I’m now in Kabale, in the far southwest of Uganda. We are not far from the delightfully named Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, famous for its mountain gorillas. Unfortinately they only let 12 people in the park per day, so you have to book well in advance, and I did not have that much notice.

Our Internet connection here is fast and pretty reliable after 10:00 AM. It uses a laser pointed at a microwave tower some miles away. Pretty sophisticated, eh? Except that the mist is so thick in the morning that the connection is unusable until it burns off. (In Jalalabad, we were using a satellite Internet connection. It worked pretty well, but the other end of the connection was in Germany. If they had clouds over there, you were out of luck; you had to check the weather report for Germany to see how your connection was likely to be over the course of the day.)

The soon-to-be-beleaguered President of Uganda showed up at my hotel last night. The area was crawling with heavily-armed military vehicles all day, so it wasn’t much of a surprise. They searched me thoroughly before they would let me go back to my room after work, but I don’t think it helped much. "What’s this?" An iPod. "What is an iPod?" I don't know how to explain it to you.

Tomorrow evening I leave for Queen Elizabeth National Park, where I will spend my day off before returning to Kampala on Sunday. Since only my film camera was stolen, I hope to bring you some spectacular shots of very far away animals from my digital camera. I'm not really expecting Internet access again until Kampala.

Kabale at dusk.