From Ethiopia to Uganda...By Air!

Coming from Ethiopia, Uganda looked green—obscenely green. The watercourses of Southern Ethiopia were parched dry. From the airplane above, I could see only the claw marks of sunken waters, riverbeds without rivers. This began to change when we entered Ugandan air space. Immediately, a handful of forested mountains rose from the lowlands. As we grew closer to Kampala, neatly terraced hillsides popped up, growing in frequency until they outnumbered the patches of scrub. By the time we circled around Entebbe National Airport, the world below had matured into a rich carpet of red soil and luminous verdure.

I had been informed by a Ugandan sitting next to me that, compared to Ethiopia, Uganda was unencumbered by bureaucracy. I rejoiced at the prospect. The bureaucratic morass in Ethiopia had been truly unbelievable. You can’t give a birr to a beggar without having to wait for a receipt. My parting memory of the country was an abortive attempt to get a police report for my stolen camera. I went to the Mercato police station where I was shifted between four different offices and mistakenly taken to jail. There an unusually jubilant mob of prisoners greeted me with hoots and howls. Everyone wanted my mobile number.

After an hour or so of acquainting myself with every inch of the station, an English-speaking policeman wrote down everything I told him in Amharic. Then he did this again on a more ‘official’ form. After two hours of this, he informed me that it was forbidden for him to write in English and explained that I had to go to the main station near St. George’s Church. There, he said, I would be given a form to take to the U.S. Embassy where I would receive another form to return to the police station. Then, apparently, something would happen. He estimated the entire process would take three days. In any case, the form for the main station took another hour to write up. I left Ethiopia with about one-eighth of the undertaking complete.

My Ugandan visa took no more than two minutes; my Ethiopian one had taken no less than one hundred. Perhaps what I heard through the grapevine was true: Uganda is an easy country to travel in. I walked out of the terminal in high spirits. Having mastered fidel, the Ethiopian alphabet, and perfected the pronunciation of Amharic’s glottal consonants only to run into a brick wall when it came to verb conjugation, I was anxious to flex some of my Swahili. I encountered a taxi driver as I exited the terminal and decided to start right away.

“Hujambo bwana?”

He looked at me like I was retarded. I learned quickly that Kampalans, for the most part, eschewed Swahili in favor of Luganda. They also drove at speeds unfathomable for Ethiopia. As the taxi hummed along at 120 km an hour past bicycles and purring motorcycles, Entebbe gave way to Kampala. During three days in Uganda’s capital city, I noticed several tangible differences from my beloved Addis Abeba.

First of all, the cityfolk didn’t convulse into abject hysteria at the sight of an mzungu. I felt a bit let down at the lack of throngs and screaming children. Indeed, I felt like I had gone from being Brad Pitt to Dallas Lillich in a matter of hours. Secondly, Kampalans were glaringly free of disease. They seemed, on the whole, in much better shape than Ethiopians, many of whom suffer from creepy eye diseases and ringworm issues. Moreover, I didn’t see a single leper or unfortunate on the verge of starvation. But despite these happy absences, I found Kampala to be a much less walkable city than Addis. My difficulty in getting around probably owed as much to my tenderfoot status as it did to the hill density; less ambiguous was the constant stream of screaming cars at every intersection where I invariably waited for five minutes before hurtling myself kamikaze-style into traffic. At least, it seemed, Kampalans were aware that walking obliviously in the road was insalubrious.

I checked into the Red Chilli Hideaway which had been recommended to me by a number of people. They only had self-contained cabins available for $30. I had some extra money from leeching off of Hannah Maryam for two months, and I desired something like comfort—a condition I couldn’t find in Ethiopia in the $20-$30 range. (The ‘nice’ hotels I stayed in when I was sick always seemed to have a throbbing club scene directly underneath my room and a major surplus of gap-toothed whores.) I was dead-tired from staying up all night eating chat with Meki and wanted to sleep, so I committed myself to the expense.

The amiable guy at the desk walked me to the room. We chatted in Swahili on the way. I ended up completely confounding him because half the words came out in Amharic. As we neared the cabin, it looked preposterously large. “This is all mine?” I asked. He nodded, opening the door.

At first sight I was completely awestruck. I had in my possession not a mere room, but a fully functional babe lair. There were three overstuffed couches, a mahogany dinner table with candelabrum (and candles), silky curtains rippling from capacious windows, a double bed, bathtub and en-suite bathroom with—gasp—toilet paper! “Are you sure this is 60,000 shillings?” He told me it was and left. I walked around the cabin akimbo a couple of times and then passed out face down.

I awoke submerged in a tremendous puddle of drool. I rolled over, disentangled myself form the mosquito net, and walked to the on-site restaurant and bar in search of recruits for the babe lair. Upon entering the premises, the guy at the desk told me that a girl by the name of Lauren had noticed my name in the guestbook. “She knows you,” he said. “She went to the same school as you!” I neglected to remember that I’d signed my address as ‘University of Wisconsin-Madison’ and began entertaining thoughts of a pulchritudinous secret admirer. Perhaps she knew me from my band Johnny and the Church Camp Rebels and was trembling in the presence of a bona fide lady-killer. The name Lauren rang sonorously in my mind conjuring up unlikely visions of an exotic beauty wholly devoted to my every whim. I suppose I was pretty lonely. In this way I sat around drinking until I noticed a comely young woman with a wireless card sticking out of her laptop.

“Excuse me,” I said suavely as she passed by. “Do they have wireless here?” “No,” she said wistfully and a conversation was born. Before long she told me that Lauren, her girlfriend, had seen that I was from Madison where she had gotten her B.A. And so, as is often the case with me, the spider had not caught a fly but instead idiotically entwined itself in its own web.

This ended up being just fine, as I made two fascinating new friends whom I bored with my endless blathering about the ex-girlfriend who I clearly hadn’t sweated out of my system. They also had with them a large supply of Tanzanian swill, a resource that I exploited into extinction. Lauren was a documentary filmmaker with a history of NGO work; Beth was a young New Yorker politico on her way to Harvard Law. They were traveling around the world for a year before returning to their sure-fire, power-couple existence on the eastern seaboard. They moved into the babe lair with me for two nights wherein the most erotically-charged moment ended up being my early-morning sighting of Beth’s bare back.

We got our plans together for an excursion to Lake Bunyonyi and had some excellent conversations in which Lauren gleaned a number of regrettable quotes from me for their website’s exhaustive ‘Quotes’ section. I seem to remember saying something alone the lines of “The Qu’ran isn’t very chill.” (See girlsgoneworldwide.com for the incriminating evidence.) We spent a couple of days in Kampala before boarding a bus to Kabale en route to four days of easygoing eating, reading and sleeping on Itambira island.