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 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.
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 closer we got, the more impoverished it looked.
We were met at the airport by a driver who took us to our hotel. The small, regional airport must be situated in one of the poorer neighborhoods of Kampala. 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 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.
(Bob) An expensive but therapeutic way to get back to Kampala without a long and bouncy drive over bad roads, and most importantly, a way of coaxing a reluctant spouse to acquiesce to a trip with lots of driving, but lots less driving because of a well-placed flight. And I must say, I was very happy to sit in the airplane instead of the back of a kidney jarring vehicle with stiff shocks. It added to the aura and experience of the trip and the drive from the airfield to our hotel was one of the more jarring experiences we've had in viewing deep poverty.
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