Natalie and Anne are finally in Africa!

Oh my gosh.... You can't even guess how long it took me to upload these pictures... And that's although we are still in Kampala, the capital of Uganda! The internet conection is not very reliable and if it is there, it is slow. Anyways, that shouldn't be a surprise in a city where power cuts for more than 12 hours are kind of normal. I am not complaining at all, I just want you to know why I might not be updating the blog as frequently and with as many pictures like I did in Asia :-) Anyways, let's see how far I get - otherwise you will just have to stare at the pics and guess what might be on them.

But let's get started: Natalie and I are finally in Africa!!! We have been in Uganda for nearly a week now and so far it is completely different (very different!) from any other country / region I have been to before.

One thing is that we really stick out on the street. That might sound quite obvious, but physically I was sticking out in Asia, too, but I never really felt like it. Sometimes, we walk around Kampala for half a day (we use to walk everywhere since there are not really many tourist sights, so walking around town and experiencing is one of our activities here - one day our "activity of the day" was to walk to an Ethiopian restaurant for 3 hours, eat there and then walk back to the hostel) and don't meet any other "white" person! But don't be mistaken and think that there are hardly any foreigners in Uganda. The country is kind of a Mekka for 18 to 20 year old Brits and US-Americans who arrive in groups of 20 people or more and then do some "volunteering" in schools or orphanages. The volunteering business is quite a big industry here, but at least to me it is kind of irritating since I don't really get what skills or special knowledge these teenagers have that Ugandans would lack... (except the one of getting drunk every evening). I am pretty sure they do know how to play with children etc. But I guess it makes us (people from the "West") feel good if we feel like we are "helping" these poor Africans... So it is really that Ugandans are providing a service for us, but I better stop being negative here, otherwise nobody will ever read my blog again :-)

A second thing we noticed so far is that we are actually not crazy for the food!!! That is a great, because we didn't believe a place like this existed for us!

Lastly, preferences here are definitely very different. Most of the commercials on the street are about gaining weight and hips quickly! I am pretty sure at home these companies would go out of business within a few days :-)

Since I am running out of time and we have to catch an early bus to Fort Portal tomorrow morning, let's start with the pictures. The first ones are from one of our walks through Kampala:
Even in the capital many of the streets are not paved. Since the earth here is red, you will have a different skin color after walking around town for only a few minutes.

Traffic in Kampala is quite bad, but it still has some rural touches. You quite frequently meet cows, goats or chicken in the streets.

This is the taxi car park, where all the minibuses that take people around town leave from.

Our second day in Kampala was actually quite frustrating since we found out that we could not just get on a local bus and visit the national parks by ourselves. Local transport usually doesn't reach them and without your own car, it is very often impossible to get there. We first wanted to visit the Murchison Falls, which are amazing waterfalls of the river Nile surounded by quite a lot of wildlife. After finding out that we couldn't go there on ourselves, we asked some travel agents how much they would charge and already thought that we would have to leave Uganda after a few days because of severe money shortage! We are talking about hundreds of US Dollars for a three-day trip!!! So we finally sat down and did some research (yeah, you should really do bits of that before leaving for the trip...). Fortunately, we found out that one can actually visit some of the very interesting National Parks with puplic transport and we also found a cheaper operator for our trip to the Murchison Falls that included some chimpanzee tracking, a boat ride on the Nile towards the falls and a game drive.

These are some schoolchildren in their beautiful school uniforms on our way to the Murchison Falls. One notices that many of them have to walk quite a long way to get to school everyday.

The above picture was taken at 6 am the next morning and we were excited to leave for our first game drive! My jeans look so dirty because the chimpanzee tracking the previous day involved quite some "off-the-track" running through the jungle.

A beautiful sunrise over the Nile on our way to the game drive.

Giraffes!!! Okay, I won't comment on all the other animals since I am sure you know them all from the zoo, TV or even real life :-)

Anybody knows what this animal is called?

I have never been on a safari before, so you can imagine how impressed I was!!! We saw so many big animals from very close. I was quite shocked when our guide asked me what the biggest animal in Germany is and I found out that it is most likely a cow or a horse! But they don't even live in the wild... But then I could mention that we once had a bear called Bruno - very impressive :-)

In the evening we went on the boat trip on the Nile towards the Murchison Falls:

You cannot believe how many hippos we saw!!! We were so impressed by the first one and then we saw hundreds more. During the day they hang out in the Nile because their skin is very sensitive and they would get blisters from the sun. At night they used to visit our camping ground in search for some food (of course we finished all of it, so the poor hippos had to look somewhere else).

There is a crocodile on this pic! It is not certain whether you see any on the trip but we managed to see like seven individual ones outside the water and then a group of at least 15 swimming together in the water!

More hippos and wharthogs in the background.

Another crocodile

Finally a picture of the two of us! Anne and Natalie - unknown species from Germany...

The two of us in front of the Murchison Falls. They don't look very impressive on this picture, but that is how far the boat got.

On the third day we went on top of the Murchison Falls and let me tell you, they are pretty impressive! Especially the power the water gets when it rushes down the water fall.

That's it for now! We are back in Kampala, but as mentioned before, we will leave to Western Uganda tomorrow.

I am sorry if this entry is not very skillfully written or as interesting as the Southeast Asia ones, but time pressure and the constant threat of no more internet doesn't help... Enjoy the pics for now and I will try to write a bit more about the people and their life here the next time!