Last week I was in Soroti to ‘escort a friend to collect a wife’. Soroti has a neat little two street town. It is simple, clean and beautiful and I could not get over the huge rock formations dotted all over the area.  They are amazing.

There is so much beauty in simplicity, though there are many modified things that can also look good. Take for example all the eye-catching females dotting Kampala city.  How do guys keep their eyes on the road? Forgive the sexist comment but really, there is a well dressed, preened and powdered woman walking the streets of Kampala at least every 200 metres. If I find them eye-catching, then surely they present a traffic threat. (And you may put away all the lame jokes about the B. Bill, please. I play strictly for the legal team.)

I was supposed to be writing about how I would like to visit all the towns of Uganda, instead of planning holidays to Mombasa and wherever, but bear with me as I instead turn this into a rant about Kampala. I often have to be in Kampala to work, but aside from the cinema and a few favourite restaurants, I find it a nuisance having to go there and I do not miss it at all. The dust, the traffic, the never-ending road works… the potholes developing in exactly the same spot they were last year. While I am sure every writer/journalist/columnist/concerned citizen has been grateful for the easy topic of potholes to bail us out on dry days, it is sort of getting ridiculous that absolutely NOTHING is ever done about the problem areas.

The same thing goes for the flooding, which up to the second decade of the 21^st Century is still baffling city engineers. Yesterday I had the uniquely worrying experience of paddling my car through about a metre of flood water while at the same time trying to avoid potholes lurking under the water from memory. And of course since all the markets and trading centres are right by the roads, you have to do this swimming drive while trying to avoid splashing the citizens going about their business by the roadside.

Whenever you get onto raised ground you will have a good view of the slums clinging tenaciously to the bottom rung of every residential hill, melting almost perfectly into grand mansions and apartment blocks with limited parking space. I have only a handful of friends in Kampala who live on roads which are clearly marked and qualify to be called roads. The rest I have to visit using a combination of Google Earth, GPS tracking and good old bodaboda know-who.

However, I am sure Kampala has its charms, as do all the towns of our beautiful country. And to go back to the line of thinking which I should have originally pursued; it is worth your while to discover Uganda.

Published on Sunday January 24, 2010