This is a strikingly friendly country which is well known for its safety and comfort. Within its borders are quite a number excellent National Parks well worth visiting. Many reputable tour organizations provide excellent programs which include Uganda's finest scenery and wildlife.

Capital: Kampala

Population: 22,804,973 (July 1999 est.)

Area: 236,040 sq. km

Language: English (official national language, taught in grade schools, used in courts of law and by most newspapers and some radio broadcasts), Ganda or Luganda (most widely used of the Niger-Congo languages, preferred for native language publications and may be taught in school), other Niger-Congo languages, Nilo-Saharan languages, Swahili, Arabic

Time: GMT +3

Electricity: 240 AC

Geography: Mostly plateau with rim of mountains. Uganda is bordered by Democratic Republic of the Congo 765 km, Kenya 933 km, Rwanda 169 km, Sudan 435 km, Tanzania 396 km.

Tipping: Tipping is not part of the culture. In larger hotels it is suggested but not really expected.

Shopping: Most shops are open by 9:30 in the morning and after a a closing time for lunch, shops remain open until 6 - 7 PM. Most shops will close on Saturday at noon or after the lunch hour and remain closed until Monday morning.

Food and Drink: Visitors should use bottled water.

Social: In general the people are among the friendliest in Africa and are rather outgoing in nature. Note that although the official language is English most people are more familiar with Swahili.

Business: The business atmosphere is very positive - a marked improvement from the time of Idi Amin. Light business suits are recommended. Business cards are a must. English is understood by most businessmen.

HIGHLIGHTS:

• Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park.
• Jinja: bustling market town.
• Kibale Forest: see chimps in the wild.
• Kisoro: base for visits to the gorillas in the Virungas.
• Mount Elgon: volcanic mountain on Kenyan border.
• Murchison Falls National Park, Queen Elizabeth National Park

Unit of currency is the Ugandan shilling (USh). There are no restrictions on importing foreign money. Money can be changed at private foreign exchange bureaux — often at a better rate than at the banks — which have sprung up in Kampala and several smaller towns.

EXCHANGE RATE:

£1=1500,25 USh

LANGUAGE:

All main population groups have their own languages and dialects, but English is commonly spoken.

GETTING AROUND:

By road (minibus, bus, taxi, car hire). No problem with main routes as roads are much improved. Avoid the railways as service is bad, breakdowns common and it costs too much.

Bill won’t like my saying this, but he was beset by the jitters as we flew into Uganda. Our photographer, and a nice suburban guy with three kids and a propensity to vacation in France or the Bahamas, he’d been trawling the Net for background and hadn’t liked what he found. The U.S. State Department had issued a travel warning that spoke of troop movements in national parks and banditry in the Mountains of the Moon. Hospitals were primitive, roads dangerous, and the germ threat so intense that members of President Clinton’s party, which had passed through five days ahead of us, were advised to not kiss anyone and to keep their lips pursed in the shower. On top of this, Bill was reeling from the side effects of tropical disease inoculations and the psychic reverberations of a New Yorker article about some crazed rebels on the north bank of the Nile who believed that magic could protect them from bullets and could turn rocks into hand grenades. As we came in to land at Entebbe, his refrain was, “What the hell are we letting ourselves in for?”

