I have a friend and colleague who collects election posters from all the countries he visits. I'm of a mind to start collecting pictures of the toilet signs from our field offices. Here are samples from our Kabale and Kampala offices:

Yes, let's make our stay here enjoyable.

Primitive and childish.

Just back in Kampala from a day and a half in Queen Elizabeth National Park, in the far west of Uganda. Let's see if my hotel's tiny pipe can handle all the pictures:

Terraced hillsides around Kabale.

These Acholi cattle, with their distinctive horns, remind me a lot of animals I had seen in ancient Egyptian paintings and carvings, but never actually encountered in real life (or its improved version, television).

Sunrise over the park.

Ugandan kob, which as far as I can tell are no different from Kenyan gazelles.

Buffalo soldier, dreadlock rasta.

Elephant family outing

Papa chows down.

God prepares to speak over the Kazinga Channel.

The edge of one of the Katwe Craters.

A computer simulation of the nice closeup I could have taken of this lion if I had my stolen camera. Sigh. (This one is a small snippet from a larger image, and wouldn't look good as a print.)

Fishing boats. Many of the inhabitants of the fishing villages in and near the park are missing limbs from encounters with hippos.

Salt collecting on Lake Katwe.

Sunrise from the back door of my hotel room.

On the road to Kampala we came across this troop of baboons.

Baboon family.

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.