“A visit to the botanical gardens?” you might have proposed.
There was a good chance I would have replied with something along the lines of, “Blah, no way! Gardens are for Babylonians and old people.”
This was the Old Joel. The New Joel is a huge fan of botanical gardens actually, which means I have grown more mature and open-minded since coming to Uganda (I don‘t think it is because I have grown more Babylonian).
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My sister, on holiday from her freshman year as a collegiate academic at the University of Puget Sound, decided she needed to fly all the way over to Uganda to remind me that her first semester grades were much better than mine. There wasn’t much I could do in argument (she showed me her transcript), so I am left with the thoroughly enjoyable task of showing her as many different cultural and geographical aspects of Africa as possible in a limited amount of time and money.
Wednesday, and my sister’s first morning here in Uganda, began with a walk to Entebbe Airport. This just so happened to be one of those incidents that begun with me saying “Follow me, everybody, I think I have a good idea where [insert location] is!” Even though I have little or no clue where I am actually going. My sister and I and Brad and Asha (his girlfriend) set off that morning trying to find our way to Aero Beach, but ended up wandering to the airport. This wandering phase, because it was kind of my fault as I was the guide we shall call the “sightseeing tour” of Entebbe, ended just in time to observe the lunch hour lull at a cafeteria in the taxi park. A lesson I learned from Peter Mayle proven time and time again its relevance: Truck stops and taxi parks, no matter the country, often have very good food, usually at a very reasonable price, and always delivered in very massive proportions.
After a filling lunch of public transportion chaos and local Ugandan cuisine, our quartet segued to Aero Beach, a curious oddity. Rusting away on a beach only a kilometer away from Entebbe International were two old passenger airplane skeletons. The larger of the two bore the faded black, red, and yellow of the Ugandan flag, an oxidized remnant of some past foray into the national carrier gig, though it did not appear like it had ever been flight-worthy. A dark black mold had grown over much of the dirty yellow paint, visibly contrasting a dull metallic gleam revealed by peeling undercoat. The only two remaining doors hung awkwardly on broken hinges and the engine turbines had been stripped bare and now provided a number of small lizards with an excellent basking place. Heaped disorderly under the left wing was a pile of junk: broken chairs, tables, bed frames, paint cans. Inside, there was nothing, not a single chair or flotation device in the entire cabin, merely a few thousand corners all worthy of requiring a tetanus injection merely by looking at them. Prior to our visit, I had heard rumors that one of the planes on Aero Beach was the Air France liner hijacked by Palestinian terrorists. En route from Ben Gurion to Paris, a group of frustrated Palestinian men took control of Flight 139 and rerouted to it to a country found universally reliable and friendly to bad people the world over, Idi Amin Dada’s Uganda. Israeli paratroopers landed, despite Amin’s bumbling efforts at mediation, and all hostages were released save just one casualty. I am not certain what has happened to that plane, whether it is rotting on an Entebbe Beach having been repainted in Ugandan colors or with a picture of a smiling Barack Obama on its tailfin, or if it is sitting on proud display in some Masada museum, I cannot tell. I am certain, however, that airplane skeletons wearing national colors is eerily symbolic of Africa’s past tradition of engaging in luxurious endeavors which it could not sustain, and letting them fall into decay(see David Lamb's The Africans, specifically the national air carriers chapter), at times even marring pristine, untouched country.
These days the main attraction of Entebbe is not rotting airplane carcasses, believe it or not, but an expansive 40 hectare garden started in 1897. Begun partly as an experiment, the Botanical Gardens were created in part to give botanists an idea of which plants could survive in tropical, equatorial Uganda. A number of species were introduced, and, perhaps not to anyone’s surprise, it appears as they have all performed marvelously. Foreign varietals of cinnamon, fig, pine, apple, clove, mahogany, and even hazelnut trees towered spectacularly, shrugging off the pesky strangling fig and curtain vines with almost local impunity. The only failure, we were told, was a species of oak tree that couldn’t quite handle cohabitating with African termites.
The oxygen breathing contingency was less breathtaking. Aside from an impressive array of birds to see--a listing which includes hornbill, two varieties of turaco, red-chested sunbird, palmnut vulture, fish eagle, eagle owl, among others--there was not much to see that moved. The occasional vervet or colobus monkey chattered in the sprawling canopies above, and I believe I saw the tail end of the bright green tree snake before it fled into the high grass, the latter being exciting news at the time due to my sister’s great phobia of anything serpentine.
A pleasant afternoon cap was spent walking around Entebbe on our way back from the botanical gardens. The quiet town was replaced by Kampala in the 1960s as the administrative capital in Uganda, thereby locking Entebbe in a different time and era. Massive colonial government buildings lined the streets, windows broken and whitewash dirtied and overgrown with vines and squatters, but still exuding an air of languor that suggests “a deck chair, a shady veranda, the chink of ice on glass, and the curling smoke of a cigar.” Winston Churchill, I venture, would have absolutely loved Entebbe. We did.
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