It's all about U

In all the little towns we've passed through in Uganda, there have been blue painted buildings advertising "Uganda Telecom - it's all about U". The other constant here that keeps reminding you where in the world you are is the cattle - Ugandan cows all have ridiculously large horns!

Uganda's a beautiful country, incredibly lush and green... with the thunderstorms and rain that I guess you should expect comes with that kind of territory. The first night here we staying in Kampala and the tent leaked - I woke up (on my birthday no less) to a wet sleeping bag and a dripping roof. As a result I felt completely justified in upgrading to a room with a view (and four solid walls) when we got to Lake Bunyonyi that night - luckily for me we were staying there for the next four nights... which means that out of my first 12 nights in Africa, so far I've only spent 2 in a tent. Superb - now if only I can maintain those kind of stats for the rest of the tour!

As Mwongi, our tour leader, promised, Lake Bunyonyi is beautiful - the campsite was a mini paradise, set right on the lake edge and surrounded by forested hills. The view from the bar as we watched NZ beat Australia in the semi-final of the Rugby World Cup was phenomenal - and that was regardless of whether you were watching the screen or looking in any other direction!

The main reason for our stop in Bunyonyi was the opportunity it gave us to trek with gorillas. To do that we went to the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, which is home to half of the world's surviving mountain gorilla population. (Naturally I felt obliged to get the commemorative t-shirt which says "I penetrated the impenetrable" on the back!). I've never actually seen the movie Gorillas in the Mist, but as we were driving to the park past forested hills and mist covered valleys it was easy to see where the title may have come from.

A word to the wise - gorilla trekking is not a walk in the park. For the first hour or so we followed an elephant track into the forest/jungle. How an elephant can possibly survive in such dense bush or walk along such narrow tracks is a complete mystery to me. But for the giant piles of elephant dung that we passed along the way, I would have assumed that our guide was pulling our leg when he talked of elephants.

The next hour was a bit more hardcore - our tracker guide Medi led the way, or to be more accurate "cleared" the way by using his machete to cut back the bush so we could pass! We had to wear gardening gloves and cover up completely to avoid the stinging nettles, and I must have lost my shoe half a dozen times as it got stuck in the mud/bog along the way! At a couple of points it seemed more like an extreme obstacle course, climbing over fallen tree trunks that came past your knee and were just as wide, scaling muddy embankments and sliding down vine covered slopes. It's a good job you forget about all that when you see them up close for the first time!

As you'd expect, the gorillas were awesome. They need to limit human contact with them because our DNA is so similar it's very easy for diseases to pass between the species - as a result you're only allowed to spend an hour with them once you've found them. But what an hour!

Our group - the Nshoni family - were feeding when we found them. Gorillas feed in dense bush, sometimes climbing trees and pretty much constantly on the move... so for a lot of the time we were clambering up and along slippery slopes just to keep them in sight. That said, because the family is quite large, with 4 silverbacks and 23 in total, sometimes you'd be following the main group and then realise that there was a lone one munching away less than 5m from where you stood.

It's amazing - they'll look you in the eye and you can see them thinking, their hands look like more muscular versions of our own and they use them in pretty much the same way that we do, and if they don't like how close you're getting they'll start to grumble at which point the trackers start grunting and making gorilla noises to put them at ease.

I saw one juvenile climb a tree and onto a branch that wasn't quite big enough to support him - it broke and he came toppling into the undergrowth (pretty funny once you realised he wasn't hurt). Another must have decided that the fastest way to get to the bottom of the hill was to roly-poly down the slope - one minute he was there and the next he was tumbling out of sight. The silverbacks were definitely the most impressive of the group, if not the cutest. They can grow up to 200kgs and the muscles in their shoulders and butts look as though they could crush just about anything in their path. They look so powerful even just walking around - it must be quite a sight when they face off against each other.

The ride back to Bunyonyi after the gorilla trek was almost as adventurous as the trek itself. There'd been a torrential downpour as we were walking back to the starting point, and it had made the muddy mountain road pretty treacherous. Megs and I looked at each other and fastened our seatbelts as the van we were in slid until it was at 90deg to the direction we were supposed to be going (i.e. until it was facing over the cliff edge!) and the driver put his foot to the floor in an effort to get us out of the mud.

Needless to say, we thought we deserved a drink when we got safely back to Bunyonyi at last - it was perhaps somewhat ironic that we asked for a bottle of red wine and received "Altar Wine". According to the label on the back, "This wine has been especially bottled for Church use having been approved by the appropriate authorities"!

From our base at Bunyonyi we also did a day trip into Rwanda. Clearing customs from Uganda into Rwanda was an experience and a half - the night shift at at Rwandan immigration didn't quite get the concept of dual citizenship or two passports and wanted to send me back across no man's land and into Uganda to get another exit stamp... fortunately common sense (and I think the queue stacking up behind me) prevailed in the end!

Rwanda was an intense and sobering experience. Our first stop there was at the genocide museum in Kigali. It gives you an amazing overview of Rwanda's history and the factors which led to the genocide, and also has exhibits which put a heartbreaking, human face on the tragedy and (separately) look at genocides that have occurred around the world over the past 100-150 years. There is an abundance of information on display, but you never feel overwhelmed by it - you just get overwhelmed by the horror and sadness of it all.

Our next stop was at the Nyamata Church just outside of Kigali. The church was initially relied upon as a point of refuge for some 10,000 Tutsis - it them became a place of terror as those people were killed there. The site has been converted into a memorial to the genocide victims - walking through the mass graves (where skulls are on one shelf, legs on another, etc) and seeing all the victims' clothes stacked up in piles on the pews gives you a real sense of the extent of the loss of life. It's horrific.

Our final stop before taking on customs again was Hotel Rwanda, although I'm not sure why. There's no exhibition to tell you about its role in the conflict - there was just an ultra flash lobby, a refreshing looking swimming pool and a poolside bar selling over-priced Sprite but also showing the United v Liverpool match. Bit of a non-event after the earlier stops.

One of the positives to come out of the tragedy is that it seems to have broken down social prejudice. The difference between Hutus and Tutsis was always an arbitrary distinction, initially imposed by colonial powers on the basis of whether or not you had at least 10 cows in the early 20th century - today those distinctions are no longer relevant as people think of themselves as simply Rwandan.

Rwanda was over a week ago now, but I'm going to have to update the blog later - am back in Nairobi and heading to Carnivore for dinner shortly, so clearly there are more important things to be done - principally, eating! This has been the first internet access I've had since arriving in Africa, so safe to say that updates will be a bit sporadic on this trip. We're heading to the Serengeti next week before getting to Zanzibar for next weekend. Will hopefully get a chance to send another update then. In the meantime, twanani badai (see you later).