What indeed? Viewed from the sensible perspective of, say, the average European or American, Uganda is one of the last places one would wish to visit, which is probably why so few do. Five years ago, there were hardly any tourists at all. Last year, a mere four thousand chanced it, and most just climbed a volcano, saw some gorillas, and got the hell out again. I mean, we’re talking about a country where the power fails every second day, where AIDS is rampant and bugs are known to lay eggs under your skin or crawl up your nose and eat your brain; a country that was once a charnel house in its own right, with the killing fields of Rwanda on one side, the famine grounds of Sudan on the other, and armies of wild Karimojong tribesmen crossing the frontier on massed cattle raids, according to a newspaper we bought at the airport. It was more than enough to invoke in any white man “a sense of undefinable oppression.” Those are the words of Winston Churchill, who arrived in Entebbe in 1907 in a frame of mind not entirely dissimilar to Bill’s and, to some extent, my own. He’d had a splendid time on the trans-Kenya railroad, but something about Uganda unsettled him, something he couldn’t quite put a finger on. It could be the altitude, he said, or the insects, or maybe even the unbearable beauty of his first sight of Entebbe, a cluster of red-roofed bungalows on Lake Victoria. “It was too good to be true,” he wrote in My African Journey. “It is too good to be true. Behind its glittering mask, Entebbe wears a sinister aspect.” The young British MP had come at a bad moment, it turned out. There were rebels on the north bank of the Nile, and the countryside was devastated by pestilence. Man-eating leopards prowled the jungle fringes, and the very air seemed full of malignancy. “A cut will not heal,” he wrote. “A scratch festers. Even a small wound becomes a running sore.” Pioneer colonists were so depressed that two had committed suicide, and even Winnie was reduced to morbid pronouncements about the curse that seemed to lie over this “curious garden of sunshine and deadly nightshade.” That said, Churchill donned his pith helmet, whistled up the porters, and set forth on safari. He and his party traveled five hundred miles in the next thirty days, trudging across savanna, bicycling down forest paths, steaming across pristine lakes under cool blue skies that were full of waterfowl and fish eagles. He began to notice things that had eluded his first glance—“birds as bright as butterflies, butterflies as big as birds,” a mad profusion of flowers, forests to rival those that once covered England. He saw great herds of elephant, plains covered with game, thunderstorms “wheeling in vivid splendor across the night horizon.” The natives were friendly and intelligent, the hunting superlative. By the time he reached Nimule, on the far side of the country, Churchill was enchanted. The rest of East Africa was interesting, he wrote, “but the Kingdom of Uganda is a fairy tale. You climb up a railway instead of a beanstalk, and at the end of it there is a wonderful new world.” Ninety years later, we came down from the sky, loaded our misgivings into a Land Cruiser, and took off on a journey that carried us to a similar conclusion. Uganda is a happy-go-lucky calypso song of a country, where people’s pain is enormously sweetened by the bounty of nature. The soils are rich, the lakes teem with fish, and the climate is an endless summer. Ugandan peasants harvest three crops a year, where most Africans can’t count on any; you can feed an entire family on an acre or so, just sitting in the shade and watching the bananas grow. This eases the desperation that might otherwise obtain in a country so poor and so recently devastated and makes it possible for people to be nice to each other, and, yes, to visitors. We were plied with beer in Kampala bars, given small gifts of fruit by peasants whose clothes were in tatters. We sang in the shower, and never got sick. We ate boo and dudu at roadside stands, and lived to tell the tale. We traveled the country from end to end, and everything we saw was beautiful. In Uganda, even the cows are breathtaking.

We began to see them about five hoursout of Entebbe, lovely Ankole cattle with horns like lyres, each with its own name, apparently, and a personality much analyzed by its doting owner. This I gathered from Sowing the Mustard Seed, the autobiography of Yoweri Museveni, cattle farmer, soldier, and Uganda’s state president. I’d bought a copy in the town of Mbarara, and it was fascinating: An earnest young revolutionary takes to the bush in 1980 with a handful of guns and 29 men, hell-bent on perpetrating yet another socialist catastrophe. But something happens to him during his long fight for power. He abandons the idea that all Africa’s miseries are the white man’s fault. He becomes an apostle of free markets. He starts talking about discipline, law and order, and the need for institutions based on the history, culture, and psyche of African people. After toppling Milton Obote in 1986, Museveni starts dismantling the Ugandan state, or at least whittling away at it. He takes power from the center, gives it to “revolutionary councils” at village level. He slashes the bureaucracy, privatizes state assets, deregulates everything he can. The results are miraculous in African terms: Peace returns, inflation vanishes, and the economy starts galloping ahead at ten percent per annum. Museveni is hailed as Africa’s savior, a Moses come to lead the Dark Continent out of its nightmare of violence, starvation, and economic decay. He’s a dictator, to be sure, but Ugandans like Tony Sukuma, our ebullient driver, couldn’t give a damn. “People look around,” he said, “and they see it’s working. They say, this is the right path for the moment. Wherever you go, people are happy.” It turns out that Tony spent a decade in Museveni’s army fighting for a cause that came down to common decency: Down with the bloody tyrants who stole everything they could lay their hands on, and away with the soldiers who looted your village, raped your sisters, and smashed your head in if you stood in their way. He was wounded twice, but remains enormously pleased with the result of his sacrifice. “I don’t want any stupid changes that will take away the peace and stability,” he said. “If anybody threatens to do this, I will fight again. After all, if it wasn’t for this peace, you guys would not be here, would you?”

