Kampala and the Road to Mbarara

10/5/09

Definitely some things I’ve never seen before….
Started out yesterday morning at the BOMA, a hotel in Entebbe. On the grounds itself there must have been 20 different species of birds that I had never seen. Driver came during breakfast of course (not his fault, we knew he would be arriving from 8:30-9ish. Luggage stowed in the back of his truck (with passenger seat attached), while I got to spend the next 5 hours in the back seat with my knees up to my chest. Better than many of the mutatus (minibuses) that I have seen, but not the most comfortable ride.

Driving through Entebbe and Kampala was an experience. Mobile is a big thing here in Uganda, as evidenced by the repeating iteration of buildings painted as billboards. The building is still used, although by building I mean a 9 x 5 brick structure horizontally oriented to the road with two metal doors on the front and a corrugated roof. The buildings themselves are often painted a characteristic color, with ads above the front doors or along the sides of the buildings. Alternating between a bright pink for Zain, white/red for Wydin, yellow for MTN; by the time I got to Mbarara I felt like I had been through South Dakota’s Wall Drug alley. It took until Mbarara for me to figure out what they company of Zain actually did; they had signs everywhere, including billboards and mileposts that proudly displayed their corporate logo, but I had no idea what they actually sold. I guess Nike might seem the same to an outsider, since many of their ads aren’t very particular about what the company actually sells.

The sides of the roads were packed with people. I never realized how much life in the US is spent indoors, or how little we actually see people. Most of us carry out our lives in a building, either with work, living or entertainment. Does not seem to be the case in Uganda. I saw more people out and about on that drive than I have ever seen in Portland. People were standing in masses at the sides of roads, either working on broken down mutatus, sitting on their boda-bodas (motorcycles), or sitting on the stoop of their buildings. It seemed like quite a few people were just sitting staring off into the middle distance. I don’t mean this as any discredit to the Ugandan people; they appear very industrious, but I have been told that for young people, finding jobs is a real problem. Many of the young men on bodas were grouped in clusters, of course.

Driving in Uganda is an active experience. Kampala has traffic the way it should be, as long as you don’t worry about pesky things like speed limits, traffic lanes or safety. Add to it that the city is inundated with mutatus, white minibuses with a horizontal white and blue checkered band along the middle parallel to the ground. I never understood how the buses knew when and were to stop, but they appeared to swerve both into and out of traffic in random intervals. Their were alternately 2 to 5 lanes of traffic. Bodas and bicycles commonly got swept to the sides, with a driver imperiously pounding on his horn to say “if you don’t move, you will be run over.” Broken down bodas and crashed mutatus on the side of the road attest to this mad max philosophy. From time to time from the road I could see down the dirt roads further into town. I caught glimpses of what I would only call a slum, with pucked and cratered dirt roads with a central ravine and flanking wooden shacks.

After a while I felt that I should put together Kampala bingo, since there were so many things that came up again and again:Shop selling bed frames, with the bed frames prominently displayed on the ground between the shop and the road
Shop selling chairs, once again with merchandise wedged in the 6 feet of space between the stoop of the building and the every shifting lanes of traffic on the road
Broken down mutatu
Shop selling metal doors
Shop selling metal window grates
Man urinating on side of the road
Three (or more) people stacked on a boda, women riding sidesaddle

The following would only count in multiples
Mutatus (could make the number as high as you like and it would still fill in minutes.
5 (or more) young men on bodas in a group sitting and staring
Bundles of motoke (a type of banana)
People carrying a yellow plastic canister- in appearance, much like a jerry-can for gasoline, but they are all a stereotypical yellow color. I saw women, men and children carrying up to three of these; not sure what they were carrying whether it was water, oil or gasoline. If they had a bicycle, it could be loaded up with many more, with the bike itself mainly used to transport goods, and only rarely ridden.

Our driver took a ‘short cut’ to avoid the traffic in Kampala itself. Not sure if it worked; we definitely did not get stuck in traffic, but were barreling down dirt roads, up hills and down around corners at a concerning pace given how close people were to the road.

On the way we got to talk with our driver, Daniel, about his family and life in Uganda. We asked him why Mbarara had been growing so much, since it is one of the fastest growing cities in Uganda. He replied that many of the people of Mbarara, culturally distinct and separate from those people in the capitol, used to come to Kampala to do manual labor, digging, planting and building. According to him, a while ago they got it into their heads that maybe they should work for themselves, and started building up their own city, working and expanding their existing subsistence farms and supplementing with crops such as tea and coffee.

Finally got to the road outside of Kampala, only 200+ km to go to Mbarara.

I drove the Alcan, I winded my way up logging roads in the mountains of Montana looking for old mine tailings, I’ve driven my car through the tidal pools of denali flats with the water coming up through the floorboards; but I have never been on any road like that from Kampala to Mbarara. They are doing quite a bit of construction, and on the refinished parts our driver was able to punch it up to 120km/hr. Unfortunately, the maximum length of these repaved sections appeared to be one mile long, since he would then have to rapidly decelerate in order to clamber down from the sections of paved road. Add to this craters waiting to swallow your car- I could call them potholes, but that would be a discredit to potholes everywhere. There are potholes, and then there are holes in the road that if you hit them you will lose a bumper, muffler or perhaps your engine block. There were many of these, and at times it felt like we were riding speed racers on Endor (I know, geeky star wars reference, but whatever) or slaloming back and forth between potholes, all the while alternating gunning the engine to 120km/hr or slowing down to a snail’s pace.This went on for more than four hours….

Our driver was wonderful, and navigated this obstacle course without scaring the four mzungus (white people- but I’m not sure how it’s spelled) wedged inside the truck cab. He didn’t pass around blind corners and respectfully honked his horn when passing people to let them know he was going around. Of course, there are no single or double lines to tell you if and when it is ‘safe’ to pass. Not really necessary, since you can pass someone on the right with traffic barreling down to you from the other direction and they will scream by you on the right. It does not make for a comfortable trip when you’re passing a car and can see a huge cargo truck just down the road heading towards you.

As we got further out from Kampala I liked the countryside more and more. The shacks on the side of the road got more well maintained, the broken down lots full of plastic bags and trash were replaced with banana fields, and there appeared to be many more people industriously working on something, whether it was in the fields, working on a drum or basket, or selling motoke or other vegetables on a plank by the side of the road. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of native forest left in this part of Uganda; mostly rolling hills with field after field of banana trees.
Finally after an interminable trek we arrived in Mbarara and were settled into the guest house at the university, thankfully there were enough rooms available that we could stay right near the hospital instead of having to walk in from the hotel.