[Post-Edit Note: All pictures and written content in this post was originally created in 2015.]

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Uganda, like Nepal and a couple of other places, are unfortunate destinations which I have shamefully lodged at the back of my mind with promises to revisit on paper ‘in the near future’ without any real intention to – simply because I am completely dry on thoughts and words, and the term ‘near future’ gives me enough ambiguity to work with until… well, until five years later which is, apparently, now.

The thing is, Uganda is one of those countries that looks remarkable only in reminiscence. It holds neither iconic monuments nor good food, and its culture isn’t as strongly echoed in its atmosphere as it is in, say, Kenya. Lands are parched and smog gleams a copper red, and every camp night swells humid with a chance of malaria. A fantasy Ugandan road trip reads like a Jack Kerouac novel: windows rolled down, music turned up, and boundless freedom on the open road. But in reality, it is closer to silent 12-hour bus rides through dusty towns, clogged city traffic, and pee breaks amidst the bushes.

Uganda, is where you learn to live with what you have. It is where you feel the weight of useless necessities tying you down, where sufficiency is not correlated to how many things you have, and where happiness can sometimes come as arbitrarily as bumbling down unpaved roads with the windows down, kids running up beside you bearing toothy smiles and winsome hellos. Uganda is not blissful in tokenistic ideals, and it never attempts to impress itself on you that way. It doesn’t spoon feed and tell you what or where to look; instead, it nudges you along ever so patiently, encouraging you to trail and wander and get lost in its unspoken magic.

Uganda is perhaps, the grand epiphany you have always dreamt of. While Kenya may be the best answer to the world’s call for the wild, Uganda is an enigmatic tapestry of experiences that will satiate the hungry wanderlust in each and every one of us.

I must warn you, the following catalogue of Uganda experiences turned out to be a hell lot longer than I expected it to be – kind of like the trek we did for the Golden Monkeys in Rwanda. I could try to be apologetic about it, but then again, those cunning lil red-assed primates never were.

1. Being In Two Hemispheres At Once: The Ugandan Equator

There is one particular scene from A Walk to Remember that’s been stuck inside my head for the past 18 years. It’s when Landon (?) brings Mandy Moore to the state line and gets her to put one foot on each side of the demarcation such that half of her is in Virginia and the other is in North Carolina… and then he tells her that she is now in two places at once.

I have been obsessed with being in two places at once ever since my cruel fate of having witnessed that scene. Everywhere I’ve gone since then, I have displayed a compulsive need to track down symbolic lines, straddling every border I could find to figuratively split myself into two. Once, standing in historic Hue, star state in the U.S.-Vietnam War, I found myself in both North and South Vietnam at once. I was so ecstatic I almost pee-ed myself- until I realized anyone who isn’t a veteran wouldn’t care because today, Vietnam is just, Vietnam. Which means at that point, half of me was in Vietnam and the other half me was in, well, also Vietnam.

But modern details like that never stopped me. And so in Uganda, my obsession was brought to a whole new paradigm.

With one leg in the North Equator and the other firmly entrenched in the South, I found myself in two hemispheres at once.

For a minute, I felt invincible.

2. Unwinding In the Idyllic Serenity of Lake Bunyonyi.

Lake Bunyonyi is mystical. Cotton candy streams of mist, skies a cocktail dome of blue, verdant rolling hills, lush green terraced fields, an archipelago of islets – this is one of the most scenic wonders in the world; and it befuddles me how it has managed to escape the hawk-eyes of travel giant publishers for so long. This splendid wonder is like a potion for the soul. It’s serene, idyllic, and relatively unspoiled, and glows so devastatingly beautiful that you won’t quite know what to do with what you see.

Personally, it was the greatest respite I’d ever come across from city life.

Perched at 6,500 feet above sea level, Lake Bunyonyi is believed to be Africa’s second deepest lake at 900m (at its deepest). Every evening, the lake morphs into what looks like a pool of molten gold under the sunset, glowing amber like witchery unbeknownst to this world.

