My African trip (Part 1)

When I came to know that I was supposed to visit Africa, I had mixed feelings. There was a sense of excitement for going to a new place, as well as the feeling of fear that I was going to an unexplored, under-developed and perhaps a little unsafe place in this world. People go to US, UK, France, Germany when they go abroad and here I was, heading to a completely different place. Thankfully, I had my colleague and friend Nishant along with me in this adventure. We never had a clue as to what we would see on our visit to Africa.

On July 16th 2009, we took flight from Bangalore to Dubai via Emirates airlines. We had a brief stop-over at Dubai for a few hours. The Dubai airport is huge, it feels like miles long from one end to the other. They have moving walkways for making it easy to walk from one point to another. We had our fun on these walkways, as we walked on them which made us appear to cruise at a fast speed relative to the still ground.

We boarded another Emirates flight to Entebbe, Uganda. The Airbus 330-200 we were in, was double the size than the planes that run in Indian domestic flights. Emirates air-hostesses were diverse in their origin - some blacks, whites, some colored as well and they wore a peculiar head covering, also portrayed commonly in Emirates ads. They spoke various languages, which made me feel that Emirates was a truly international airline. I enjoyed the service provided by Emirates and was almost sad when they said Thank you on my way-out.

We found the Entebbe airport just at the banks of Lake Victoria, the largest tropical lake in the world, giving a beautiful panoramic view of the landscape. After completing the formalities for Swine flu checkup and getting a visa on arrival, we came out and met Simon from University of Makerere. He had brought a taxi which took us to Kampala, the capital of Uganda, the place where the University of Makerere is located.

Kampala is about 38 km from Entebbe and it took us an hour to get to Makerere. We found the highway to be quite good, and in fact I was surprised to find only big cars and sedans plying on the roads. Hatchbacks were nil, and a very few motorbikes were to be seen. Was Kampala actually a city of rich people? It was a mystery to which I found out the answer, only a few days later.

Kampala basically consists of 7 hills located at an elevation of about 3900 ft. We were at one of the hills called Makerere hill where the University was located. The temperature here lies between 16-27 degrees throughout the year - heavenly.

We arrived at the Makerere University Guest House where we had our rooms waiting for us. The receptionist gave a warm welcome to us. The rooms were quite big, each with 3 beds and an attached toilet and bathroom. The guest house even had wireless internet facility. After putting our luggage inside our rooms, we went for a short meeting with the people at Faculty of Computing and Information Technology. They were the people we were supposed to work with.

When we went to the FCIT building, we realized that the office was 6 floors above and there was no lift. So much for the health conscious people at Makerere! I came to know that the building was new and the lifts maybe installed later on. I do hope it happens for the people working in those offices.

After the short meeting, we came out and bought a SIM card by a company called Zain. The SIM card was handed to us in exchange for 2000 Ugandan shillings (2000 Ugx = 1 USD). I remembered that when I had applied for a postpaid connection in Bangalore, many verifications, phone-calls, residence visits were done before my SIM card could finally work. I was glad to have a SIM card that simply worked out-of-the-box. Plus the Zain network worked in 18 African nations, including Tanzania where we were headed for next.

At the Guest house, I had a vegetable sandwich for dinner. I had been concerned regarding the food as I am a vegetarian, but it turned out that they had sufficient veg dishes, although 80%-90% dishes were non-veg/egg based. Drinking water is an issue in Kampala, which is surprising taking into account the fact that they are practically on the banks of the largest fresh water lake in the world. There were no water coolers that had drinking water freely available, so we had to buy 500 ml mineral water bottles for 500 Ugx (about Rs 13).

After dinner, I roamed around the campus at about 9 pm. Simon had warned us not to take a risk and go out of the campus after 9, lest we became sitting ducks for looters. It was quite dark, even inside the campus and I didn't go far.

The next day, Friday, was a working day where we had detailed discussions with the team at FCIT. I found many of them to be very bright and passionate about coding. Some of them were younger to us, fresh out of college working there.

When we came out of Makerere for buying some water and an electrical converter, I noticed the city had 2 brands of motor-bikes that were predominant. And they were the Indian brands - Bajaj (Boxer) and TVS (Max 100). These bikes are locally called Boda Boda, and people also use them as taxis. Africa seems to be a happy customer of Indian automobiles - good for Indian companies.

July 18th, Saturday was an off-day for us. Simon was again assigned to take us to the Kampala city for some sight-seeing. Simon even joked that we were his guests, so his colleagues had to take permission from him if they wanted to talk to us.

After lunch, we set out for Ggaba beach, which is situated on the banks of Lake Victoria. We took a shared taxi to get to the place. They don't have big buses, but vans ply as taxis at Kampala. And the taxis are not filled up as in India, where 6 people are made to sit in place for 4. That way, I had a comfortable ride and I found the public transport to be good. The Kampala city is not as crowded as a metro in India would be. But roaming inside the city, I saw unclean roads, reminding me of India again.

Ggaba beach is on the banks of the Lake Victoria, which practically looks like the sea, minus the big waves and the tides. Boating facility was available and we talked to a guy called Frank. He quoted a price of 10000 Ugx, we found it to be too high for us. So he immediately went down to 5000 Ugx. The deal was done. He said that he would take us on his motor boat for 10 minutes, but he gave us 20 min of wonderful riding, probably seeing our enthusiasm.

While on our way back, Simon cleared the 'big cars in Kampala' mystery for me. It seems that people here generally buy used cars from Japan, mostly Toyotas at about 2k-8k USD while a brand new one costs 15k which is quite expensive for anyone. No wonder I could see many old models of Toyota which are no longer manufactured. A brand new Boda boda will cost about 1000 USD, around the same as it will cost in India.

We reached back Makerere by evening and went for a walk in the campus. I could see that University was big in size. I heard that about 40k students study here. The campus was quite green, and we even witnessed a christian wedding at a residence hall. Majority of the people in Uganda are Christians. We also stumbled upon a church behind the main administrative building at Makerere where we saw a students choir practicing for Sunday church music. We sat inside the church and listened to the gospel music that they were playing together. It was quite peaceful there.

On Sunday, it was time to say goodbye as we boarded a taxi and reached Entebbe airport. Overall, the Uganda trip was an enlightening experience. I found many similarities between India and Uganda. Uganda has lots of different tribes who speak different languages, so they are linguistically diverse, just like India. Luganda is their main language, apart from English which is also the official language, so a large number of Ugandans know and converse in English. Seeing the city, the warmth of the people, I felt at home. They even drove the same bikes. :)

Seeing our Uganda trip to be successful, with lots of enthusiasm and expectations, we boarded a Air Uganda flight, and flew towards Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania.

(contd in My African trip Part 2)