took Kira and her friend Michelle swimming one day. Michelle is Ugandan, and as she watched me putting sunscreen on she said “If I put sunscreen on, my skin turns purple.”

As part of Kira’s homeschooling we have been studying composting, and have now got a compost bin. Our research shows that it needs to be in a shady spot in the garden to keep it from drying out. This has proved - well – impossible, as we have no shady spot in the garden. Amazing, isn’t it, no shady spot. I’ve put it behind the house which has shade for a few hours, and then have to give it a dousing with water every day to keep it moist.

Mind you, it is helpful having a sunny garden when you decide as I did, to have a hangi. A hangi, for you non-New Zealand people, is a traditional Maori way of cooking food – in the ground.
First we dug a hole in the lawn (a hidden bit of the lawn), then put a lattice of small branches near the bottom to support the igneous rocks we had to find. Then we put wood/branches in there and burnt them for one and a half hours to get the rocks hot enough. Then we scraped the ashes off the rocks, put a damp cloth on them and put our food on, in silver foil containers. As this was a trial, we just used potatoes, onions, carrots and sausages. Then we put the soil back on, ensuring no steam escaped and left it all for a couple of hours.
Now, as people have pointed out, it is much easier if you put them in the oven … but where’s the fun in that?
The hardest part was finding enough wood. Many Ugandans use wood for their own cooking, so there wasn’t much around. We did manage to find a bit of what smelt like a pine tree and loaded it in the car. My car boot carpet is now full of tiny pine needles I can’t get out.
Anyway the food was cooked wonderfully. The only small problem was a bit of the silver foil cover buckled under the weight of the soil and some earth got in. Jon and Jordan weren’t bothered and just washed a few sausages and potatoes under the tap and they were fine!

You have to get used to the red earth round here, it gets everywhere. When you go shopping round the Jinja shops your hands get dirty when you pick things up as they have a coating of dust on them. Some supermarkets have a cloth at the till and wipe the products, while one supermarket gives you hand wipes at the checkout.

And talking of cleaning things, I asked John Bosco to give our fridge a clean. I expected he would take the items out and wipe the inside of the fridge. Instead he took the items out, and carried the fridge outside onto the lawn with the help of Geoffrey the gardener and cleaned it there!

And so the squash court here, which was newly refurbished not so long ago isn’t being looked after, and will look quite run down if it’s not maintained. There is usually a collection of creatures in there – the occasional bat, lizard or spider, along with a regular cloud of mosquitoes. It’s hard trying to hit the ball when several mozzies decide to fly in front of your face. We spend as much time swatting the mozzies with the racquets as we do the ball.
There must be leaks in the roof and there are streaks of dried rain down the walls, which have caught a lot of dead mozzies.
At times when there is no electricity, it’s quite hard to play as you can’t see. One time I was playing with Jordan when the power went off. He decided we should play with the door open. The ball hardly ever hits the door, but the first shot we took saw the ball sailing out of the court and onto the grass outside. It went outside a few more times, one time landing in a muddy puddle.

Jordan has got an idea for a version of Monopoly called Uganda Monopoly. Basically you have a board with potholes in it and you drive round the board any way you like, overtaking, going the wrong way or going across the board. Instead of the top hat and the shoe and the dog, you use pieces like a boda boda, a matatu (minibus), a goat, a banana fibre sunhat etc The first few properties are mud huts, moving on to small houses and building up to the posh hotels in Kampala. If you land on the electricity or the water companies, you only have to pay sometimes, as the chances are they won’t be working. I think the game should catch on …

One of the UK people we know here works for the British Forces. He gets sent DVDs of English TV programmes from the BFBS – British Forces Broadcasting Service. He’s lent us a whole wad of them – it’s great, as we don’t watch TV here, the reception is poor and we only get two not-very-interesting Ugandan stations. We feel like we are watching ‘real’ TV. I guess it is also good training for when we move back to Blighty. At least we’ll know some of the programmes.

A Ugandan I met a while back is getting married. Here, people have expensive weddings they can’t afford, so they have a group of people who help them fundraise for the wedding. Each week they have a meeting. Although I don’t really know this person well, and haven’t met the fiancée, I have been invited 14 times to the many pre-wedding meetings. Crikey!

And while I very rarely talk about politics there are a couple of current issues that are getting a lot of coverage. One is the proposed ‘Anti-Homosexual Bill’ that would criminalize homosexuality and institute the death penalty for gay HIV-positive people.
A U.S. news report said that ‘Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made the strongest statement yet by an administration official that the United States will not tolerate efforts to criminalize homosexuality among countries that receive U.S. funding to combat HIV/AIDS.’
And secondly ‘The US Congress has directed the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, to closely monitor the Uganda Government’s preparation for the 2011 general elections.’ Uganda’s general election is a year away, and Jon and I had decided that if we were still living here then, we would leave the country for a while, while it was going on. It is Africa after all.

Now that we only have a few months left here I do feel a sadness at leaving. I love the sunshine, the relaxed atmosphere, the fact that you don’t have to dress to keep warm, the African-ness of it all. On Saturday mornings I go to the market. I love going there; it’s so ‘African’. I will really miss things like that. I will have to come back…