Mbarara University Inn

Our base camp in Uganda is the University Inn, located in Plot 9 on the road to Kabale Road. The personnel is extremely nice and diligent and the services include manual laundry, laptop guard, and cheap beer.

The entrance of the University Inn

Some of the rooms

The reception

The room rate, 40,000 Shillings or approximately US$20, includes a clean bug-free room, 2 beds with mosquito nets, running water, television, closet, and breakfast. Some of the luxuries not available to everyone include hot water, toilet seat and bath mat.

Unfortunately you can’t choose the luxuries available in your room and so Sarah and Andres got a room without hot water or toilet seat, and Emily got one with intermittent warm water and unstable ceiling. Fortunately, the ceiling collapsed when she was outside so we now have some cool pictures and no injuries to report.

The collapsed ceiling

And the mess in the room

My room is sort of a presidential suite, 4 times bigger than my room in Boston, and with all the frills plus the company of a lizard that stares at me every night from his spot in the upper corner. I believe the lizard is the reason why I don’t have any mosquitoes flying around in my room. The lizard and me have a pretty good relationship, I tell him good morning and good night everyday and he responds changing color and eating mosquitoes. I would say it’s a promising relationship.

The door to my kingdom

Inside the room

This extremely important switch allows me to have a hot shower everyday

The University Inn has also a cool patio where we hang out everyday having a beer and playing cards or domino. 0.5 liter of beer costs 2,000 shillings or US$1, very cool.

Breakfast is good. Coffee, Tea, passion fruit juice, bread, jam and butter if you’re lucky, pineapple, watermelon and another kind melon, plus eggs a la carte. This is all included in the room rate. The toaster’s on button doesn’t hold for more than 20 seconds so in order to toast bread you need to stand-up next to the toaster and after 10-12 hits you get the bread toasted.
I’m still trying to negotiate the laundry rates. They charge 1,500 shilling for a pair of boxers and 800 for a pair of socks, which is far more expensive than the wash and fold service I use in Boston. The problem is that here they hand wash everything but Peter, the receptionist, told me he could give me a good discount. Let’s see how good it is.