The Plan (What There Was of One)
I'd been on the road for eighteen months when Uganda appeared on the map not as a destination but as a gap between Kenya and DRC. A gap I could fill. A gap that, I reckoned, would be fine—gorillas, some water, decent coffee, move on. The kind of thinking that gets you into trouble, or into the best stories. Sometimes both.
I landed in Kampala on a Tuesday in the kind of heat that makes thinking difficult. The city sprawls across hills like it's still deciding whether it wants to be here, markets bleeding into government offices, churches broadcasting sermons loud enough to wake biblical figures. My guesthouse was in Kamwokya, which meant I was exactly nowhere special and exactly where I needed to be.
By Wednesday, I'd already missed two minibus departures. By Thursday, I'd booked the best Kampala group walking tour Best Kampala group Walking Tour. because sitting still was making me restless.
The City Walks Back
Our guide, Peter, had the kind of face that suggested he'd seen every type of tourist and had developed opinions about most of them. He didn't waste time on pleasantries. We started in Owino Market, where the density of humanity and goods became almost abstract—fish heaped on tables, cloth vendors calling in Luganda and English and a third language that might have been just noise, the sheer press of bodies moving in directions that seemed to defy geometry.
"This is where Kampala actually is," Peter said, steering us past a woman carrying what looked like a small vehicle on her head. "Not the hotels. Not the expat compounds. Here."
We walked past the old Parliament building, through Nakasero with its colonial ghosts, stopped for coffee at a café that was basically someone's front room with better cups. Peter told us about the city's hills—Kampala supposedly has seven, though he suggested that number was optimistic—and about the different communities layered into each neighbourhood like geological strata. Buganda royalty, Indian merchants, British administrators, everyone who came and stayed and left their fingerprints.
What struck me wasn't the history. It was that Peter knew every corner personally. This wasn't a recited script. He was showing us his city the way you'd show someone your home, with the mixture of pride and exasperation that only works when you actually live somewhere.
I spent that evening writing in my notebook that Kampala didn't feel like a tourist destination. It felt like a place where tourism had arrived as an afterthought.
North, Toward Water
Friday I took a minibus north toward Jinja, Uganda's second city, which sits where the Nile begins its long journey to Egypt. The road was the kind of road that makes you understand why people move to cities—potholes the size of philosophy, matatu drivers who'd clearly made a pact with violence. An old man next to me ate fresh pineapple with a knife and offered me some without asking. This is how you make friends in East Africa.
Jinja day tour exploring the source of River Nile Jinja day tour exploring the source of River Nile started at seven in the morning, which is when I learned that my guide, Moses, had opinions about everything and the kindness to share them. We moved through the city—a place with genuine character, less frantic than Kampala, more focused—and eventually reached Bujagali Falls, where the Nile tumbles down with such force that you feel it in your chest.
But the real moment came at the source itself, at the place where the Nile technically begins, in a spot that looks like it could be anywhere—a stretch of water, papyrus, birds. I'd expected grandeur. I'd expected to feel something. What I actually felt was small, and quiet, and oddly moved by something I couldn't articulate. Moses let me stand there without talking, which was the kindest thing he could have done.
We visited Itanda Falls that afternoon, and a local market where I bought passion fruit I couldn't carry, and by evening I was sunburned and exhausted and had somehow booked the next five days of my life.
Into the Forest
Bwindi Impenetrable National Park sits in the southwestern corner of Uganda like something from a different era. The private 3 day gorilla trekking safari in Uganda Private 3 Day Gorilla Trekking Safari in Uganda involved leaving before dawn on a Monday, driving through landscape that got progressively greener and more vertiginous, arriving at a lodge that seemed to have grown from the forest rather than been built in it.
Our ranger, Charles, had been tracking these gorillas for twelve years. He moved through the forest like he was reading a newspaper, pointing out the smallest signs—bent vegetation, faint paths, droppings that apparently told him everything about who'd been where and when. I was breathing hard within twenty minutes. Charles was breathing like he'd just sat down.
When we found them—a family group of nine, led by a silverback the size of accumulated trauma—I understood something about why people cry at supposedly predictable moments. You cannot prepare yourself for that. For the closeness, the sheer presence, the fact that they were simply living their lives and we were the interruption. The silverback looked at us with an expression that seemed to contain judgment and indifference in equal measure, and I thought: he's right. We are exactly as small as we feel.
Charles told me later that he'd never left this forest, never wanted to, couldn't imagine what the rest of Uganda was even for. "This is the realness," he said. "Everything else is noise."
The Nile Does Not Negotiate
Back at Bujagali, I'd booked the private whitewater tubing in Bujagali hydropower plant Private Whitewater Tubing in Bujagali Hydropower Plant for the morning after I returned from Bwindi, which was stupid, because my thighs had opinions and those opinions were angry.
But the Nile at Bujagali isn't something you can refuse. The rapids here are Class 3-4, which means you're getting thrown around but not killed, a distinction that seems important in the moment. Our guides, Juma and Patrick, had both grown up on these rivers. They treated the tubes like other people treat cars—with casual competence and an understanding that disaster was always two metres away.
Two hours of white water will strip away whatever pretence you've been holding. You're not thinking about work, or emails, or the person who didn't call back. You're thinking about not drowning. You're thinking about your guide's instructions and the next rapid and the weird joy of being small in front of something vast and indifferent.
Juma told me afterward that he'd proposed to his wife on this river. I asked if she said yes. "What else could she do? I was holding her hand in a tube at Class 4. She was trapped."
The Kitchen, The Quiet Thing
Back in Kampala, still damp and still smiling like an idiot, I'd somehow signed myself up for the cooking class for typical Ugandan food in Kampala Cooking Class for Typical Ugandan Food in Kampala, which meant spending four hours in a kitchen learning to make posho, matoke, groundnut sauce, things that sounded simple until you actually tried them.
Our instructor, Amina, had the patience of someone used to teaching tourists who believed that cooking was an instinctive art rather than a skill. It's not. She walked us through each step—how to peel plantains without removing skin, how to know when groundnuts were ready, how salt wasn't optional—and by the end we'd made something that tasted like actual food, not like what tourists imagine food should taste like.
I asked her why teaching rather than professional cooking. She smiled like I'd asked an obvious question. "I am teaching. That's what matters."
The Sting
I left Uganda on a Saturday, flying out through the same airport I'd arrived at. On the drive to Entebbe, I realised I hadn't thought about my original plan—to treat Uganda as a gap, a brief interlude—in about four days. The Nile had a way of doing that to you. Not by showing you the spectacular (though the waterfalls were spectacular), but by insisting that you actually pay attention to things. To people. To the spaces between landmarks where actual life happens.
Moses texted me a photo of Bujagali Falls a week later. Charles sent a message through my guide service saying the gorillas were well. Peter's market was still happening in Kampala exactly as it always had been, completely indifferent to whether tourists passed through it.
That's the thing about solo travel that nobody tells you. The destinations don't care about you. But the people in them might. And that caring, those small moments of connection with guides and instructors and people who let you stand in their lives for a moment—that's what rewires you. That's what makes you come back. That's why I'm already looking at flights.
