We’ll be back Mbarara, all is forgiven!

Oh my word Kampala is total chaos. We will never complain about Mbarara again.

We wake up early after a pretty disturbed nights sleep, it seems our hotel backs onto the party street and Monday night is a huge one, and make our way to the hotel lobby for breakfast eager to start our day of tourism. Now I must say, if like me holiday planning is not really your thing, you should definitely travel with Sacha. The girl is so organised! She literally has the whole day mapped out for us; all I have to do is tag along. Amazing.

We start our day by visiting the market, naturally, envisaging something very similar to our market in Mbarara. How many times must we tell ourselves never to expect anything? The market in Kampala is nothing like the market in Mbarara except that they both have fruit and vegetables. The market in Kampala is completely manic, sellers just set up camp anywhere on the floor so you literally have to climb over people and produce to get through. What’s more is that it is completely heaving with locals. We had been told by Primrose, who lives in Kampala, that the people in Kampala are even friendlier than those in Mbarara. She is wrong. The people in Kampala are so rude! If you happen to get in between them and the place that they are going they will go through you rather than around you. As a consequence Sacha and I are now expert people dodgers – you do not want to end up on your arse in Kampala!

After a quick look around, Sacha and I decide to move on to the next stop on our Kampala tour. This is to a second market in the southwest area of Kampala, which specialises in beautiful fabrics and tailors as we’re both keen to get some clothes made whilst we’re here. As we make our way over it starts to dawn on us just how tame Mbarara is. At least in Mbarara the chaos has a level of order to it, in Kampala it is literally every man for himself, and because it’s closer to the equator it’s also SO much hotter. Combine that with the noise and you literally find yourself in hell. We even walked past a blood drive on the side of the main road by the ‘river’ (make of that what you will), which had two gigantic speakers blasting out Ugandan hip hop at either side of the tent. By the time we make it to the market we can only bare to glance at it through the mayhem before deciding that we are too hot and uncomfortable to cope with it today. Furthermore fabric and tailors are not in short supply in Kampala, we have already walked past hundreds of shops selling stunning fabrics on the way over, so there’s options to get our clothes made elsewhere.

Continuing on our way we suddenly realise we haven’t got a clue where we are, we’re supposed to be en route to the Gaddafi mosque on the west side of town, but whilst we can see it the road seems to be taking us through a slum rather than to it. Also we’re now completely roasting and getting pretty dehydrated. We decide it’s worth stopping in some shade and figuring out where we’ve got to. Unfortunately the only place we can find that looks safe enough to do that is the petrol station. But hey, beggars can’t be choosers and so we settle down next to a pump and crack out all the maps we have access to. Thank god we still have a sense of humour to laugh about it. So it turns out we’re traipsing through Kampala’s biggest slum, with all our valuables including MacBooks, IPods, IPads, and IPhones in our rucksacks, we are essentially walking Apple Stores. Woops. Luckily no-one seems to be paying us too much attention even though the levels of our discretion are pretty variable. We eventually work out that if we follow the road just a little further we will reach a crossroads that will take us straight up to the mosque. Simple enough.

Once at the mosque, some half an hour and a few wrong turns later, we are immediately dressed up to resemble good Muslim women. We thought we had dressed very conservatively, apparently not! (Hilarious pics attached). We were then taken on a tour of the two prayer rooms and the minaret by our absolute character of a guide whose name has escaped me (sorry!). The mosque is incredibly beautiful, however it is only a few years old. It was eventually finished in 2007 after Amin started construction in the 90s. However, midway through construction Amin stopped supporting the project and therefore the mosque was left uncompleted. When Gaddafi visited a

few years later he was approached by the leader of the Muslim community, who asked him for financial help to finish the project. Gaddafi agreed with the approval of Museveni. The involvement of both Amin and Gaddafi in the construction of Kampala’s greatest mosque has lead it to be nicknamed the ‘dictators mosque’. We were also lucky enough to witness the call to prayer, which our guide continued to sing for the rest of our tour.

It was then time to climb the minaret, a pretty mean feat for our exhausted selves. However, our guide quickly convinced us of the good it would do for our butts and thighs so we eager(ish)ly took on the challenge.

Well it was definitely worth it, the views from the top of the minaret are stunning. You can see the whole of Kampala and get a glimpse of

Lake Victoria from the top, making it especially helpful in planning our walk back to the hotel. Honestly if it weren’t for the lack of refreshments it would have been perfect (everyone knows I love a good city skyline with a drink), but nevermind, we’d spotted some small Eritrean / Ethiopian café type things just outside the Mosque’s entrance so we decide to head back down and check them out.

Sacha takes me to some bloody weird places. Ignoring all the more established coffee shops she chooses one that is a glorified mud garage, with no front door and two plastic chairs squeezed into the corners. We are clearly the first two white people to ever have entered this shop as the two owners insist that we pose for many photos with them before we leave, but hey at least we have friends now!

By this time it is around 4pm and we’re getting hungry for lunch. We’d noticed a park across the road from our hotel and so we make our way back via the market to pick up some lunch on the way. Unfortunately the park is a no go due to some heinous crime that had taken place on its grounds, so we make our way through the streets of Kampala to find a little bit of green where we can sit and satisfy our rumbling tummies. We eventually end up by the Ugandan Freedom Moment, just by a roundabout. It may have a few homeless people sleeping by it, but it also has the green that we were looking for, so we contain our reservations, lay out our blankets and start to eat.

Unsurprisingly we’re not left by ourselves for very long before we’re approached by one of our fans / a potential homeless person requesting just a few minutes of our time. Luckily this one seems sweet enough and probably just wonders what on earth we’re doing, quite frankly I’d started to wonder the same thing, we were eating by a main road after all.

With lunch over our thoughts quickly turn to dinner; it was 6pm by this point. We decide that it’s high time we try some local Ugandan foods as our many blog readers have been requesting. So we consult the trusty lonely planet guide for the best places to eat on the cheap in Kampala. We decide on the City Annex Hotel, which is across town and apparently offers some of the best local flavours at a good price. Winner.

A power nap and half a blog post later Sacha and I are ready to head in the direction of dinner. After having spent a whole day on the streets of Kampala we are now experts at dodging both Kampala traffic and Kampala people and so we make it across town to the City Annex Hotel in no time. The restaurant area is pretty nice, it has a lovely thatched roof and ambient lighting, which is just about as much luxury as we can expect here.

We settle down into our plastic chairs and I study the menu whilst Sacha starts an animated conversation with our waiter about how highly recommended the City Annex Hotel restaurant is in the lonely planet. Unfortunately for her the waiter has never heard of lonely planet, but fortunately for him Sacha brought hers with her and preceded to show him the recommendation. Much to my amusement he clearly couldn’t care less and looked highly confused about what was happening. At this point Sacha had also noticed this fact but was way beyond the point of return and continued to engage him on the subject for a further five minutes.

Once our poor waiter had finally been called away we start to examine the menu, which was helpfully categorised into Western and Ugandan foods. Bravely avoiding the Western menu we take a look at the local Ugandan flavours and choose a couple of things that look nice. However, when our nice waiter returns we are told that they only have two Ugandan meals on the menu tonight – guess the food isn’t all that popular here after all! We decide to be brave and go with whatever those things are (veggies in ground nut sauce) with some matooke, rice, spinach and some questionable looking brown dough type thing on the side. We really needn’t have been so eager, the waiter brings us enough food to feed an army rather than two people that ate lunch mere hours ago. Oh well, the main dishes taste good and the sides are generally okay so all in all we consider the meal a success and so we make our way home praying that our tummies agree!