Yesterday I took a day trip to Jinja, which lies along the main route that runs west from Mombasa on the Indian ocean in Kenya through Nairobi, through Uganda via Kampala and on to Rwanda and Burundi. It's a very well-maintained road and even has two lanes at some points. As you can imagine it's a major trucking route. We passed a number of trucks laden with matooke - green plantains and a Ugandan staple - which is grown in Mbarara in western Uganda; drivers leave at 4am every day to deliver to the Kampala markets.
The Old Taxi park in the center of Kampala is the hub for human transportation; the blue and white checkered Hiace minibuses don't depart for their destination until they are crammed full with passengers, but for long distance weekly commuters, like the wife of a friend who works in Kiboga in the far west of the country, it's a very efficient way to get around.
The Jinja road runs through several sugar cane plantations - The Sugar Corporation of Uganda in Lugazi and Kakira Sugar, both of which are owned by the Mehta Group. Each company has its own sugar factory and I recognized the brand names from the bags of light brown sugar you can buy in the local stores. Kakira even generates its own electric power by burning bagasse, the waste product from sugar cane, and supplies the local grid with 32 megawatts. I was also excited to see a couple of tea plantations along the way - Ugandan tea is delicious, the kind we're used to in England.
Nile Breweries is situated right on the Nile at Jinja - it's huge. Unfortunately they are not open for tours on weekends.
Since there is so much industry around Jinja, which is the third largest city in Uganda after Kampala and Mbarara, there is plenty of employment so people enjoy a relatively comfortable standard of living, with more brick built homes with corrugated sheet metal roofs than mud huts with thatched roofs in the villages.
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