And what a pity that would have been, because we would never have seen the sight that awaited us at the end of the road, which terminated on the summit of a sharp promontory in Queen Elizabeth National Park. Here stood the Mweya Safari Lodge, suspended in the sky between two bodies of water. Porters ushered us through the lobby, past a giant pair of elephant tusks and onto a veranda that commanded one of the most spectacular views in Africa—Lake Edward on one side, the Kazinga Channel on the other, and before us, the Mountains of the Moon, their flanks clad with mysterious forests, their snowcapped peaks lost today in cloud. We collapsed into wicker chairs, struck dumb by the sight of an alpine landscape on the equator. Waiters brought tall glasses of passion fruit juice. A lanky, bearded fanatic sat down beside us and started jabbering about birds. Malcolm Wilson spent his asthmatic boyhood staring out of fogged-up windows at shivering sparrows in rainy English gardens. From such beginnings grew a lifelong obsession that eventually landed him here, where he was trying to establish a bird-watching center. “It’s a gold mine, if you understand birding,” he said. “We hold the world record for a one-day species count—397 species in a single day. There are 558 species in this park alone.” He began to enumerate them: fish eagles, palearctic ospreys, Goliath herons, the papyrus gonolek, the bare-faced go-away bird, and the legendary shoebill, a huge pterodactyllike creature with yellow eyes and an imbecilic expression, almost impossible to see on account of its preference for impenetrable swamps. “I’ve spent fifteen thousand pounds of my own money trying to set this thing up,” cried the birdman, “and I can’t go on alone. I need help and nobody gives a damn.” Neither did I, quite frankly; birding has always struck me as boring. On the other hand, I’d never met a birder quite like Malcolm Wilson. His description of flies hatching on the lake below was inspirational. It happened often, he said, usually in the morning. Flies began to hatch and rise into the air in clouds so dense that the water appeared to be smoking. Soon an apocalyptic feeding frenzy would be under way in the sky above, with millions of swallows snatching insects out of the air and in turn falling prey to raptors that came diving out of the sun like F-16s and—thwack—annihilated a lesser bird in an explosion of feathers. “It’s fantastic,” cried the birdman, who was acting all this out with windmilling arms and a grin that was slightly lopsided as the result of an encounter with a buffalo on a footpath a hundred yards away. Irritated, it had tossed him a few times, butted him black and blue, and knelt on his face, knocking his teeth askew.

He glanced around apprehensively, and sure enough, beasts were converging from all directions. There were warthogs in the flower beds. Marabou storks sauntered across the lawns like old, stooped men in evening dress, crops dangling down their chests like scarlet cravats. A great rump of reddish brown flesh broke the horizon, and a hippo rose into view, strolling up from the lake to feed on the daisies. We changed tables, ordered beers, and watched the sun set. The birdman observed, apropos of nothing in particular, that one of the best things about this place was that you could sometimes sit here at night and watch tracer bullets arcing across the distant mountainside, where government soldiers were hunting rebels and bandits.

But we don’t really want to talk about that, do we? Nah, we’re on holiday. We want to repair to the dining room, where waiters are serving dinner in uniforms that seem to have been in mothballs since Uganda’s fifties tourist heyday: white shirts, narrow black ties, FBI slacks, and black-rimmed spectacles, like a conclave of black Clark Kents. On the menu tonight, as always, there is fish—fillets of tilapia, hauled out of the lake this morning, deep-fried and garnished with lemon. It is an excellent fish, at least the equal of trout or salmon, especially if taken at high African altitude and washed down with cold Ugandan beer. I was groping for a light for my postprandial smoke when a waiter presented me with a good omen: a box of Double Happiness safety matches. I lit up and sat back to savor my coffee, feeling like Winston Churchill at the end of his stay.

