Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Boston and I had already been given permission by the Uganda Wildlife Authority to
walk along the river. We had been summoned to see its chief, Colonel Andrew Seguya, in
Kampala; Andrew had heard we'd been broadcasting our opinion that the true source of
the Nile belonged in Rwanda - and only by our conceding that the source of the
White
Nile
was in Uganda did the bespectacled colonel agree to help us. Two days out from Masindi,
we came to the small town of Karuma, where another power station straddled the river and
the falls, gentle compared with what we would find further west, still looked dramatic. Bo-
ston had told me that the Ugandan government had plans to transform Karuma into a new,
modern city - not organically, by attracting investors and settlers, but by imposing growth
from above and the building of yet another dam. Right now, there was no evidence of this.
Ahead, the national park was a verdant line of green, and I was glad to be walking into it,
leaving the deforested devastation behind.
At a UWA ranger station on the outskirts of Karuma, we met the guides and porters
who would take us into the park. A motley collection of crumbling buildings, the station
didn't look much like the headquarters of an operation tending to more than three-and-a-
half-thousand square kilometres of wilderness, but inside we were introduced to Simon,
the lead ranger, Francis, his right hand man, and Maureen, a gun-toting lady of such con-
siderable girth that I had to quickly stop Boston from asking her how she intended to walk
with us
all
the way to the Falls. Accompanying us there would also be two porters, Ge-
orge and Julius, who knew the park intimately as locals and had aspirations of becoming
rangers themselves.
As we were checking packs and Simon was showing us a map of the park, another
ranger appeared in the station, dragging a handcuffed local after him. I watched as they
crossed the station floor to disappear into its recesses, where Boston assured me the cells
were waiting.
'Poaching?' I asked.
Simon nodded, wearily. 'Illegal fishing, this one.' As he said it, I noticed Julius, one of
the porters, looking particularly shifty. 'He'll be prosecuted and fined, but it doesn't stop
them.' The fine, he explained, was ordinarily around 300,000 Ugandan shillings, roughly
approximate to £70, a fortune for an impoverished fisherman, but nothing when stacked
against the need for food for a man and his family. Simon and his rangers enforced the law
as it was, but something was fundamentally broken that even subsistence fishing had to be
policed like this. 'It's not him we have to worry about,' Simon conceded as, finally resup-
plied, we left the ranger station to head for the park. 'It's when it becomes commercial.
There's meant to be no fishing, without a licence, inside the whole of the park, but boats
come onto Lake Albert and up the river. That's not subsistence. That's industry.'
Outside, Karuma Falls Bridge - originally built so that military could move swiftly over
this part of the river - took us to the north bank and, from there, we entered the park. As
