Gulu: Home of Spiders, NGOs and Powercuts!

Antony and I got the 6 hour bus to Gulu, in Northern Uganda, yesterday. It was quite a cool drive, though the driver seemed bent on killing everyone by speeding like a madman, and preferring to use his horn to avoid collisions rather than his brakes!

As we crossed the river Nile at Karuma Falls (the limit for what used to be considered safe to travel during the LRA's reign) a baboon ran alongside our bus hoping for food to be thrown to it. Was quite a cool introduction to Northern Uganda.

The north is so different from Kampala in the centre; the tower blocks of Kampala Road are replaced by small huts with thatched roofs, nestled amongst corn fields and surrounded by nothing by abundant vegetation and trees.

We arrived at Gulu around 2pm. Gulu is known is NGO town and is full to the brim with signposts for various NGO offices and UN 4x4s with their characteristically huge aerial masts attached. The town is small, scruffy and considerably less friendly than Kampala. The people too, look very different from those in Kampala, with the tribal differences being the Southern Buganda and the Northern Acholi, very noticeable.

We checked into a fairly smart hotel with en suite and television. They were asking for 52,000 UGX a night (close to £20) but we said that was to expensive so they instantly dropped it to 31,000 (£5 each a night) - haggling has never been so easy!

The night's main highlight (well more of a lowlight) was the discovery of 5 huge spiders in our beds; two of which were carrying egg sacks with them! Neither Antony nor I, despite our desires to portray ourselves as Danny Archer like characters, are fond of spiders to put it lightly! So what entailed was two adult men attempting to kill massive spiders with flip-flops and deet spray for around about 2 hours. This process including stripping both our beds, quite a lot of girlish screaming and much jumping onto beds when the spiders made a run for it! We were slightly concerned by what the hotel staff thought we were getting up to, what with the thudding of us jumping, the yelling and the moving of beds around!!

After great effort and profuse sweating, with a huge thunderstorm as the backdrop, we killed all the spiders, settled in with our bottles of gin and watched a film. The power then went off and the water ran out. All in all, a cracking night!!

Welcome to the North!