Father of several and husband to two, Wilfred Megenyi hadn’t been paid in ninety days, and worse yet, a snake had just been extracted from the hideously bloated leg of his brother, who had stepped into a black magic trap on a footpath. None of this could be vouched for, exactly, but it was the talk of Mantana Camp, a day’s trek north of Lake Edward. We arrived at sunset, slept under canvas, and set forth before dawn into the Kibale Forest National Park, where Wilfred worked as a ranger. A luminously nice guy, he managed a smile at the sight of us, pulled up his Wellies, and led the way into the dim jungle, which was full of vines and spider webs and trees that soared to three hundred feet, stabilized by side roots resembling the fins of Apollo rockets. Churchill loved the forests of Uganda, filling pages of his diary with descriptions of their “awful fecundity” and the “intense convulsions of life and death” under way in the rich humus underfoot. We were looking for creatures more elevated—our first cousins, the chimpanzees, which abound in Kibale Forest. We trudged through a fairyland of green glens and dells, but alas, the chimpanzees were elsewhere, and Wilfred was reduced to giving us a compensatory lecture on bush medicine: this plant to cool fever, that one to bind the gut; katimboro bark to engender a monstrous erection, and the flowers of the omunyara tree to lubricate the vagina on the receiving end of it. He cupped a hand over his nose and emitted a bizarre nasal whine, imitating a duiker ewe in her birth throes. Moments later, a troop of blue monkeys came crashing through the treetops, hoping to feast on the placenta. “Where did you learn that?” I asked. “Oh,” he replied, “I used to be a poacher.” Wilfred seemed to take the chimp no-show as a personal failure, which is perhaps why he invited us back to his shamba, which lay out on the sun-drenched savanna. He showed us his mud hut, his wives, and his many sweet little offspring. We met the neighbors and inspected his plantation of coffee and matoke bananas, which are picked green and require cooking. In a swamp at the bottom of his garden, he’d built a fishpond that was stocked with tilapia. He lopped some leaves off a cassava plant and chucked them in. The water began to boil. It was a great little fish farm, as fish farms go, but Wilfred had no sure way of getting the fish out of it, save for a hook fashioned from rusting wire. I delved into my luggage and found some tackle for him. He gave me a pineapple, profusely apologizing that it was the only one he had. I promised to send him some pumpkin seeds. He pressed his precious fish-farming manual into my reluctant hands. Not to be outdone, I tried to give him a few banknotes, but he refused them, so I had to slip them to a wife on the sly. It seemed the least I could do for a family that hadn’t seen cash since Christmas. Why not? Wilfred wasn’t quite sure, but most national park staff seemed to be in similar straits. I made inquiries when we reached Kampala a few days later, but it was very confusing. Some said the rangers’ pay had been diverted into the patriotic frenzy of street-cleaning and weed-slashing that preceded the recent visit of President Clinton. Others claimed it was lost. A few maintained that it had been stolen. Nobody seemed very worried. It was just one of those Ugandan things, apparently, like unreliable phones, bad roads, and perpetual rebellions on the periphery.

