A charming cup of tea with the PG chimps

After the rafting we had another day to kill in Kampala and we used it to try and understand what made the city tick. We shaved away the layers of smog and grid-locked streets to find a city pulsating with life. We spent the afternoon wandering in the markets and backstreets where 5-storey shopping arcades are filled to the gills with garish western-style clothing and tiny side streets are lined with tailors on foot-powered Singer sewing machines knocking up African skirts and blouses at a rate of knots. We climbed the fire escape of a building for a bird's eye view of the city's taxi park. Row upon row of small minibuses stretch off into the distance waiting to whisk people off to every corner of Uganda.
In the evening we went to a jam session outside the national theatre. Every conceivable type of music was covered and rastas sat alongside Americans with harmonicas and hip hop artists. One particularly weird ensemble comprised of an American folk singer accompanied by a Scandinavian girl on some kind of whistle and a Ugandan rapper. I'd love to say it was cutting edge but I think Mike and I could have done a better job with a recorder and a dustbin lid. The highlight of the evening was the people watching, as the event united all faces of the Ugandan capital. A bare-footed, tanned Norwegian girl in a colourful, floaty, silk dress wafted around self-consciously holding hands with her Ugandan boyfriend who was decked out in copious gold chains, low slung jeans, sideways baseball cap and shades. We sat on a high wall and watched as the hungry eyes of countless other young Ugandan boys trailed the shapely behind of the girl as she moved through the crowds. An elderly white lady arrived with a blue rinse and set, incongruously draped in a leopard print scarf, who proceeded to chat to a group of heavily dread-locked rastas. The beer flowed, the music warbled on. Fantastic night.
From here we headed west to Fort Portal and on to the crater lakes region. We had been recommended a camp site by one of the lakes and arrived in the late afternoon expecting an amazing paradise akin to Nature's Prime Island. We were met by a confused looking gardener and a plague of flies. Eventually the voluptuous Pakistani owner arrived, dressed in a slinky, sequined, animal-print dress, thick black hairs protruding from her chin and a cloud of cloying perfume warding off the flies. She was straight out of a Salman Rushdie novel. Her charge for camping at $15 dollars per person per night rendered even me speechless. Dinner would also be $15 dollars per person. It was late in the day, we were tired, we were trapped.
We sat, fuming, and ate 5 small chicken bones - one of which was actually the chicken's neck - and boiled rice heavily seasoned with dying flies. In the morning we awoke to rain. It wasn't rain, it was the ever-thickening plague of flies plopping onto the tent. We asked for directions to the chimpanzee forest and were told it would be wise to pay a guide to take us there. Of course, she would give us a "very good price". $15. We declined and set off in the wrong direction.
An hour later - hot, tired, angry and lost we came across a sign for a community campsite. We walked up a grassy hill, accompanied by a gaggle of small children and came into a leafy square with views across to the Rwenzori mountains in one direction, and down into a tantalizingly blue crater lake on the other side. We ordered some water and decided to move to the camp the following day.
From there we walked back in the right direction towards the chimpanzee forest, booked a trek for the next morning, negotiated a motor bike to take us there at 6am (we hoped - the guy could speak not one word of English) and then we headed to the Chimpanzee Tea Estate for a cuppa. We arrived at an old lodge looking out across immaculately manicured lawns sweeping down to the lush green of the tea plantation below. It was deserted. We let ourselves in and perused the old books on Africa that lined the walls and the family photos on the fireplace. We settled into two wicker chairs on the veranda and an elderly white Labrador dozed companionably at our feet. We were lost in reverie, warmed by the afternoon sun. Eventually a girl arrived and we ordered some 'African tea' - spiced tea brewed with milk instead of water -and sat until the shadows lengthened and drove us back to the fly-infested campsite of doom. Luckily three Italians, paying $125 dollars a night to stay in one of Madame's faded-looking cabins, had arrived so she was forced to serve up something a little more exciting than boiled chicken neck (only a little more exciting mind you). She had dressed for the occasion in a red chiffon dress, with an even more alluring perfume than the night before. As the evening wore on the flies thickened and hummed ominously. We were driven to bed early as they flew into our eyes and mouths. They were so bad in fact that Madame offered that we could sleep in one of the cabins. We slept under a mosquito net which did not provide an impermeable barrier to the flies and awoke on a million tiny corpses.
Thankfully our motorbike driver was waiting for us at 6am with a friend. We mounted the bikes and they sped off in the direction of Fort Portal - the opposite direction to what we thought we had agreed a price for. We managed to stop them and thanks to a pretty good impression of a chimpanzee (a nod to my Grandpa there for the tuition in this field) we managed to communicate our desired destination. We sped along the bumpy, dusty road as the sun rose, lighting up the brilliant green of the tea plants and burning away the hazy blue mist enveloping them. The tiny bikes hurtled down steep hills and we clung on for dear life. I tied my hoodie tight around my face; Mike arrived with red eyelashes and hair from the fine dust.
The chimpanzee tracking was a bit of a disappointment. We did see four chimps, but they were forty meters up in the air and the forest was almost silent. As the trek finished we were faced with a problem. I did have the number of the moto drivers, but we did not have any signal. We tried hitching a lift from other people on the trek, but they were not too keen to share their Toyota Landcruisers and private chauffeurs with the likes of us. We decided to walk and hitch hike as we went. It was only 10km to the outskirts of the forest and a further 5km to the campsite of doom so we could make it in a couple of hours at a good pace. Luckily after a few km a moto driver chugged up behind us on a clapped out old bike. We persuaded him to take both of us on the one bike and set off at a tortuously slow pace, balanced precariously as the bike wobbled over pot holes. On the steepest hills we had to jump off and run after the bike, but we made it. Both of us agreed that this comical journey was more fun than the chimp tracking itself.
We found a second motor driver, picked up our packs at the campsite and headed on to Lake Nkuruba community campsite. Another interesting journey. As we hit each bump the extra weight of the packs on our backs bounced us straight off the back of the bike and into the dust. Eventually the poor drivers had to negotiate the crazy dirt roads with our packs balanced on the handle bars. We made slow progress but we arrived, dusty and travel-worn in time for a trip to the market and a dip in the lake. We spent a wonderful night in our tent under a starry sky with chirping birds and a knock-out view to welcome us the following morning.