Ugandan Beer

The Winner! Nile Special

I believe I'm done with my research on Ugandan beer. After almost two weeks here, I have completed a thorough research and reached a conclusion. A cold Nile!

I excluded Guinness from my research since, although it is brewed in Uganda. It is no different from the original one and I am not a great fan of stout.

I started my research with a Bell, a light beer, not too light though but still with not enough taste. I then moved to Club, which is the closest to Bud Light, which means water in beer bottle. Then I tried Nile Special, a tasty lager, not too heavy but definitely not light with 5.6% alcohol. The perfect partner for all occasions. The next player was Tusker, a malt lager, brown beer, heavy and tasty. I liked it but it needs a good partner, like beef or the popular goat meat. Finally I tasted Moonberg, a german beer brewed here, very much like Nile but I believe less tasty. It was a close finish between Moonberg and Nile but I stick to Nile.

Time in Uganda

Time is relative, and I’m not talking about Einstein’s general relativity. I’m talking about cultural relativity. One hour for me is not one hour for an American and it is not one hour for a Ugandan. It’s hard to understand this concept but it’s one of primary importance whenever you’re dealing cross-culturally.

Ugandans say that here you should not go to a restaurant when you are hungry, you should go at least 1h before you think you will be hungry. Any nutritionist in the US would probably tell you the same but here it has a different meaning. It means it takes at least 1h to order food to the table. If everyone is fine with that, why shouldn’t I? Furthermore, they even warn you so no complaints.

A meeting time does not mean that people will be on time for the meeting. It is a suggestion; you know you should show up around that time, maybe half an hour later, maybe more, maybe less. If you are early, you drink a cup of coffee or tea and wait. Why should you hurry if no one does?

This logic is repeated again and again in different contexts and situations. Time is relative, so why worry?

Disrespecting local timing is rude because you are assuming that everyone thinks like you, that you are the center of the world, the one who dictates the rules. When we came to Uganda we were repeatedly told that time in Uganda does not mean the same as in the US. Everyone repeated the warning again and again. Nonetheless, those warnings often seem to be left where they were given, a few thousand miles away.

Have you ever thought why should that report be delivered on Monday and not on Tuesday? I’m not asking who gave you that deadline; I’m asking why was that deadline set? Why is half an hour a reasonable time to order food and not one hour? Why should someone be ready to give me what I ask for when I ask for? Why should I be angry whenever someone does not understand my time? Shouldn’t they be angry with my anger?

Vision Empire

In Mbarara, a town with 250,000 inhabitants, there is only one place to go out at night. It is called Vision Empire and every week it offers three nights of fun and drinks. Wednesday is ladies night, Thursday is reggae night and Friday is whatever night.

I went there on Friday with Pidson and a few more friends. It was literally whatever night, from bad American 80s pop to good Ugandan hip-hop and reggae. It's 12 something when we head to Vision Empire. The price of admission is visible at the door: USh 3,000 for the regular room, USh 7,000 for the VIP room. US$3.5 is reasonable for a VIP room and Pidson won't let me go to the regular room. ‘Girls are on the VIP room’, things don’t change just because you're in Africa.

Pison and I before heading to Vision Empire. Notice how black shirt is the uniform

In fact, when we arrive there are no girls or boys. The place is empty. ‘Too early’, complains Pidson. Dinner was too short. I go to the bar and order a drink, ‘gin and tonic please.’ ‘Excuse me?’ I try once more and give up, clearly that is not a normal order. ‘One vodka sprite, please.’ The waiter brings me a 0.375 liter bottle of vodka and a fresh sprite. That's half a regular bottle of liquor in case you're not familiar with the metric system.  ‘Can I have a glass please?’ He brings a glass and that’s all the cocktail. Ice is overrated, which makes sense because it's hard to trust that they boil water before freezing into ice cubes. I take my ‘cocktail’ but after a couple of glasses everything is warm and tastes awful. It’s better to stick to cold beer.