I must confess to being a bit nonplussed by these manifestations of the African ordinary. Uganda was supposed to be the New Jerusalem, the epicenter of the much-touted African Renaissance. In my imagination, it was a country of straight backs and rolled-up sleeves, with humming assembly lines, spartan leaders, and children schooled to pick up litter while singing cheerful songs about honesty and self-reliance. I was a bit dismayed to find Kampala somewhat run-down and beset by turmoil. Slack maintenance had claimed the lives of six doctors, drowned when a bridge collapsed. The sewers in some suburbs were not working. “Godfathers” of the ruling party were allegedly engaged in various swindles, and someone had just hurled a hand grenade into a crowded Kampala restaurant, killing three Burundese businessmen. I hastened to the scene the next morning, but most passersby had no idea who had done it, or why, and the rest shrugged as if to say, relax man. I walked over to State House, hoping for an interview with President Museveni, but he was in London, so I just wandered around, taking in the sights. Downtown was the standard African jungle of office blocks and traffic chaos, but the markets were full of food, the police were friendly, and there was no discernible undercurrent of tension. On the contrary—the mood of the city seemed astonishingly open and cheerful, considering that Uganda is a one-party state. The newspapers were full of gleeful accounts of the latest government debacles. Lampposts were festooned with pictures of candidates in a bitterly contested mayoral race. There were five of them, just about equally divided between “Movementists,” who supported the government, and “multi-partyists,” who didn’t. The only rule seemed to be that none of them were allowed to run under their true political colors, even though everyone knew exactly where they stood. Beyond that, the campaign was a glorious free-for-all, with fist-fights, near riots, and smear campaigns. The muckraking Uganda Confidential assailed Mr. Birriggwa’s character, claiming he’d left a wife and children destitute in America. Mr. Birriggwa stormed into the editor’s office and manhandled him. The editor, Mr. Cheeye, challenged Mr. Birriggwa to a duel. Hecklers taunted Mr. Sebeggala for his lack of education, causing an inexplicable upsurge in support of his candidacy. Some said the cruel mockery had offended the electorate. Others maintained that it had actually offended the Baganda, the populous tribe from which the candidate hailed. Around lunchtime, I sought refuge from these contradictions on the shady veranda of a restaurant called The Lion, where I met A. Kadumukasa Kironde II, aged fifty-three, a Ugandan aristocrat whose posh British accent was redolent of Eton, Bentleys, and cricket. A celebrated gourmet cook and bon vivant, he was puttering around in a chef’s hat when I arrived, experimenting with exotic recipes in the kitchen. He told me to call him K.K., uncorked a bottle of “rather agreeable” South African red, and began to explain Uganda to me. The key, he said, was to understand that the nation was led by “a master of the art of the impossible.” Uganda was devastated beyond description when Yoweri Museveni came to power, riven by canyons of ethnic mistrust, haunted by the ghosts of a million civil war victims, and generally considered ungovernable by anyone. Museveni should, by rights, have failed utterly. The fact that he hadn’t bore testimony, in K.K.’s opinion, to a close reading of Machiavelli, the grand master of shrewd political manipulation. “This,” K.K. continued, “is clearly evident in his style of governance.” Nobody gets everything he wants, but almost everyone gets enough to keep them quiet. Politicians are free to pursue their ambitions, provided they stay within the framework of broad Musevenism. Corruption is vigorously suppressed, but you might get away with it if you’re the favorite son of a powerful faction that the Big Man can’t afford to alienate. Tribalism is officially a no-no, but some tribes are a bit more equal than others—a factor, per K.K., that was not entirely unrelated to minor rebellions in the backwoods and explosions in restaurants over the road. Ah, well. At least Uganda was stumbling toward the light these days, rather than sliding backward. K.K. summoned a waiter and treated me to a meal. “My entire life has been one of paradox,” he confided as we tucked into our Goanese chicken, smothered, in my case, with the delectable peanut sauce called boo and surrounded by the ubiquitous greens known as dudu. An African prince, he was hauled off to London at the age of six, when his father was called to the British bar—“Middle Temple, actually.” A year or two later, he was back in Kampala, where white schools refused to admit him. After independence, he wound up in Manhattan, where his father was Uganda’s ambassador to the United Nations. He returned to Kampala after the downfall of the tyrant Idi Amin, only to see his restaurant razed in the next round of street fighting. Now his cousin Ronnie was king of Buganda, but K.K.’s joint was struggling to attract tourists. “You whites are tribalistic,” he observed. I had to agree. K.K.’s cooking was excellent, and the banana gin with which he subsequently plied me was lethally effective. “Come back tomorrow,” he cried, as I staggered toward a taxi. “I’ll introduce you to the king.” What a country. What a capital chap. What a day.

