{UAH} Ugandan Be Kidding Me - The Ugandan Motorcycling Experience

When I told friends and family about my plan to hire a motorcycle in Uganda and attempt a full circumnavigation of Lake Victoria, they rattled off every cliché about overlanding in Africa in a vain attempt to dissuade me. "The drivers are crazy!" "The roads are a disaster!" "The traffic police are corrupt!" But when I was lying face-down in a russet road in the middle of a jungle, the taste of baked dirt in my mouth and the battered corpse of my 250cc Honda splayed out ahead of me, the only words of warning I recalled were those from Grace, the smiling hostel receptionist who had bid me farewell before my ride into Murchison Falls National Park that morning, "Be careful out there. There are lions in the park, you know."

My East African odyssey began in Kampala, Uganda's capital, with its chaos of noisy boda bodas (motorcycles), bustling city folk, and faded shop fronts with their wares spilling out onto the narrow sidewalk. I collected my motorbike—a characterful 1980's Honda dual-sport with a sticky ignition and a suspect kick starter—and tentatively peeled into the madness of the road.

While I crawled along with the matatus, the lumbering white mini-bus vans that ferry Kampala's working population around the city along ever-transient transport routes, all around me the motoboys on their boda bodas rattled past, ducking and weaving through gaps in the traffic that were scarcely there. When I eventually mustered a grain of courage and began to plot my own route through the horde of vehicles, I did so with all the grace of a guinea fowl trying to avoid being trampled in an elephant stampede.

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As I found my rhythm, I began to see that within this chaos there was order. Amidst the madness there was a hierarchy, a pecking order in which, paradoxically, the larger vehicles submitted to the smaller ones and where motorcyclists ruled the roads. In Europe or the U.S., where the rules of the road are so rigidly codified and where car drivers cruise along on autopilot, any mistake made by a motorcyclist—a corner taken fractionally too wide, a mistimed turn into traffic—can prove fatal. In Kampala's streets, traffic "laws" are a more fluid concept. As a result, the drivers of the matatus, the trucks, and anything else that could cause serious harm to a motorcyclist, have been hard-wired to anticipate the erratic driving patterns of the boda bodas, making the streets, seemingly counter-intuitively, an arguably safer place to ride. Buoyed by this revelation, I pushed northward.

Lake Victoria lies to the south of Kampala, but first I had planned to travel 200 kilometers to Masindi, the former capital of one of East Africa's greatest kingdoms and the gateway to the Murchison Falls National Park. It was on the surprisingly beautifully tarmacked but uninspiringly named Kampala-Masindi Highway where the Honda and I suffered our first disagreement. As I shifted to fifth to open her up on a particularly inviting stretch of highway, she sputtered in protest and then ground to a complete standstill. I pulled her over to the side of the road, where I was soon approached by a gang of men.

Any anxieties I might have had were quickly assuaged when the youngest, a boy no older than 10, was sent scurrying back into the bush and returned with a replacement carburetor. They insisted on swapping it out for me, and in return accepted a tiny sum of cash as payment for the spare part but nothing further for their time. The 10-year old then sympathetically watched me stomp several times with increasing vigor on the Honda's kick starter to no avail before stepping in with his bare feet to get her going for me in a scene that resembled an East African reimagining of King Arthur's sword-in-the-stone moment.

I did not expect the same generosity when, an hour later, a roadside police official motioned for me to pull over. Conditioned by the tales on countless internet forums, my brain immediately searched for a happy middle ground between a cash bribe that wouldn't be so high as to make too sizable a dent in my Tusker Lager budget, nor so low as to risk offending and making an enemy of the official.

"Where are you from?" he barked, as I reached for my wallet.

"England. Manchester," I replied.

The official paused.

"Manchester United or Manchester City?"

"United."

His mouth turned upwards in a beaming smile, and he clasped me by the shoulder. "My good man!" For fifteen minutes we spoke of the declining fortunes of Manchester United football club before he asked what I liked most about Uganda so far. I told him that I had been surprised by the kindness of its people, and with that he smiled once more, lent his size 12 boot to the Honda's kick starter and waved me on my way.

Three times on the Kampala-Masindi Highway I was pulled over in this way. Three times the officials wanted nothing more from me than to hear my thoughts on their country and to know which football team I supported back home. All rejoiced upon hearing that I was a Manchester United fan and wished me good fortunes on the rest of my trip. Likewise, every time the Honda needed resurrecting—which was frequently—the villagers who came out to lend their support did so not out of expectation of any financial compensation but mainly out of kindness, possibly out of curiosity and certainly out of pity for the incompetent, scruffy muzungu and his knackered old bike.

Having been charmed by the generosity of the people in this country, it came as a huge relief that it was a Ugandan who reached me in Murchison Falls before the lions did. A park ranger sporting a magnificent moustache helped conceal the Honda in a ditch and offered to call a friend of his who worked as a mechanic in the park to collect the bike. He then gave me a ride to a nearby campsite and reluctantly accepted my offer to buy him a beer as a token of my gratitude, but insisted on paying for the next round.

The next day, when I went to collect my bike from the mechanic, I was amazed to see the Honda had been restored. Even the handlebar, which had been hopelessly bent out of shape, was now perfectly aligned. The only telltale signs of any maltreatment were the gnawed ends of the rubber handlebar grips. "The baboons beat us to it," the mechanic smiled. "They were trying to ride the thing out of there." I slotted the key into the Honda's ignition and pushed down hard on the kick starter and for the first time since I had picked her up in Kampala, she roared into life on the first attempt.

As I rode deeper into the heart of the park, I reflected on the disconnect between my experience of Uganda and the "Africa" I was warned about. Too often, the story about Africa is still framed in terms of stereotypes which suggest the whole of the continent is stricken by famine, war, desperate infrastructure, poverty, and corruption. The reality, of course, is that there is no single story which represents Africa. African countries like Uganda, much like countries everywhere else in the world, are engaged in their own share of successes and setbacks and cannot be understood in terms of a single narrative which applies to the whole continent. Certainly, for some overlanders it may have been that extortion at the hands of corrupt police officials was a reality of their African experience. However, I can only assume that in Uganda such treatment is reserved exclusively for Manchester City fans.

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Doug Loynes is a teacher and writer from Manchester, England. He owes his passion for motorcycling to the eight-year-old bully in Bali who goaded him into returning his "hairdresser's" rental scooter and exchanging it for a Kawasaki dirt bike. Since then, he's journeyed the world seeking stories at the intersection of adventure travel and culture which place the local at the heart of the feature. Doug now lives in Sao Paulo and likes to spend his weekends on two wheels in the Brazilian backcountry. Follow him on Instagram @Instdougramm.

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