One vodka sprite, please!

Pidson insists in finding me a girl despite my warnings that I'm not interested. ‘Man, here you just have to choose, you’re white, every girl looks at you.’ It is actually not true as I see some girls looking in our direction and clearly more interested in Pidson and Nicholas.

The party is over around 5, not because Vision Empire is empty but because we have an early morning drive to Queen Elizabeth Park. Unfortunately I don’t have good pictures from Vision Empire. They don’t allow cameras inside the place. The reason? Some people bring cameras to shoot celebrities and then publish the pictures in magazines. Who would say Mbarara is such a celebrity spot?

Ugandan Food, Part II

Kalo on the left, Posho on the right

‘You can’t manage that’, was the waiter’s comment on my order at City Top, a restaurant in Mbarara. I just ordered Kalo, which according to the waiter was a millet paste. I thought it was worth trying. He insisted: ‘that is not food for white people. Not even for me. That is for people in the villages. They can handle it. We can’t, it’s bad for your stomach’. I ordered anyway, just to try. Kalo is actually a mixture of boiled millet flour and a bit of cassava flour (also known as manioc or yucca). Kalo looks like an enormous piece of crap and its texture is both sticky and soft. The taste is rather neutral so people eat it with some sort of sauce. You don’t use a fork to eat kalo. Instead, you pull of a small piece with your hands, mold it with your thumb to make a hole, and then dip it into the sauce. The waiter was right. Kalo is extremely heavy and I doubt I can handle an entire piece of it.

Mold a hole with the thumbs

Fill the hole with sauce

And it's ready to eat

Another Ugandan delicacy is Posho, maize meal. As far as I could find out, posho is mostly made of maize flour although some people mix cassava. A couple of people told me that posho is made of cassava but I find it very hard to be true since cassava has a chewy and sticky texture and Posho is hard. Posho looks white, which is funny since both maize and cassava usually have a yellowish tone. I tried to find out why but people just say it’s the normal color so I assume it’s something to do with local maize. Just like Kalo, posho has little taste and people eat it with sauce.

I also learned this week that biñeuá is also called gnut sauce (pronounced g-nut) and is actually made of peanuts and a sort of aubergine. Anyways, it’s still awesome and the best sauce to eat with either matóke, posho or kalo.

Kalo, posho, matooke and rice are the staple foods in Uganda because they’re cheap, very energetic and rich in fibers.

Road to Queen Elizabeth National Park

It's 11am when I leave my room at the University Inn to try to grab some food. Maybe some breakfast leftovers. We went to Vision Empire last night and it was fun, maybe too fun considering I had to drive for 2h. Pidson, our guest for the weekend, has already arrived and everyone is waiting for me. Not surprising.

We sort of rented a car to a friend with Pidson’s and it was a lot better than I expected, a Toyota Hilux Surf. Whatever that means, it was roomy and tough, just what we need to drive around the park and face the poorly built Ugandan roads.

Our ride, a Toyota Hilux Surf

The road to QENP is gorgeous. Vast tea and banana plantations and beautiful lakes lying in the middle of tall green mountains. We could be in Switzerland if it wasn’t for the potholes, the traffic of bikes carrying the most amazing amounts of bananas, or the aspect of semi-built houses by the side of the road.

Tea plantation

Banana plantation by a lake

Banana bike

Village by the road to QENP 

Driving in the middle of Uganda gives me a different perspective of the country. Mbarara is not exactly shinning and organized but it’s definitely a lot more developed than the villages I see in the countryside. In Mbarara, and hanging with URI people, everything seems to be moderately fine.

