Pearl of Africa

The Great Enigma

Sitting on the terrace of the Speke Hotel Kampala, I was thinking. You see, Uganda’s a great enigma to me. A small, friendly easily accessible country crammed full of environment and wildlife and with a tradition of tourism that goes back to the Great British Explorers SHOULD have tourists. You’d imagine that tourists from all over the world would be forming an orderly queue in front of the friendly immigration officer at Entebbe Airport to get their brilliant safari experience. But no. No
queue, not even a line for citizens of the US of A. In fact, practically no tourists at all.


Watching the Birds from the Speke Hotel
Well, the terrace of the Speke Hotel is a pretty good place to ponder such a problem. Built in the colonial style in Uganda’s tourism heyday and named after the great explorer, the Speke offers just the sort of ambiance necessary for relaxed and effective enigma-solving. You simply order your drink and sit and watch and think. You watch the newspaper and magazine sellers gently proffering their news, the upmarket local Asian and African families arriving to see and be seen, the foreign businesspeople cracking deals with locals. You count the white Land Rover Defenders of the aid agencies driving purposefully to do good deeds. You notice the (very) small group of self-conscious tourists. You watch the locals strolling to work through the park opposite, and the big fat storks trying to get comfortable in the trees. And you notice the local security guards in scruffy uniforms and with what look like pop guns chatting to each other.


On Safari
And I sat there wondering why Uganda isn’t packed with tourists. A few days previously, I’d gone to see the Murchison Falls. I’d read the books of course and I’d learnt what the Victorians had said about them, but I didn’t quite know what I was going to see, For two hours or so, I’d been driven along a pretty smart road, past lovely green undulating countryside, to Masindi for a colonial coffee. When the smart road dried up, we navigated a dust-road to the park gates. ‘Close all the windows’ said William, the driver -‘ Tsetse flies here’. So for another two hours it got uncomfortably hotter and very uncomfortably bumpier as we negotiated our way through the park to the Nile. Just looked like a river to me. And across we went, to the very upmarket luxury Sarova Lodge. All marble and swimming
pools. Lunch. Standard English Colonial Cuisine. And then a boat trip up the Nile to the falls.

Bloody Hell, It’s Amazing
It’s no wonder that Winston Churchill had described Uganda as being like Regents Park Zoo and Kew Gardens combined, I thought, as we were cruising down the Nile towards Murchison Falls. Proud fish eagles perched in the trees surveying the scene, pied kingfishers and bee eaters flew around busily, on the banks families of baboons were watching along with a mixed group of water buffalo and a few monkeys in trees, in the river, great pods of hippos were languishing and from the banks a big fat croc was sliding into the water. You know when you know something is fantastic, you don’t think, you just look and feel. I just felt supremely priviledged. Sitting on this little pleasure boat. An amazing scene. Just as it must always have been. Untouched. Raw nature.

Oh Dear, It’s Just So Romantic
Occasionally I get to a fantastic place and I look around and think ‘This is romantic, I wish that I had a lover with me now’. No such luck. Shit. I’d arrived at the Nile Safari Camp by boat to be met by David, one of the staff in smart safari uniform. Very attractive, very romantic. Off to the cabin, all with different names, all beautifully made. All romantic. Mine’s just on the Nile with a lovely little terrace. David says ‘I’ll fill up the shower with warm or cold water?’. ‘Warm’ says I. The shower is outside. Oilcan full of water above, pebbles below. Very effective. Very refreshing. And it’s dinnertime. Alfresco, naturally. The sun is setting magnificently over the Nile. The sounds of the river and its
inhabitants are everywhere. The food is very good. The company excellent. What more could you want? Never mind, eh!

The North Bank
So, we’d taken our boat back along the Nile to Paraa. Past a herd of elephants. We’re taking a game drive on the North Bank; Magnificent. Lots of giraffe, Uganda Kob, Hartebeest, Oribis, Lions and Warthogs. And there’s the birds. Everywhere, Spectacular Carmine Bee-eaters and Red Bishops, Eagles and Vultures soaring above us.

Can You Believe it?
So this is the Nile.The Nile that waters Egypt. The Nile we all read about as kids. The Nile of Cleopatra et al. The Nile that all the explorers looked for the source of. What did they think when they arrived at Murchison? ALL of the Albert Nile through a 8 metre (sorry 30 feet in those days) gap to a 150 feet drop? Awesome, majestic, amazing, incredible, extraordinary (choose your own few adjectives). History, nature, romance, power. It’s all there. But the most important thing, the best description - I was there, I saw it, I marvelled at it.

So, Why No Tourists?
Back on the Speke terrace, I still couldn’t understand it. So I thought I’d do a check list:
PEOPLE - friendly-but-not-over-friendly, dignified and polite
SERVICE STANDARDS - willing but patchy
FOOD - OK
COSTS - not cheap not expensive
POLITICS - stable government
SECURITY - a bit worrying in parts
TOURIST OFFER - simply magnificent, unmissable, possibly the best and most varied (birds, mammals, primates, water, environment) experience in Africa. Just compare it with Kenya, Tanzania or Zimbabwe (each country has more tourists in a week than Uganda has in a year!).
Maybe potential tourists are frightened of Amin (happily retired with a wife or two in Saudi), maybe they have just forgotten how astoundingly beautiful Uganda is. Maybe they
want their exploring prepackaged and the forests hoovered. It’s still an enigma.

The Missing Word
Until I realised that to get the correct answer one needs to ask the correct question. Which is ‘So why no tourists...yet?’ The answer is now perfectly simple - ‘There are no tourists in Uganda yet because it’s not yet been rediscovered, in the meantime it represents Intelligent Tourist Paradise; a magnificent place to explore, not without its difficulties, but the rewards from a visit are enormous.’ So, I’m just lucky. I was there before the crowds. Wouldn’t you like to be too?