Many of you will have travelled on a small budget before – backpackers rather than fancy lodges, cheap eateries rather than gourmet temples, cramped bus journeys rather than air-conditioned jeeps – and think you know what I am talking about. But you are mistaken – I am not talking about travelling on a small budget, I am talking about travelling on a small budget in a country without any tourist infrastructure at all!
One of the things I hate about travelling is not having pre-booked accommodation and arriving in a new town at night desperate to find a place to stay that has some sort of hygiene standards (i.e. the sheets get changed every now and then and the toilet has been cleaned or flushed at least once in the past month…).
One evening we arrived late in Lira, a small town in northern Uganda, looking for some kind of accommodation. But soon we realised that all the places were made for locals and while they were certainly affordable (about US$1 per night), they did not match any of our other outrageous criteria such as electricity, some sort of water, food and a mosquito net that had more material than holes. Needless to say that we decided to continue searching for a place that might just beat these attractive road side hotels…
The little village of Karuma turned out to be a major hub for truck drivers and was bustling with life: loud music was played from all the shops, kids ran around, women sold food on the streets and truck drivers treated themselves to one or the other Waraji (local gin). Ewa and Hamish set out to find a hotel and soon came back with a massive smile on their faces: they had found a place that did not only have electricity, but also en-suite bathrooms and water! Wow! But this luxury came at a price and the room would cost us an outrageous US$2.50 per night... shocking! After much debate about whether we could afford this (please hear the irony…), we decided to stay in the “Golden Guest House”, which was clearly one of the up-market hotels for locals in Uganda. 
But the second – literally – we walked through the door and got excited about the Premier League football on TV, the generator stopped working and our dream of an evening with electricity was over. The hotel’s main room looked like a prison yard, but I assume that this massive empty space was used by “rich” Ugandans for their birthday parties and weddings. Personally, the place evoked no festive spirits but claustrophobic feelings in me – surrounded by massive wooden doors with heavy locks on the outside (so that the hotel owner could make sure his guests would never escape from their rooms…) and bars in front of the windows it really looked more like a prison than a hotel. 
The only nice thing was that the rooms were all named after countries, which gave the place a tiny bit of character and I felt that Ewa and I clearly belonged into California! Unfortunately there was nothing glamorous about the room itself– it had a bed with a mosquito net and some sort of a wash-area (which I would definitely not call en-suite bath, but anyway), the water wasn’t working though … second bubble burst!
The hotel was not serving any food so that we decided to explore the local nightlife. Unfortunately every “restaurant” including the “best restaurant in Karuma” had run out of food other than rice and we settled for a stall by the side of the road where a friendly lady could not only offer us rice, but also pasta, some beans and … drum roll … some beef soup! Amazing! The food turned out to be excellent, which may be due to the fact that we had not eaten all day long, and we were certainly the town’s main attraction of the night! Four white people eating at one of the local food stalls – Karuma had certainly never seen anything like that before! The food lady must have been incredibly grateful for this amazing PR, because all the locals gathered around her stall and watched us eat her food – sales must have gone through the roof! Later on we moved on to one of the “pubs” for a game of pool and despite a shocking inability to play the game, we were once again the centre of attention with all the locals wanting to challenge us.
Back in “Hotel California” we had nothing better to do then go to bed, but soon after Ewa and I turned off the lights, I heard a funny noise right next to my bed. Assuming that one of the plastic bags had fallen over or so, I didn’t pay much attention to it. But then the noise came back and got louder… and even though I would have loved to deny it, it was fairly clear that we had – in the best case – a mouse in the room but probably a rat. The rat itself didn’t really bother me much, but it was the sound that drove me crazy and the fact that it might be crawling through my bags. So after trying to ignore it for a while, I got up and packed up all my things – not to run away, after all, where would I go - but to make sure that I would at least not hear our visitor anymore! I put away all the plastic bags, hung up the shoes, zipped up the bags and went back to bed for what turned out to be a really good nights sleep!In the morning there was still no water in our luxury en-suite bathroom and the only option for a shower was to poor a bucket of cold rather dodgy looking water over yourself – yay! This kind of travelling does not only make you smelly, but also inventive and I soon started to wash my hair at stopovers in fancy lodges: Equipped with shampoo and a towel I would invade their bathrooms and wash my hair in the sink … desperate times, desperate measures!
Fortunately there is hope for low-budget travellers: Just outside the National Park, a local women’s empowerment initiative has opened a little guesthouse. Fair enough, it also has no electricity, but the charming little Bandas (traditional Ugandan huts) were spotless with clean towels, extra duvets and proper mosquito nets. Even though we arrived unannounced, the lady prepared a fantastic meal with vegetables (!!!) and lots of fresh fruit for breakfast. But what I loved most were the toilets: they were still the usual local style latrines, but came with things I had certainly not seen in Uganda before and almost forgot existed – a toilet brush and loo cleaner! Amazing!
No comments:
Post a Comment