A couple of weekends ago, Kerrie and I decided to drive down to the end of Ggaba Road (big road that runs out of Kampala) and check out Ggaba Town and Lake Victoria. Ggaba is a very interesting place, because it’s right on the lake, but there’s really nothing about the town that would attract visitors. It’s small, extremely crowded, and pretty impoverished. However, it was a very interesting visit and we did end up at a pretty nice little park.
The first place we stopped had these huge boats up on the hill, and at the bottom of the hill there were all of these large brick structures that women were standing atop. There was a mesh screen as a “roof” of the structures, charcoal burning underneath, and the women were walking on the screen with the coals burning underneath. It appeared that they were drying fish. Not a fan of that smell.
Then we drove down to a place called Beach House, where there was an area that closely resembled a park (though it was by no means an actual park). There was a little bar where we bought sodas, and then some tables scattered around where we sat to drink our soda and watch the ugly Marabou Storks…
As we were leaving the Beach House, we had to drop our glass soda bottles in the collection box. I walked over and set mine down, and then this man (probably around my age) turned to me and said, “Hey! Would you like some of my beans?” And he held up his fork with literal beans on it. Ummm…no thanks!
After we left Beach House, we drove down to the pier. That was a crazy place! We could barely move the car down the road because there were swarms of people everywhere; a man was telling us to park and telling us it would be 2000 UGX. Kerrie asked if I wanted to get out and walk around, and I explicitly said, “NO!” I really just wanted to get out of there! It wasn’t that it was necessarily a dangerous place, but there were a LOT of people and I felt really claustrophobic about not even being able to move the car. We slowly turned around and left.
Our next stop was at a place called Munyonyo Commonwealth Resort. Ahhhhh….this is a LOVELY place that is so nice that Queen Elizabeth stays there whenever she visits Uganda. We sat out on the back patio, sipped cappucino, and pretended that we were in the Fiji Islands instead of East Africa. It was divine…
Interesting day? Very.
