The ma in Kla
My mom came to visit. It's been a while, so a special occasion indeed.
We hopped over to Murchison Falls National Park, after visiting the rhino sanctuary at Ziwa. At Ziwa, we were lucky, spotting 9 of the park's 12 rhinos, which are being bread to be put back in the wild, after going extinct in Uganda in 1983, partially due to Idi Amin's hunting prowess and the civil war that followed his ousting.
In Murchison Falls National Park, we were lucky to spot lion and jackal, as well as the usual suspects. Even though the elusive leopard was, well, elusive.
Returning to Kampala, we braved traffic for many hours to go to and come back from Jinja in the span of one day. Traffic was horrendous. The 75km journey back took us four hours.
And, on the way there, for the first time ever, after having been stopped many times by traffic police in Uganda, we finally were fined, without the traffic officer even soliciting for a bribe. I overtook a truck, crossing the yellow continuous line.
More commonly, traffic police threaten with a fine but, if no bribes are forthcoming, typically 'forgive' you. Not now. The cop didn't seem to be interested in a bribe and happily wrote up a fine. The annoying bit was the lack of clear instructions on how to deal with it all.
The cop thought we would first have to go to the URA, the Uganda Revenue Authority. We assumed we could just go to a bank and pay, which is the general assumption amongst Ugandan expats. Neither is correct. First going to Stanbic and being redirected to the URA, we were told that we could go and pay the fine directly at an Orient bank branch. There, they told us we'd have to go back to the URA. But, not so, we discovered at URA. Simply paying at Orient marks the end of the process.
In this case, though, the cop decided to keep my driving license, which is not uncommon practice. So, we had to head back and find him with proof of payment.