28 July -- Road back to Nairobi (by Roger)

Sadly, this is the day we leave paradise.

Linda and I got up early so we could do a bird walk by the river before we spent the rest of the day traveling. We were willing to get up early so we could do our birdwatching from 6:30 to 7:30, when we would meet Caroline and David for breakfast. Already packed and ready to hit the road later, we met for coffee and looked through the dark at the fog. We were up, but the sun wasn’t. Darkness. Heavy fog. No birds. Undaunted, we went for a walk anyway and came back to the hotel, where we saw one of the omnipresent wagtails in the dawning light fighting itself in the Landrover mirror.

After breakfast, we spent some time taking pictures of most of the staff. Then we resigned ourselves to what we knew was going to be one long trip to Entebbe. As before, the road was ridiculously bumpy, and we were thrown continually up and down and side to side continuously. Now I know how a martini feels. There is a good side to all this, though, because the road wasn’t as dusty as before (thanks to the rain), it was lots cooler than on our previous trip, and there weren’t many vehicles at that time of the morning.

We made a few little stops as we did the three-hour dirt road part of the trip. We noticed that there were lines of people at different places, and our driver told us that there was an election. It was actually a referendum on whether Uganda would move from a one-party to a multi-party form of government. I had mixed feelings about the vote based on the little I knew of Uganda’s recent history. Historically, political parties in Uganda have grown along tribal lines, and whenever one party gets power, it starts making life hard or impossible for the other tribes (parties). That’s how Obote and Amin came to power, and tribalism was the underlying motivation for the atrocities they committed. Musavene, the current president, was able to defeat the dictator Obote with a multi-tribal army, and he converted his movement into a single, multi-ethnic party which has been governing Uganda very successfully for the last 20 years. Now there’s a question of whether Uganda is ready for multi-party democracy or not, and the lines of people we were seeing will decide whether to risk it or not. Stay tuned to CNN for the latest headlines.

We stopped just outside the forest at a tea plantation where we bought a kilo of the local tea. The tea from this area is aromatic, flavorful and mild, so we were happy to have that chance. A woman at the plantation also showed us a copy of the referendum ballot; it had symbols (a tree and a house) to represent the single-party/multi-party choices for those who are illiterate. Caroline and I thought that the origin of our own donkeys and elephants might be similar.

After another bumpy interlude, we stopped for a…er, refreshment break, and while he was out in the weeds, David spotted a chameleon. David and I wanted to see if it would turn blue, like our Landrover, but when I started toward the car with it, our driver panicked. Apparently, Africans here don’t like chameleons any more than they do in West Africa. David and I consoled ourselves by putting the little two-toed lizard on a tree and watching it turn red.

We got back in our martini shaker and continued, eventually reaching paved road. After an interminable period, we broke for lunch at the place we’d stopped on our outward trip. After lunch, we went on to the equator, where we stopped at the shop we’d stopped at before. We’d noticed that there three basins with “Did You Know?” on them, and David had heard that water would go down them in different directions (clockwise or counterclockwise) depending on whether we were on the north or south side of the equator. This was too much to go untested, so we tested it. Sure enough, water went down clockwise in the north basin, counterclockwise in the south and pretty much straight down the equator basin. I can hardly believe that 20 yards of distance would make such a difference, but I saw it myself.

As we continued on down the road, we could see that the day was starting to move into evening. Birds were getting more active, and I saw a few birds flying over that looked like big turacoes. Our driver finally pulled over at a place with a lot of the birds in a tree, and we got a really good look at a Great Blue Turaco. Fantastic.

After 10 hours of travel, we entered Kampala as the sun was setting. The part of town we went through was hugely active – people waiting for minibuses in the middle of a big, colorful market. The road went from paved to unpaved/potholed and back to paved, and the driver told us that the MP from the district with the unpaved section was a vocal critic of the government; the lack of pavement was punishment for his lack of cooperation. “There is a lot of politics in this road,” Josef said.

We drove in the dark to Entebbe, where we joined Bush I, Bill Clinton, and Bush II in staying at the Botanical Royal Hotel. Clinton had apparently been popular in Uganda because we had seen things like Hillary pizza on menus before; at this hotel, the penthouse was called the Clinton Suite. We didn’t stay in that suite, but I was happy that, after 10-1/2 hours on the road, I slept on the most comfortable mattress I’ve slept on in Africa.