Okay, so where are we now? We’re up in the wild blue yonder, in a single-engine Cessna passing over Lake Albert, a vast expanse of greasy green water dotted with fishing canoes and ominous bits of flotsam that look like crocodiles to me. To the west, the mysterious Blue Mountains rear almost vertically out of the lake, and to the north, lost in a heat haze, lies the Sudanese border—“a realm of sinister and forbidding aspect,” said Winston Churchill, “where man is fanatical and often rifle-armed.” It was so in 1907, and it remains thus today. Somewhere in the trackless wastes below, government power peters out, and you enter the fief of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a berserk band of dreadlocked mystics who seem to specialize in slicing off their enemies’ lips and seizing convent girls as concubines. Our destination—the Pakuba airstrip, on the north bank of the Nile—is considered unsafe by the U.S. State Department, but the only sign of danger as we come in to land is a herd of oribi that refuse to move out of our way until we scream over their heads at full throttle. A Land Cruiser is waiting. We throw our gear in the back and bounce off across the savanna. Ten clicks down the road, we come upon a patch of charred, blackened sand that marks the spot where a convoy was ambushed fifteen months back by the LRA. They executed the drivers, looted their trucks, and withdrew into the reserve’s northern reaches. They’re still out there somewhere, so we take the south fork, which leads through a forest of singing thorn trees to the banks of the Nile, six hundred yards wide at this point, its dark waters flecked with yellow foam, rolling toward Egypt at seven miles an hour. On a ridge above the banks looms a giant wooden stockade of the sort erected by eighteenth-century fur trappers in the wild forests of North America. This is the Paraa Lodge, a relic of Uganda’s mid-century tourist heyday, recently refurbished at enormous cost in anticipation of a tourist boom that has yet to materialize. A squad of porters pounce on my luggage and lead me up a grand mahogany staircase. The lime green walls are covered with etchings—reprints from the Illustrated London News, for the most part, showing Victorian explorers shooting elephants, meeting one another in jungle clearings, and fending off attacks by “forest dwarves with poison arrows.” My suite is wood-paneled, with a fan in the ceiling and a mosquito net draped gracefully over the bed. Down in the kitchen, the freezers are crammed with imported delicacies that will shortly be served in a dining room the size of a ballroom. It’s amazing—a grand hotel in bush so remote that the only communication with the outside world is by radio. Outside, the vast tiled terrace is deserted, the swimming pool empty. I drink a cold beer on a cool veranda that commands a broad sweep of the river and, beyond it, the bush stretching low and level to the blue wall of the Rift Valley. This is a richly mythic landscape. Every major Victorian explorer buckled his swash out there among the thorn trees: Theodore Roosevelt hunted rhino in 1909, two years after Churchill passed through. Bogart, Bacall, Hepburn, and Huston came in 1950 to make The African Queen. Two years later, Hemingway almost died in a plane crash on yonder hillock, an episode that inspired The Snows of Kilimanjaro. More recently, a small-town fishmonger named Alice Auma was summoned to a spot just upstream by an ancestral spirit who revealed her new destiny: She was to take up the sword in the name of Jehovah and cleanse the land of evil, beginning with administrators loyal to Museveni. This was the genesis of the Lord’s Resistance Army, but we don’t really want to dwell on that, do we? Nah, we’re beginning to like it here on the wild frontier, poised on a knife-edge between ecstasy and terror. We want to drink gin and tonics and eat pan-seared steaks in a cabernet jus while the sun sets in barbaric splendor over the Nile. After dark, the swimming pool is like a blue jewel in the black African night, and you hear hippos crashing around in the undergrowth below. Lightning begins to play on the northern horizon, a sure sign that the rains are coming. Next morning, we rise before dawn and go out on a game drive. It’s a lovely day, cool and gray. A large herd of kob stampede across the horizon at our approach. A smudge of black on a distant hillside turns out to be a throng of ruminating buffalo. After a while, we turn back and see the same kob again, plus five giraffes and a column of ferocious driver ants heading across the savanna on some inscrutable mission. That’s about it as far as wildlife is concerned. We drive home somewhat saddened.

Photographs taken here in the early sixties show a landscape as flat and open as a billiard table, all the trees having been torn down by rampaging elephants. The riverbanks heaved with hippopotamuses; there were lions and rhinos in every second donga; the antelope were too numerous to be tallied. But then the wars began, and rabble armies began to criss-cross the country, living off the land. The antelope were machine-gunned and eaten, the elephants poached for their ivory. Murchison’s elephant population had fallen by ninety percent. It’s rhinos had been exterminated entirely. To be fair, it should be noted that what game is left had dispersed after the rain, so there is far more of it than first meets the eye. It is also true that Museveni’s government has restored control over Uganda’s reserves, and that recovery is taking place at a heartening rate, with elephants giving birth to twins galore as they expand into empty ecological niches. Still, if you want to see wildlife in splendid variety and large numbers, go to a country where jumbo jets disgorge hordes of tourists who throng to zoo-like parks where they choke on each other’s exhaust fumes in traffic snarl-ups around lion kills and water holes. You’ll probably see the Big Five—elephant, lion, rhinoceros, leopard, and buffalo—but you’ll never experience anything like the loneliness of the Ugandan wild.