Traveling out of Mbarara is a reality bath, just like it is watching the local TV. Commercial don’t try to sell you cars, electronics or shampoo. They try to make you boil the water you drink, to bury your trash, to use a condom, or to stop ‘being’ with underage girls. Apparently these campaigns are effective but new problems arise all the time. As AIDS prevalence decreases among teens and young people, it increases among married people. Why? Because men cheat on their wives without using a condom and they can’t use one when they go back home and have sex with their wives, as it would be too obvious they cheated. So they need new campaigns to make people use condoms when cheating. How about that as a commercial?

On the way to QENP we stop to take some pictures. Two kids approach us riding a bike. I expect them to ask for some shillings. They don’t.

- ‘Do you have a pen?’, it’s their only request.
- What do you want the pen for?, it’s the obvious question
- I want to draw

Nothing more is said, I don’t insist either. I look for a pen in my bag and find one. He smiles. How sad is that when a country can’t provide you the most basic learning tools? And this kid is not an illiterate. He speaks English, something you only learn when you go to school. And he wants to draw. I’m sure he also wants to learn.

The kid who asked me for a pen

Queen Elizabeth National Park

‘The Park occupies 1978 sq. kilometers’. Eddie, the ranger we hired to guide us around the park, would mention this figure every five or six sentences, perhaps to emphasize the size of the QENP. No need for that. Coming from Mbarara, we crossed the mountains surrounding the park and we could see the endless valley with the Rwenzori Mountains far away on the horizon. Rwenzori was the original name of the park, but that was before 1954 when Queen Elizabeth II came to Uganda and decided that her name would be a better choice.

The Queen Elizabeth Park

Emily, Pidson, Sarah and I at the main gate

Our weekend safari started with a boat ride on the Kasinga Channel. Ugandans claim that the Kasinga Channel contains the largest concentration of hippos and from what we saw they are probably right. The 2-hour boat ride was productive: water buffalos, hippos, crocodiles, elephants, antelopes, warthogs, and a large amount of birds including fish-eagles, pelicans, storks, and a bunch other that I don’t know the name.

Elephants, hippos and buffalos mingling by the water

Herd of water buffalos

Hippos resting with pelicans

Lots of hippos and buffalos squeezing in the water

The Mweya Lodge was our next stop to grab some food and find accommodation. The lodge is the most luxurious place I’ve seen since we arrived in Uganda and that left me thinking about the bubble that tourists live in when they come to Africa. That will be subject of another post. US$110 was the price to stay at the lodge, whereas the neighboring hostel charged USh30,000 (US$15) for bed and breakfast. The only issue was that they were ful booked so they could only accommodate the five of us in the entrance area. US$95 were worth the sacrifice and so we stayed at the more interesting Mweya Hostel.

The Mweya Safari Lodge...

... and the Mweya Hostel

Andres hanging with warthogs in the lodge's backyard 

The Mweya Lodge is the typical place where white tourists come to pretend they are in Africa without actually being in Africa. Western comfort, Western food, decent prices for Western standards, and the inevitable ‘indigenous’ music and dance show by the bonfire so they can have pictures that look like Africa. The lodge served the most expensive meal I had in Uganda yet. USh40,000 ($20) doubles my previous record at the most expensive place in Mbarara. Western cheap, Ugandan exorbitant.

Very African? Bonfire and 'indigenous' dance

It was 6am when my alarm buzzed reminding we had a game drive scheduled with Eddie, the ranger. Eddie was promptly waiting for us at 6.30 and we left with the promise of spotting some leopard and the unique climbing lion, which just like the name says, is a lion that climbs trees like leopards do.

