Kampala by Bike

You can keep your gorge swinging and bungee jumping. White-water rafting? Hah, piffling. Quad biking? Sandboarding? Forget it! If you want real heart-stopping adrenaline-fueled action-adventure in Africa, take a taxi-bike into Kampala.

Today is a 'free day', to explore Kampala. Despite the possibility of a lie-in, I was awake at 8am, and 9:30 found us trying unsuccessfully to make a dent in the enormous pan of porridge the cook group had made for breakfast. After sitting around for a while, conducting one-to-one post-mortems of the night before, we made half a plan to head into town. Derek, Huw, Jess, Boyo and I all headed out together, down to the garage round the corner where we picked up some bikes. Boyo approached on guy to sort a price, whereupon we were suddenly surrounded by guys on bikes. It was like a scene from Grease II (look, my sister really liked it when she was young, okay?). Anyway, after a bit of negotiation, we were off, with me clinging to Boyo (with scrotum squared away in his shorts, fortunately).

My god, this was incredibly hairy. We whizzed and weaved through traffic at fifty km/h, my knuckles going white as they gripped the handle behind me. It was a ten minute ride, and twice I heard myself murmur, 'I'm not ready to be a statistic'. I did have a chuckle to myself, though, when I heard Boyo ask the driver, 'Been busy?'. I couldn't help but ask, 'What time you on to?'

Kampala's a great city. It's busy, smelly and polluted, but somehow relaxed. People talk to you, sure, and we had to keep an eye on the odd street urchin who hovered near us, but it was all fine. There are fourteen-person taxi-mini buses everywhere, but god knows how anyone knows where they're going. Twin that with the ubiquitous motorbikes, and you have a city consisting mostly of public transport.

We left Boyo to run some errands and struck out on our own. We didn't actually do a lot in Kampala, other than completely fail to find the craft market (sadly, Lonely Planet led us to a craft shop. Not exactly what we were after). We had a bit of an issue on the way back. We negotiated a price, and they drove us back, stopping outside a 'shoprite' superstore. We were, like, 'this isn't what we wanted', but they insisted it was what we'd asked to. Patently untrue, since I'd actually pulled out a book with the address in it. Anyway, they decided it was further than we'd negotiated, so asked for more money. I actually think the price was very cheap, and a little more wasn't out of order. However, as Huw (yes, it's 'Huw', not 'Hugh' – he's properly Welsh) pointed out afterwards, they were trying it on with us – trying to renegotiate on the fly. We elected to pay them 3000 per bike to drop us there – 1000 cheaper than agreed for Red Chilli. We then walked off on our own, ignoring the growing crowd of touting bikes.

We walked for then minutes, unsure of where we were. Eventually, we found a garage, asked where we were, then conducted some more brief negotiations with some more bikers. Off again, and this time they got us home. Well, they got Derek and I home; they only got Jess and Huw to the end of the hundred-metre drive. So now dinner is being prepared, and I must go wash Kampala off my skin and out of my hair.