We set off at 6 am, having gotten up at 5, glad that the beer intake had been limited. As the clothes hadn’t dried fully the evening before, some of us strung up our clothes inside the van using a long spool of string and they were still drying in the morning, leaving the van to look something like a launderette.

As we were moving, I dangled my camera out of the window on as fast a shutter speed as possible and managed to capture the sun rising.

It was a long and dull drive to the Ugandan border and a long dull wait at the border for customs to clear us. Luckily tour busses like ours can skip the standard traffic queue as that can sometimes take days to process and that would be a very poor holiday indeed!

We helped the time pass by eating roadside samosas from a guy with a bag full of them. We did not enquire too closely as to the nature of the meat, but it was tasty and in the end that’s that matters.

We had to get out of the van and queue up to get our passports manually inspected and stamped. Apparently, they could massively improve efficiently through automated tools, but choose not to as that would result in large scale redundancy of border officials. So, trade is stifled and tourists are bored instead.

Once clear into Uganda, we pulled up in a grassy inlet and set up for lunch, much to the bemusement of an audience of boys who gathered at a distance to watch us sitting in a circle in the noonday sun making sandwiches and pasta salad.

Back into the bus and we drove to the Red Chilli campsite in Kampala, arriving at about 5 pm. We set up had hot showers and all retired to the bar for the local Nile beer. Nile beer started as a small local bootleg brewery by some workers who were building the Dam at Kampala on the Nile and it became so popular it is now one of the largest breweries in East Africa.

For the first time on our trip, there was Wi-Fi, and our visit to the bar was much more anti-social than usual as everyone logged on and checked emails and Facebook.

We did, after emails were done, break open the bottle of local Safari, a powerful spirit that tasted a little of turpentine.

Kampala

Kasese

Eldoret