We have arrived in Kampala. Before we arrived Paul had told me over and over Kampala is a very big and busy city, Moshi is 'Africa lite' compared and you can't really walk to places in Kampala. To say this is a big city that you can't really walk around is true and also feel like it falls short of a very descriptive reality of what it is like.
Here is how I can describe it.
Imagine Lake Victoria, a vast and beautiful body of water. Kampala is the area to the north, the topography is rolling hills, some moderately high, with peeks and valleys between. Color it all with many shades of lush green, wild, farmed, tended to, and some landscaped. Now looking out over from one peek to the next you see a wash of green, with buildings between, running together with a semi sea of rooftops, red with tile or corrugated tin, grey to dusty rust color.
Once you drive among this you see the city is not quite as uniform as it may seem, looking at the buildings more closely there are about a quarter of them in some halted or continued state of building and half of these have a horrifyingly dangerous looking exoskeleton of scaffolding built from, what seems like large sticks, tied with twine (I am sure they are some hardwood that make them stronger than they look or I can tell myself that anyway) going up 4 to 6 stories. Houses are a mix of fancy stucco/cement like buildings fully enclosed with barbed wire topped walls, moderate brick structures (not enclosed), smaller rectangular dwellings of cement, very small clusters of (what an American would picture as) shacks the size of garden sheds made from an assortment of materials- some are planks of wood with various sized gaps between. Keep in mind that not all of these dwelling have electricity, running water or toilets. Also keep in mind that some people in this city still walk for water, some from a tap some from an open pipe running free.
Lining the streets are modern strip malls some sporting chain names foreigners would recognize, or low buildings with a jumble of hand painted signs crowded along the tops advertising a range of amusing names. There are banks, museums, universities, movie theaters, industrial sections of whole parking lots of tractors, dump trucks or lumber yards (these vary from milled wood stacked and covered to other areas with rough hard wood trees limbed and sorted by size and held upright between branches of larger trees). Shipping containers that have been cleverly transformed into businesses some full size, some cut into half. Small single shacks of wood or cut and flattened oil barrels are here and there, some the size of a phone booth, some 2 - 4 times the size, selling various things. Add restaurants, some small with someone cooking over a charcoal stove others with table and chairs, some with pool tables outside, some fancy and more high end.
To this keep adding open areas of differing sizes of farms (coffee, banana, fruits) land, green areas along the road are turned into a nursery, selling plants in plastic bags not pots, areas where people are hand mixing and forming cement bricks or maybe the red dirt earth bricks. The dirt bricks are then stacked in piles (some quite high) and set with fire under to harden them. There are also rock quarries with flagstone type rocks stacked up or places where people are breaking rock by sledge hammer into smaller and smaller units. Place some cows and goats out grazing, ducks and chicks are free, we even saw a troop of monkeys, there also seems to be a shockingly diverse number of birds some I've never seen. Many are the large (HUGE) garbage eating storks that clack and fly noisily sometimes near your head (I was told they eat 20% of Kampala's garbage a day). Drop in a few big open area parks. Carve in some roads, some wide paved, some dirt and bumpy. Put in some small streams that cut through the landscape and of these some run free, some are stagnant and green, some are choked with garbage, along some water ways are people washing clothes others are 'stands' where people are washing motorcycles- soap, dirt and oil running onto the ground to make a packed black area. There are several large markets stretching out for blocks with plastic covers to protect from the sun and plastic bags to keep food off the ground. All fruits and vegetables adding colors, stacked in their neat pre-measured piles for sale, also dusty graying bags of charcoal.
These are all in a quick rapid succession of each other and the small stores selling drinks, bread and what not are next to sim cards stands, motor repair shops, small butcher stands with open doors and someone resting behind hanging cuts of meat or legs, organs hanging or the intestine draped over the counter hanging like folds of a curtain (I wonder if this prolonged dry aging is what makes beef more tender here and I remember the stories my father told me of the fly covered meat sitting out in the Ethiopian heat when he lived there, before I was ever born. He said the extreme spiciness they used must have been to cover the rancidity). Many of these little shops have neighbors two doors down that seem just exactly the same to themselves, I don't understand how they keep in business.
To all of the above assign a color and make drops over the lush ground then stir them so there are some colors more congratulated than others and yet they are all very much mixed together. We are still not quite done. For each road place people walking along the edge (some have sidewalks, some not), place drivers in cars, delivery trucks, taxis (which are what we thought of as dala-dalas in Tanzania, here the mini buses stuffed with people are taxis), private cars (what you'd think of as a taxi), a million bota-botas (motorcycle taxis which can sometimes have up to 5 people, young babies and children perched on the end or tucked between adults) and bikes all weaving in and out of each other in some rhythm that I do not understand. If you ride in the front seat of a car it's best to just disassociate or hold your observations lightly, just choosing to see what passes by rather than the way your life could pass before your eyes in a crash.
Of course you might be imagining a scratch on the surface of what it is like here. I didn't describe the sounds (including call to prayer which seems later than Tanzania, I used to know the time of day based on it), the smells and the temperature.
