Riding Uganda part 1

Ask someone in Tweerenostersmeteenskootmorsdoodgeskietfontein or New York what they know about Uganda, and the answer is guaranteed to be "Idi Amin". That's both a shame and a good thing. On the one hand such ignorance will keep many from seeing a country that ole Winston hisself called "The Jewel of Africa". But it also keeps the great unwashed masses away. The loud fat Americans in their tent-sized Hawaiian shirts and white socks, and the Eurotrash in their black socks, sandals and Doctor Livingstone clobber prefer overrunning Kenya and lately, SA. For my own selfish reasons I like that. I am now an investor in Uganda, and as much as tourism is the lifeblood of my new venture, I'd rather just break even and not have the crowds than make a killing and stand in a queue everywhere.

My old bro and connection from SADF bike squad days moved to Uganda in 2001, after several years of hardship in SA. Call him Paddy, he's of Emerald Isle bogtrotter stock but he claims one of the presidents of the old Orange Free State Republic was his great-great uncle or something. I hoisted the BS flag over that one, but stranger things have happened. He's my best friend, despite not seeing him for 10 years all through the nineties. It's always been like mixing fuel and fire and while we are growiing older we see no reason to grow up.

In mid-2003 I went to visit Paddy in Uganda for the first time. He was working for one of his Executive Outcomes connections, another SA oke who had a mine-clearing-security-logistics-in-difficult-areas business at the time. Paddy had bought two Yamaha TTR 225'and we were planning a ride in areas where not many, if any, mzungus had been on two wheels. I was still on the mend from an April 2002 dirt nap in Baja Mexico that had me off work for eight months, so I wasn't able or interested in any hard-core stuff.  The bikes were even less capable than I so it was just a nice, easy ride through some beautiful scenery populated with friendly people.

I flew from Joburg to Kampala on East African Eagle airlines, which has since ceased to exist. After a night of catching up we drove north out of Kampala, the bikes on a trailer behind a Landy. That's what they told me anyways, I slept all the way to a little town called Masindi where we spent the night. You don't drive around Africa at night in places like western Uganda, safe as it is. I didn't show signs of life till the next morning, the first night's party in Kampala may have had something to do with that.

We were headed for a place called Butiaba, on the shores of Lake Albert. Paddy was running the basecamp and security for an oil exploration expedition on the Semuliki Plain. Across the lake from the camp the Blue Mountains in DRC loomed dark and ominous. I worked in what was Zaire in 1996 and I didn't and don't like the place. It's a shithole. Joseph Conrad could have written "Heart of Darkness" in 1999 instead of 1899 and it would have been identical. 

Leaving the Masindi Hotel, check the company insignia:



We rode around the Semuliki area for a few days, consumed reasonable amounts of beer and laughed at the replacement medic's stories of how he caught his wife in a compromising position with one of his colleagues. He had quit his job as a fireman in Cape Town to go on this well-paid adventure and being a bit of a soft, was realizing he made the mistake of his life. He didn't exactly get any sympathy from us. When told to the wrong crowd, TMI stories tend to get the teller ripped to shreds and mitterrated upon. (Too much information, if yer wondering.)

Between Masindi and Butiaba the road goes through a genyoo-wine rainforest, where we went looking for wild chimpanzees with a guide, but couldn't find any:


Having tech difficulty, will continue after fixing. Clicking on the above photos seem to enlarge them for now.