Lake Bunyoni is, undoubtedly, the most stunningly authentic lakeside experience you’ll find for miles. Canoe, bird-watch, cycle, hike, skinny-dip (or not); the decision is yours. It’s like walking through a painting, and my advice is to dig in deep if you ever find yourself there. Lake Bunyonyi is a refreshing breath of air (assuming you just rolled in from dusty red Kenya); and you will find that the Ugandans’ burst of infectious spirit only serves to make this place all the more captivating if you open your hearts to them.

3. Doing the Animal Run At Queen Elizabeth National Park.

Singapore, my wonderful pride of a nation and the world’s littlest red dot, measures in on the world map at 719.1km².

Queen Elizabeth National Park (QENP), the largest game reserve in Uganda (but still not the largest in the world), measures in at 1,978km².

That makes QENP almost three times the size of Singapore.

Can you imagine three Singapores packed to the brim with the kind of biodiversity that robs you of speech? I can’t even imagine one full Singapore worth of animals, savannahs, and wetlands, let alone three – and that’s coming from someone with a very lively imagination at that.

Special attention needs to be brought to the Kazinga Channel. The Kazinga Channel, which is but one of the many features in QENP, is 32km long. This means that if you were to lift it out, straighten it, and superimpose the full length of the Channel on Singapore’s map beginning from the tip of the North right down to the South, it would still stick out by a good 5km.

The Marabou Stork fast became my favourite animal when I learned of its existence in Uganda (sorry, you’re entertaining the musings of a late bloomer here) – and remains so even till today.

I just figured, if someone allowed to you to stand on his back, the least you can do is not take a shit on him.

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4. Sleeping Under the Stars At Lake Mburo.

My memories of Lake Mburo are tangled up with kaleidoscopic images of sunset hues and inky skies smeared with billions of stars, the mesmerizing dance of glowing embers and crackling firewood as we campfired under the night sky. Here was where I found myself a little too upclose and personal with a resident warthog when I saw my own reflection flickering in its wild eyes (Tip: don’t move.) (Better tip: don’t wander off alone in a game reserve.) Where we heard – in simultaneous horror and excitement – the calls of hippos as we tried to fall asleep in our tents which began to feel increasingly vulnerable with every hippo squeal we heard. 

Rich hues of red blended with oranges, purples, crimsons. The sunsets here are the kind that transport you into a kind of timeless existence, a resounding glowing collision that quickly gives way to the dark waves of a heavily speckled sky every night. And it fills you with such a strange feeling inside too. A strange, overwhelming feeling that has neither bound nor depth; but is yet so absolute in the way it wraps itself around you. It’s like being in a dangerous fire and feeling peace. Or having your heart constrict and yet, still, feeling so light.

It’s like being in love in retrospect, I think. Reminiscing spans of moments as if it were in the past even as it were the present. And it’s wistful. And it’s nostalgic. And it’s bittersweet. And it’s absolutely the most brilliantly bizarre feeling in the world.

5. Making Merry With Chimpanzees At Kibale National Park.

Meet Kibale, my official Timberland boots for the trip, christened after the very forest that maimed them to within an inch of death.

Now meet the real Kibale, a National Park and an extensive block of rich green rainforest in Uganda that measures 795km² (again, bigger than Singapore) and harbours 13 primate species and more than 138 bird species. Kibale is considered one of the gentler terrains in the grander scheme of things but let me tell you, where relativity is concerned, sometimes, the word ‘gentle’ is really but in the eye of the beholder.

Kibale is the kind of jungle that debilitates your will to live. It looks treacherous even at first glance – but oh, it will beckon you with a pulsing heart, inviting you in with promises of lush green forestry and poetic scenicness and perhaps even an encounter with a chimp or two.

And then once you’re in.

I must say, Kibale was one of the most primitive trekking experiences I have ever had. The first in line typically paves the way with a machete, while the ones who follow a close second face a constant grave danger of having recoiling branches smack them right in the face if they don’t have fast enough reflexes. Insects will probably be the least of your worries as thorns and stinging nettles become an increasingly primary concern. And from time to time you wonder if you’re walking around in circles because, let’s face it, after 7 hours, green just looks the same. 

