Leaving Kampala

On being a fish out of water

(I’m writing this from a hotel room in a Nairobi locked down by street protests. I will hopefully have a piece on walking Nairobi next week, when I return home.)

It wasn’t until my final two days in Kampala that I began to find a rhythm, and relax into a daily habit. I’d found my morning coffee place, settled into an acceptable six-mile walk, chosen a cafe to spend the afternoon reading and writing in, and then a restaurant and bar for the evening. All of it though was still tenuous and little of it comfortable.

The walk was the hardest to find, and the least rewarding. In every other city I’ve found a ten mile-ish route that was intellectually rewarding, and physically relaxing, or at least not physically dangerous. That, as far as can tell, doesn’t exist in Kampala, due to its atrocious infrastructure, overcrowding, and the swarms of smoke belching Matatus, Boda-bodas, and other vehicles.

Walking in Kampala means trying to tightrope a roadside shoulder so thin, so jagged, so muddy, as to be useless, or a sidewalk jammed with everything, and pockmarked with cavernous holes. In either case, including the sidewalk (because in Uganda that’s also the road) you risk being hit by a van, motorcycle — something that happened to me twice, although neither time seriously — or god forbid a semi.

Layer on top of that an equatorial climate where a sunny day can morph in minutes into biblical downpours, forcing the city to stop and take shelter, as the skies pour rain so thick no umbrella can stop, roads become rivers, and the drains (that exist) transform into clogged ponds of garbage.

So instead I ended up with a six mile loop through the least dense, and least interesting, part of town I could easily access¹. A path from downtown up onto the most exclusive of the seven hills of Kampala, where there was always a sidewalk (kind of), and through neighborhoods of gated apartments, government buildings, and heavily guarded malls². It’s also where the Kampala golf courses is, which did give me one of the more jarring pictures I’ve taken, of the young boy taking a break from collecting trash to watch the game below.

I don’t know exactly what he thought of it all because our conversation was interrupted by a guy carrying a live chicken, who jumped off an idling Boda-boda, ran into the scrub next to us, dropped his trousers, squatted, and relieved himself (loudly), before jumping back onto the Boda-boda that sped away, all while still holding onto his chicken.

While about as far apart as two people can be, I like to think the boy and I were united, at least briefly, in the absurdity of that moment, although it killed whatever interest I had in figuring out his views on golf, and through that, maybe on the inequalities of life.

That inequality of life, while everywhere in the world, is more obvious, and harder to ignore in Kampala, because those at the bottom, who make up the majority of the country, have it so very badly.