About twenty miles upstream from Paraa, the Nile flows into a funnel of hard rock that narrows and narrows until all its pent-up might is constricted into a channel barely eighteen feet wide that blasts over a clifftop and into midair, only to thunder down into the abyss below with a din and violence that is almost incomprehensible. The roar of Murchison Falls is audible from ten miles away. Churchill was mesmerized by the sight of them. They were, he said, the highlight of his safari; just seeing them made the long trek worthwhile. Anywhere else, the riverbanks would be covered with resorts and casinos, and hippies would be leaping into the chasm with bungees attached, but in Uganda, time has stood still. The road that leads to the falls is a potholed abomination seldom traveled by anyone. The dusty parking lot at the end of it is absolutely empty. We had the entire magnificent spectacle to ourselves. By my calculation, I was standing on the exact spot where Churchill stood nine decades earlier, and seeing exactly what he saw, save that the rock on which he spotted a crocodile was underwater in this season. Churchill hated crocodiles, so he raised his rifle and shot. At the sound, “the entire far bank of the river, to the extent of at least a quarter mile, erupted into hideous life.” What he had presumed to be a mudbank was actually an unbroken line of basking saurians that rushed madly into the river, where their descendants were presumably still lurking—a probability that began to exercise my mind as I edged toward the foaming water, fishing rod in hand.

And now we come to a confession. Beyond all longing to see new places, this is what I had come for: to stand on this rock and do battle with the giant fish said to inhabit the pool below. They are called Nile perch, and they are the largest freshwater game fish on the planet (400 pounds reputed, 305 verified); fish like whales, and given more than anywhere in the world to lurking right here, in the swirling water at the foot of the falls, waiting to pounce on dazed and stunned prey spat out of the churning cauldron behind me. My rod was a stout one, suitable for tuna, and the gut on it was thick and strong, terminating in a long wire trace, at the end of which a crucified baitfish wriggled. I lowered it into the raging stream and watched in dismay as it snarled on a raft of papyrus that dragged it away to the left, where it snagged in the submerged roots of an overhanging tree. The same thing happened on the next cast, and the next. The river was swollen and full of debris, and I would have been undone had I not happened to pocket the cork from the wine drunk at last night’s dinner. Improvising ingeniously, I like to think, I used the cork as a float on my next cast, and lo, it kept my line aloof from the floating detritus. The cork bobbed around a bit, got caught in an eddy, and circled back almost to my feet, where it suddenly vanished, sucked under by a monster. I let the line run, counted to five, and then struck into something heavy. Moments later, the fish came to the surface—a great, thrashing, silver thing, mouth agape like a largemouth bass, and dancing on its tail like a sailfish. Then it took off across the pool and found the main current, and my line began to sweep downstream like the string of a kite in a gale. It took ten minutes to win back the lost nylon, and by then the fish was exhausted. It gave up the struggle and rolled over at my feet, a thirty-pounder, to my proud eye. But I was perched atop a rock on account of the saurian menace, and it was in the water, ten feet below. The wire trace snapped as we were hauling it up, and I was left with nothing but a fishing story. But it was enough, and I went home with a full heart. Back in Entebbe, a cool breeze was blowing off the mile-high lake, and the town that at first seemed so foreboding now looked like a South Sea island, its ramshackle houses tucked away under banana and mango trees and overrun by rioting frangipani. As we rose into the sky, the colors were like a Gauguin painting, the red billboards for Sportsman cigarettes playing off against black Guinness signs, bright yellow phone booths, and schoolchildren in uniforms of pastel pink and blue. Uganda has terrible problems, to be sure, but it’s a special place, the land of Double Happiness safety matches. Like Churchill before us, we were beset by the thought that the best was behind us, and that what lay ahead would never quite measure up. “Beauty dies out of the landscape,” he wrote as he steamed away, “and richness from the land.” He was broken-hearted. So were we.