Somewhere after 2 hours, you will discover a profound love for water and wonder why you ever drank anything else your entire life when water is all you really need. And in fact, that is right about when you find yourself making silent barter promises with God, like, please God. If you let it rain now so I can drink water with my tongue, I will never touch another bottle of milk tea in my life. Do you even need food?, you speculate after a while. Perhaps not. You’ll give even that up for water.

I thought hard and often about the lives that were lost in the Malayan forest in World War II during those 7 hours. Is this what it feels like to be a POW?, I wondered, on the brink of tears.

One of the many reasons people come to Uganda is for the chimps. The more blessed countries of this world get to specialize in one primate or the other: Borneo has its Orang Utans; Japan their Macaques; Rwanda have the glory of the Gorillas; and Uganda, the Chimps.

So, Chimps are best known as the primate closest to humans in behavior and intellect, on top of sharing almost 98% of our genetic blueprint. I think just one minute in is all it takes for you to be fascinated at just how humanistic they are. The way they size you up when they first spot you, the way they hold on to things, the way they interact with each other. The way they touch.

It’s almost like looking in the mirror.

Over the years, I have been known to pick up a few weird habits. One of them is a strange obsession for tree trunks. The other is this most peculiar compulsion to get close to animals that are capable of gorging your eyes out. (Technically, all animals are capable of that, but some just show more promise than the rest.) To this day, I can still hear the collective gasps of my trek group and the hushed ‘Nooo!‘s when I absentmindedly reached out to graze the fingers of this chimp.

There is something so indescribably gentle about the way they address you with their eyes – almost as if they were giving a meaningful evaluation of your presence and wondering if you were really worth their time.

It’s humbling, is what it is.

6. White-Water Rafting Down the Nile River.

There can only be one reason why I left Jinja to the last – in that when it comes to this liquid soul of East Africa, I really don’t quite know what to say at all.

Jinja – or more commonly known to the world as the source of the Nile River – is a place you fall in love with that takes a lifetime to get over . I have so much fear of not doing this place justice that it sorts of paralyses me into a writer’s block.

At Jinja, the day went by a whole lot of crazy and the night went by a little wild – sometimes I worry about my sanity when left unsupervised with a bunch of insane people.

#teamextreme, however, will be quick to counter that I am fully capable of insanity all on my own.

There are 6 grades of rapids in whitewater rafting – Grade 6 is not passable for attempts which essentially leaves Grade 5 as the most extreme doable grade in whitewater rafting. Going down the Nile, you get to do a series of Grades 3-5; and the photo you see above is of us right about to hit our last rapid – a Grade 5.

Why am I sitting outside the raft?, you ask.

I was trying to prove a point, you see. To Dan Batt who is showing off in the picture below and actually posing  – even as everyone else is clamouring to stay alive and in tact.

Below, you will Rob looking suspiciously happy about my disappearance.You know how sometimes, you watch movies of people clinging on to the edge of a ledge and their fingers start to slip, and you sit there and scoff and think to yourself, how weak this person must be. How difficult is it to simply hold on to something?

Very difficult, apparently. I was flat out after the second wave hit me. It turns out that sometimes, no matter how hard you hold on, water is stronger than however much stronger you think you are.

Now that I’m sitting here and looking back at myself five years removed, I don’t think I could ever rake up the courage to do that again. What could have possibly possessed me? The adrenaline rush? The self-principle of never turning down a dare? The need to prove that Asians aren’t pushovers? I was dragged downwards and manhandled by the rapids for a good twelve seconds before the tides eased and I managed to fight myself up, splashing and sputtering like a dying fish.

Do you know how terrifying that is for someone who’s convinced she can’t swim? Do you know how difficult it is to hold your breath underwater when you are panicking about the shame of passing out in front of all these people and having to be saved by the chicken boat?

I found out one thing about myself that afternoon: that my fear of humiliation can drive me to achieve extraordinary things, and that I should really work on optimizing it.

I scored a smashing one for Asians around the world that day. I don’t think I’ve ever garnered quite as much respect for my race as I did after that.

That’s right. We don’t just ride down dusty gravelly paths in motor scooters and eat by the roadside and litter and spit on pavements, bitches.

Sometimes, we try to kill ourselves in the Nile River too.

Enjoy Uganda. I know I did.

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