The Myth That Started It All
There's a particular kind of delusion that grips you in your late twenties, usually around 2am in a London flat, when you've been scrolling through old photographs of the Hippie Trail and thinking: I should have been born in 1968. The original seekers—the ones who actually did it—they had something figured out. They packed light, moved slow, and trusted the road.
I'm not deluded enough to think I could replicate that experience. But I am deluded enough to try. So I booked a ticket to Kampala and set myself a loose itinerary that was less "see Uganda" and more "let Uganda happen to me."
What I didn't expect was that the real journey would start with a cooking class.
Learning to Cook Like You Mean It
The Cooking Class for Typical Ugandan Food in Kampala Cooking Class for Typical Ugandan Food in Kampala was meant to be filler. A rainy afternoon activity. Instead, it became the spiritual centre of my entire trip—which tells you something about where my priorities lie.
I showed up at 9am to a modest kitchen in a residential neighbourhood, where I met Janet, who may have been the class instructor or may have simply been a woman who'd generously allowed a sweaty British-Nigerian man into her home. The distinction never became clear, and that was fine.
"You know matoke?" she asked, which was her way of saying, "You're about to."
Matoke is plaintain, steamed in banana leaves, served with everything. It's the gravitational centre of Ugandan cooking. Janet showed me the knife technique—a rocking motion, controlled—and then set me loose on a pile of them whilst she prepared the groundnut sauce. I peeled and chopped with the enthusiasm of someone who'd never cooked anything that wasn't microwaveable. She watched with the patience of someone who'd seen this a hundred times.
We made g-nut sauce, we made beans, we made a dish with tomatoes and onions that she called simply "tomato sauce" and which tasted like it had been cooking for decades. By the end of four hours, I'd fed myself something I'd made myself, and Janet had fed me approximately twice that amount as "extras." When I left, she pressed two containers of leftovers into my hands and wouldn't take money beyond the class fee.
"You eat," she said firmly. "Not tourist food."
I spent the next three days trying to recreate the groundnut sauce. I haven't managed it yet.
The City Reveals Itself
Before you head out of Kampala—and you should—do the Best Kampala group Walking Tour Best Kampala group Walking Tour., but do it in a way that lets the city seep into you rather than checking boxes.
Our guide was named Sebo, which means "father" in Luganda, and which he told us with a slightly world-weary air, as if to say: I contain multitudes, and also I've explained this before. He walked us through the markets—the chaos of Nakasero, the controlled pandemonium of Owino—with the tone of someone reading a familiar book to a classroom of perpetually distracted students.
"This is real Kampala," he'd say, gesturing at a stall selling phone credit and cassava simultaneously. "Not tourist Kampala."
We watched money changers execute miracles with wads of notes. We bought coffee from a woman who roasted it by hand over a charcoal brazier and whose name we never learned. We got hopelessly lost in the narrow lanes and never found our way back to the exact same route, which was entirely the point.
By the end, Kampala didn't feel like a place I'd visited. It felt like a place that had allowed me to exist within it for a few hours. There's a difference.
The Source: Where All Rivers Remember
Jinja is an hour's drive east, and the Jinja day tour exploring the source of River Nile Jinja day tour exploring the source of River Nile is the kind of pilgrimage that sounds corny until you're actually there.
I hired a guide named Peter, who'd been born in Jinja, moved to Kampala for work, and moved back because "the city was teaching me to be angry." He said this while steering a battered matatu through traffic with the calm of someone who'd made peace with entropy.
The Nile source itself is underwhelming in the way that sources tend to be—it's not a dramatic upwelling, but rather a gentle suggestion of water, a lake that decides at some point to become a river. We walked to Itanda Falls, where the water first learns what it means to rush, and Peter told me about the history of the place in a way that felt earned rather than rehearsed.
We visited the local market—a proper one, not a tourist trap—and ate fresh mandazi and drank tea so strong it could probably navigate by stars. A woman at a fruit stall asked where I was from, and when I said Nigeria, she nodded as if this explained everything. "We are cousins," she said, and proceeded to give me an upgrade on every fruit I bought.
That evening, watching the Nile begin its long journey toward Cairo and the Mediterranean, I felt the particular kind of peace that comes from being in a place that was significant long before you arrived and will be significant long after you leave.
The Rapids and the Reckoning
Three days later, I was strapped into a tube on the Nile near Bujagali, screaming in a way I hadn't screamed since I was approximately seven years old.
The Private Whitewater Tubing in Bujagali Hydropower Plant Private Whitewater Tubing in Bujagali Hydropower Plant is not a metaphorical experience. It is extremely literal. You are a human in a tube. The water is very cold. The rapids are genuine. Your guide is probably someone named David who's been doing this for a decade and finds your terror amusing.
"Big one coming!" David would shout, which meant nothing because they were all big and they were all coming. But there was something about the pure physicality of it—the cold, the chaos, the complete absence of control—that felt like washing something out of my system. I'd been carrying the weight of nine days of slow travel, of observation, of trying to be present. For two hours, I was simply trying not to drown.
When we got out, shivering and laughing and deeply wet, one of the other tourists—a woman from South Africa named Palesa—said: "That was the stupidest thing I've ever done."
"Right?" I said.
"Let's do it again tomorrow," she said.
We didn't. But we drank beer until sunset like we might.
The Gorillas Change You
There's not much to say about the Private 3 Day Gorilla Trekking Safari in Uganda Private 3 Day Gorilla Trekking Safari in Uganda that hasn't been said, and yet: you have to do it anyway.
Bwindi Impenetrable National Park is exactly as advertised—the forest is so thick that light struggles to reach the forest floor. We hiked for six hours the first day, following guides who seemed to move through the undergrowth like they were reading a book written in leaves. My legs stopped working approximately halfway through.
On the second morning, we found them: a family of seven, including a silverback named Rafiki who'd been monitored by researchers for fourteen years. He was, without exaggeration, the most magnificent thing I'd ever seen. The gorillas didn't perform. They didn't acknowledge us. They simply existed, and we existed near them, and for an hour, the entire hierarchical arrangement of the world seemed less important.
I won't pretend the experience was transformative in some neat, resolvable way. But it was clarifying. Gorillas don't care about your bank account or your email inbox. They certainly don't care about your personal brand. They live, they eat, they exist in a family unit, and that's the entire economy of their world. There's something stabilising about witnessing that.
Coming Home Different
I left Uganda the way many people do: changed in ways I couldn't articulate, holding recipes I'll probably never perfect, and with an inchoate sense that the hippy trail—if it ever really existed—wasn't actually about finding enlightenment.
It was about remembering that you're a body in a place, that other people live entire lives in places you're just passing through, and that the most profound moments are rarely the ones you've planned for.
Janet's groundnut sauce. The Nile at its beginning. A gorilla's hand, resting on earth. The cold shock of the rapids. These are the things I remember. These are the things I keep.
