Bye Bye East Africa

It is our last day in Entebbe, Uganda, we are awaiting our flight tomorrow back to Joburg and now seems like a good time to reflect on the places we have visited and to crudely sum up these large, complex places with a few pithy phrase and remembrances.
Uganda
Cheapest place we visited (and anyone who knows me knows that his is very important to me!). Great national beer is called Nile Special and is pretty good. Most everyone speaks pretty good English so we interacted a bunch with people, including our memorable walks in Lake Bunyonyi with some school children. We did not see a great deal of this country, but we liked what we saw and I could see us coming back here at some point. Memorable moments include:

- The bus's flat tire on the Longest Day (part 1) when we traveled from Entebbe to
Kabale,

- The lovely warm evenings in Lake Bunyonyi with a wonderful view and those comical "smoke fires" (as we dubbed them) which were fires built by the staff each night with fresh wood which generated a tremendous amount of smoke because it was not dried,

- Our walk with three kids up to their school atop the Lake, and
our tour of the Buganda Palace which included a walk through the creepy tourture/execution stalls built and used by Idi Amin and then by his successor, Obote through the middle-1980s.

I also must publish here my deepest apologies to Kampala - as Baby's Dad said in the classic Dirty Dancing, when I'm wrong, I say I'm wrong. We went back to Kampala yesterday on a day trip from Entebbe and I have a much, much better impression of the City. The taxi park is still a madhouse, the streets in many places are clogged with cars and burn your eyes with the diesel exhaust, but the City has some very interesting and beautiful places including views on its various hilltops (all of which have some structure of significance, Parliament for the Buganda Kingdom, a mosque built by Colonel Gaddafi, a catholic church, a protestant church, a hindu temple) and we shopped at The Best bookstore we had seen on our trip which was exciting (new books!). My regrets for my previous harsh words directed at this fine City.

Rwanda
An amazing and interesting country, with its unusual topography, the intense land use of the cities, city-outskirts, and rural areas, the organization of the capital, Kigali, the feeling of hopefulness we observed in almost all of the places we visited, and the amazing transformation which has taken place since the genocide. While we visited a lot of this country, I would love to come back in 10 years to see the progress which so many believe Rwanda will achieve by 2020. We will have to come with a pile of cash though, Rwanda was the most expensive place we visited and it is likely to only become more so as it develops further.

I'll remember so many things about this place, including the hills and views in Kigali, Serena's awesome house and cute pets, the school children in their blue or green rubber flip flops (those were the best colors I guess), the GORILLAS (of course), a man I observed walking to work near Lake Kivu with a laptop compter bag in one hand and a machete in the other, the feeling of relief I had when my moto driver found Scott at a taxi park after we had lost him when my driver ran our of petro (that was quite a relief! Not good to not speak any French there!), a funny moment when a gang of toddlers ran right over to us along the road one day, ending in a big, leg-hug, and the amazing, AMAZING feats of agricultural terracing and cultivation taking place in so much of the country.

Tanzania
We spent the most time in Tanzania, traversing the country from west to east by land. The far west in Tanzania appeared very poor, poorer than most parts of Uganda. By Mwanza though, on the edge of the country's west if it were split in thirds, the influx of resources from tourism was clearly evident, with high-rise buildings and many cars and land rovers. The Serengeti was incredible and we could have spent more time there, I won't forget my inadvertent intake of breath when the cheetahs we were stalking made a run at the wildebeests and springboks, and Dar Es Salaam seems like an up and coming African city. On the down side, the farther east we traveled in Tanzania, the more frequent and more insistent sales people became, with the culmination in Stone Town in Zanzibar where 'touts' would walk along with us for blocks, trying to talk us into a t-shirt.

In spite of this, Zanzibar was an extremely interesting place to visit for its history and distinctive East African/Middle Eastern/South Asia culture (EPS will be happy to know that I read the entire exhibit from the Zanzibar Stone Town Conservation and Development authority which documents the seemingly impossible task of encouraging rehabilitation of Stone Town's many historic buildings (many of which are in complete disrepair) and regulating new development's integration with the historic structures). And I will not forget the incomparable Indian Ocean (though a special place in my heart remains for the fierce Pacific!).

While I wouldn't say that I drank A LOT in Tanzania, I drank enough beer here to know that - of the two national beers Serengeti and Kilimanjaro - I much preferred Kili (for the taste, though the beer made in impression on me because from the moment we entered the country, I saw bar and restaurants plastered with painted lettering spelling "It's Kill Time!" which somewhat disturbed me, I figured it was some soccer term I was not familiar with.. Later, I saw that the actual text was It's Kili Time! which makes much more sense for a beer advertisement..).

Thanks East Africa for a great trip! And sorry Kenya, we'll catch you next time.