The Pearl of Africa

That's what Winston Churchill called Uganda & maybe he wasn't exaggerating. I knew very little about Uganda apart from Idi Amin's reign of terror in the 1970s, the presence of mountain gorillas and the recent bloody history of Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army (here's a fantastic book about this). My lack of research proved to be an advantage because I was pleasantly surprised by many aspects of the country: its warm, welcoming people; stunning lush scenery; cheap prices and abundance of excellent food. On the flipside though you can tell this is a nation struggling with fledgling infrastructure - power outages happen constantly, the road conditions are pretty dire and the streets are littered with enormous amounts of rubbish. Many locals we talked to blame the government for this & feel powerless to change their situation as long as current president Museveni (who has been in power since 1986) is around. Hopefully the 2011 elections will disrupt the status quo and move the country forward...

Anyway, I'll get of my political soap box now to refer you to some images of our Uganda journey. Highlights for me were tranquil Lake Bunyoni in the SW & diverse Murchison Falls National Park in the NE. I simply loved both these places and count them as two of the best experiences of this entire trip. The cherry on top was that we got to meet a variety of fascinating people, including several Peace Corps volunteers, an aid worker for MedAid in Congo and her Madagscan fiance, plus a British-Antiguan journalist filming documentaries in East Africa. Makes me sound pretty average really!