Eddie, the ranger, in the middle of us

We can’t complain about Eddie’s promises. We first saw hippos doing their morning walk to the water. Later, after herds and herds of antelopes and buffalos, Eddie shouts ‘Leopard’! We all look left: where? There he was, imperceptible under a cactus tree. We suggested a closer look but Eddie discouraged us, ‘he will run away, leopards don’t like company’. We then tried to spot Mary, a female elephant that is a regular visit to a local fishermen village. Eddie asked the kids around the village but they hadn’t seen Mary for a few days. All of the sudden Eddie receives a call. ‘Someone spotted a lion’. Eddie takes us to the spot. There are four other cars trying to spot 'the king'. She, a female lion, was resting in a cactus tree. The problem was that the tree was pretty far away from the track and off-road is prohibited. Well, nothing that Eddie can’t solve ‘just let these cars go away’. The excitement grows as Eddie goes off-road and we approach the tree. We can now perfectly spot the lion, lying in the middle of a cactus tree with their typical aristocratic look as if we weren’t there. As Eddie starts driving around the tree we can see she’s following us. Finally, she opens her eyes and slightly her mouth. Good enough. We are super excited. There is no way she’s going to climb down since it’s not hunting time yet. Mission accomplished.

Warthog sniffing

Antelopes staring

Female elephant, not Mary though

Leopard saving a good distance from us. Can you see it?

Lion in cactus tree

For the rest of the day the highlight is a herd of elephants that we ran into on our way out to Mbarara. Several elephants cross the road and halt their march staring at us as we stop to take some shots. We are literally 2-3 yards away from them but they don’t move. Patiently they wait for us to go away and resume their march to the lake. Time is obviously not a problem for them.

Elephant staring at us

Part of the herd waiting for us to leave

Closed for the weekend

This blog is closed for the weekend. We are headed to the Queen Elizabeth Park to do a safari. No hot water until Monday. I hope to have good pictures. Meanwhile, here is a picture from today's lunch break. I called it 'Cow Truck'.

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.

Food in Uganda

Food options in Mbarara are reduced to chicken or fish, they say it’s tilapia but it doesn’t taste like tilapia. Or at least not like the South American tilapia, the only I had before I came here. They catch it in local lakes, including Lake Victoria, and that might explain the difference in taste.

Chickens here are extremely skinny, so skinny that stews look more like bone stews and when fried you get more fried flour than actual meat. But they are tasty. As far as I could see, fish or meat are luxuries than not everyone can afford. We always pay a premium for chicken or fish so most locals eat rice, potatoes, matóke, chapatti and avocato. Avocatos are abundant and grow everywhere, almost like a weed they say, which is great for them since it’s such a caloric fruit.

It’s hard to find anything other than fried chicken, fried fish, chicken stew, or fish stew. The goat meat barbeque was an exception but goat is a more expensive meat. Well, we always have the option of going to the upscale hotels and eat western-like food.

Chicken stew

Fish stew

But the local food is the real experience. One of the most popular dishes is Matóke, mashed green bananas fried in a sort of thick patty shape. The matóke can also be served in the regular banana shape, in that case they just fry or grill the banana. The matóke is not very tasteful but with some sauce it’s a great side. We had it with a tomato and onion salad or with stew and it’s great. Matóke is so popular because bananas are abundant here. So abundant that they pick them either green for the matóke or ripe for desserts. Everyday we can see several trucks fully loaded with bananas, I still didn’t have the chance to shoot one but as soon as I do it I’ll post the picture.

A couple of days ago, at the university canteen, we had Biñeuá. I don’t know how to spell it but it’s how it sounds in Runyankore, the most popular language in Mbarara. Biñeuá is a stew made with a sort of local aubergine. It’s the perfect partner for matóke and they eat it as a sauce since it’s so rich.

Another popular side is chapatti, a corn-made sort of tortilla or crepe, thicker than Mexican tortillas and also tastier. They dip it in the stew or Biñeuá and it makes a great side.

Matóke on the left, Chapatti on the right

Hopefully there’s more to come about local food. I’ll keep looking for something other than chicken and fish.

Daily commute

Leave the University Inn

Turn left into the goat path before hitting the road

Go all the way through the pinneaple and corn field

Climb the small dirt hill

And turn right into the main road

When you see the dumpster on your right you're really close to URI

Walk 50 meters and you'll see URI banner. You arrived at your destination