Getting to Entebbe

The flight from Copenhagen was long, yet painless. After spending my last few hours walking around the beautiful city of Copenhagen, I headed to the train station and caught a train out to the airport. After nearly an hour of arranging and rearranging my baggage to avoid paying excess baggage fees, I checked in and away I went. The first leg of the journey took me to Amsterdam and after a 1.5-hour flight and 2-hour layover, I was off to Dubai. Six hours later we were in what seemed to be the absolute middle of nowhere on Earth. The desert surrounding the city was vast and I never saw anything that resembled civilization outside the area of the seemingly biggest airport in the world. Gen and I had been to Dubai’s airport once before on our way home from Zambia and I remembered it to be first class. This time, however, things were not quite the same. After a very long walk from our gate the passengers from Etihad’s Amsterdam flight converged with hundreds of passengers from what seemed to be several other arriving flights. Herded like cattle through transit/immigration, I made it to my connecting flight to Entebbe with fifteen minutes to spare. We boarded a transport bus that drove us what seemed to be at least 2-3 miles to our plane. As we exited the bus, we were hit by a heat that reminded me of Las Vegas at noon on any given day in the month of July. The thermometer on the screen at my seat read 114 degrees for the outside temperature, and it was only 8 o’clock in the morning! The flight to Entebbe was around 5 hours, but the time seemed to pass by quickly as I spent the entire flight talking to the guys sitting next to me. One guy was headed to Uganda with a group of students from England who would spend a month in Mbale doing a cultural visit. The other guy was from Spain and he was going to visit his girlfriend who had been volunteering outside of Kampala for a few months. The most memorable part of the flight to Entebbe was seeing the landscapes change from brown desert of northwestern Kenya to lush green hills as we entered Uganda. The change was abrupt and I could actually see a north-south line dividing the two countries.

We arrived at Entebbe’s airport around 1:00 pm, disembarked, and joined the line for immigration. On the flight over I had learned that Uganda had increased the cost of their visas from $50 to $100 and I was happy that I had opted to send my passport to the Ugandan embassy in Washington prior to traveling, thus saving me $50 bucks! My fellow row mates were not so fortunately and had to fork out the extra money to enter the country. In line I met a Filipina from Cebu (they’re everywhere!!) and practiced (butchered) my long-forgotten Visayan. She lives in South Korea where she teaches English along with her Ugandan-born husband. She was there to meet her in-laws who, after having been married for 5 years, she had still not yet met.

I breezed through both immigration and customs, got some cash from the ATM, and then scanned the mob of people outside the airport for Billy Mambo. Gen came into contact with Billy through some people in San Francisco and after exchanging a few e-mails, he offered to pick me up at the airport. I was not 100% sure he’d be there as I had written to him a few days earlier to tell him not to bother as I had planned to spend the night in Entebbe and it would be a waste of time for him to travel so far out of his way just to escort me a couple miles to where I was staying. Ten minutes, and a thousand offers to drive me into town later, I saw the Spanish guy from the plane with his girlfriend and asked them how they were getting to Kampala. We shared a taxi into Entebbe where they were dropped off on the side of the road where they could hail a passing “matatu” (minibus used as public transportation) and I was taken to Entebbe Backpackers where I would spend the night.