How’s Africa – A Trip to Kampala (in pictures)

Kampala is the capital of Uganda. It’s a large, sprawling city that houses several million people. 

We avoid going to Kampala unless absolutely necessary. The last time we went was in October last year. We drove there and back the same day — more than 8 hours of drive time total. We had to get our residency visas and Kampala is the only place you can do it.

In fact, if you want to get any kind of paperwork done, you have to travel to Kampala for it. It would be like an American having to travel to Washington DC if they wanted to apply for a passport or driver’s license.

This trip was to renew our passports which will expire in a few months.

Trips to Kampala are always interesting. The most frustrating part of the trip is the traffic. You’ll spend hours in traffic, which doesn’t usually look like traffic in the US.

Sometimes the “traffic” is cattle crossing the main highway.

Bodas (motorcycle taxis) rarely follow normal traffic laws or patterns and the police ignore them. These guys were driving the wrong way up the road right next to us.

Vehicles will pack people in wherever they fit. 

Sure enough, there was a guy dragging his goats right through the middle of traffic on one of the busiest roads in Kampala. At one point the black goat refused to walk and the guy dragged it along by the rope until he got past a car. Then he unceremoniously grabbed the goat by the tail and set it on its feet and made it walk again.

I have no pictures of our time at the US Embassy. Photography is not allowed. Neither are any electronic devices. And by electronic devices, I mean anything with wiring or circuitry. We didn’t know about this ahead of time. There was a niggling little voice at the back of my mind that said “We should take paper books for everyone to read” (the prompting of the Holy Spirit? probably!) but I ignored it. They weren’t even going to let us wear watches but I put my foot down. I reminded them we were US citizens, that we’d cooperated so far, but that the rules were starting to feel like harassment and they were just watches. They backed down and didn’t make us take them off.

Not that it helped. They really are just watches. We had to go inside, facing down a 2 hour wait, with nothing to do but sit and watch CNN on the TV in the waiting room. Kinda makes you want to dig out your ear drums with a spoon. :-/ 

Thankfully, once they got us in for our passport appointments, they moved us through fast. We were done in less than an hour. 

We’d gotten passport photos taken in Mbarara a few days before we had our appointment. Uganda passport photos aren’t the same size as US passport photos. James gave the man here in town the dimensions and he followed the directions but the man processing our applications at the embassy wouldn’t accept them. The background had come out with a blue hue instead of the white/off white they wanted. We didn’t realize this until we got there. We had to get them taken again.

They directed us to a place about a kilometer up the road, where we all got our photo taken again. Then I took the kids to a cafe across the road from the photo shop while James waited for the pictures and then took them back to the embassy. 

We do try to make the trip fun as much as we can. James found a lovely guest house for us to stay at that has a family suite with nice bathrooms, a huge park-like yard, and a playground for the kids. We also try to take advantage of food options there that we don’t have here — like Chinese food (that I don’t have to make from scratch), and

:drumroll:

NACHOS!!!!

The sweet and sour chicken wasn’t quite as good as what I make at home, but it was close. 😉 We all enjoyed it.

Those plates of nachos were so big, we had leftovers. But who’s going to say “no” to leftover nachos?

I’m always happy and relieved to come home to our city on the mountain, where even the worst traffic can’t come close to the bumper-to-bumper-and-everywhere-in-between traffic we experience in Kampala. Our house. Our beds. Our places and people. What more could a person want?