Kampala!

Uganda wasn’t too eventful. We wandered in search of an atm that actually worked and then we visited a internet café so we could update facebook (important) and say hello to the family (because it was Easter). We went back home for a bit and planned on making it back out, but ended up falling asleep in our beds. 

The next day we wandered around Kampala looking for things to do. We hit up a Baha’I Temple,kinda boring, though pretty, and we did get some pictures of us jumping with the city in the background.

Pretty Roof

Us in our skirtys

 Later we visited the Kasubi Royal Tombs which is the burial grounds of the Kings of Buganda, which was the tribal name of the central part of Uganda. The history behind it was pretty interesting and the grass huts were kinda cool. Since we were girls, it was disrespectful to the dead kings for us to be wearing pants so, as the woman working there put it, “ladies in trousers must wear skirt”. They gave us basically kangas with a string around the top to be worn as a wrap skirt. There were a few awkward things about the site. First, I wandered too far into the sacred drumming hut (also an affront to the king spirits because, you guessed it, I’m a woman), second because the ancestors of the kings concubines still live on the site and it kinda feels like an invasion of privacy, and third because the biggest hut, where all the bodies and artifacts belonging to the kings was burnt down in March 2010 by some random arsonist.

What the Royal Tomb looks like now. 

What it used to look like. 

Off we go!

After that, we came across what we considered to be the best part of Kampala, the bootleg dvd shop below our hotel. I got sooo many seasons of tv shows; it was amazing (Bones, How I Met Your Mother, Project Runway, Without a Trace, Criminal Minds, etc) I was blatantly missing my crime dramas.

We got the dvd dude (cause we bought a lot; we were friends) to come with us to the Kampala Coach night bus station because it’s not really safe there at night. It kinda looked like the aftermath scene of a riot there. To get into the bus station you had to be security checked and metal detected. When we walked up, the security guy basically waved us through saying, “Let the muzungus through. Muzungus don’t carry bombs. You got a bomb in there? (chuckle chuckle)” Which of course we didn’t. Once again we were the only muzungus on the bus. Loooooong bus ride again. This one was 12 hours through the night and it wasn’t as nice as the first one, though it was much cheaper. The seats were pretty dirty and the area where the lights and air vents were supposed to be was all torn out. Along the way we peed in some pretty sketch places and made it across the border (night time border crossings not fun. And it's illegal to bring plastic bags into Rwanda so they went through everyone's luggage at 2 in the morning looking for them) before getting into Kigali, Rwanda in the morning.