UGANDA: KIDEPO TO ENTEBBE TO KAMPALA

 July 25, 2025

We planned to end our trip with a day exploring Kampala, the capital city of Uganda. It would take us two days to drive there, and we had already experienced those roads and knew we didn't want to experience them again. Fortunately, Bob had decided when he was planning the trip that we needed a quicker way back and had booked a flight instead.

I took a photo of this map that was hanging in the Kidepo Airport and added the red circles and line to show the locations of take off and touch down.

 

The Kidepo Airport is two very small, sparsely furnished rooms--an office and a waiting room--not far from the national park and about 300 miles (by air) to Entebbe, the closest airport to Kampala.

They have a nice photo of President Museveni (more about him in my next post) hanging on the wall, and they keep their flight records in a handwritten ledger.

The only runway is packed dirt and is just under a mile in length.

We arrived in time to see our plane coming in for a landing.

This is our Cessna 5X-BUG, a four-seater, twin-engine workhorse.

We were SO relieved that we didn't have to do the horrible drive in reverse that we had already done to get to Kidepo NP, and it was really fun to traverse Uganda in the little Cessna!

Take off!

Unlike the flight scenes in the movie Out of Africa, we were too high up to see any wildlife below (and there is much less wildlife here than in Kenya anyway), but it was exhilirating to see the wide expanses of relatively untouched land.

A little further south we could see how meandering streams and rivers had shaped the geography. We also crossed over several bodies of water of various sizes. I think the picture below right is of the shores of Lake Victoria.

The contrast of those pristine open plains and the population density of Kampala and Entebbe was quite dramatic. I think that is Kampala, the nation's capital, on the left (It is just north of Entebbe) and Entebbe, the location of the country's largest airport, on the right. 

Entebbe has a population of about 80,000 people. Prior to the country's independence in 1962, it was the seat of government for the British-administered Protectorate of Uganda. The closer we got, the more impoverished it looked.

We were met at the airport by a driver who took us to our hotel. The airport--the main airport of Uganda--must be situated in one of the poorer neighborhoods of Entebbe, or maybe all of Entebbe is poor. It's hard to imagine an urban area much poorer than this.

As we kept driving, the environment seemed to pick up a bit. The market we drove by had an impressive amount of beautiful produce for sale.

SO. MANY. MOTORCYCLES.

This is Yoweri Museveni, the 81-year-old dictator who has served as president of Uganda since 1986. As noted earlier, I'll talk more about him in the next post.

These last two short videos give the flavor of Entebbe-Kampala. I wish they were in slow motion so that you could really see the details. On the other hand, this is not a slow-moving, quiet place. Maybe the rush of movement is perfect.

Our room for the night was in the Hilton Garden Inn Kampala, a new hotel financed by one of Uganda's wealthiest men and a nice oasis is a crowded city. We got there in time for a delicious dinner that included what I think was, goat curry (one of my favorites) and a bottle of Uganda's version of Bob's favorite drink, Schweppe's Bitter Lemon.

MOVIE

 7 Days in Entebbe is a 2018 docudrama that tells the story of the tense week in 1976 when an Air France jet flying from Tel Aviv to Paris is hijacked by pro-Palestinian terrorists at its stopover in Athens and eventually lands in the Entebbe airport. When the passengers are finally allowed to disembark into the tiny, dilapidated terminal, they are met by Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, who is colluding with the terrorists. Meanwhile, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and defense minister Shimon Peres are trying to come up with a plan to rescue the hostages, many of whom are Israelis. Rabin negotiates with Amin, and on day four 48 non-Israeli hostages are released. By day seven, Israel is tired of waiting and sends in a commando force headed by Lt. Col. Yoni Netanyahu, brother of the current prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The terrorists and several Ugandan soldiers are killed and so is Netanyahu, but the remaining 102 hostages are saved.