Traveling in Uganda and the Congo

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Outside Magazine January 2005

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The Hard Way
Making It Real (Cont.)

I GOT IN TOUCH with Nelson Kisaka, 31, the Kampala-based president of the Mountain Club of Uganda (MCU). Nelson said that the mountain club, much like the country itself, had been through difficult times but is in the process of rebuilding. Over e-mail, he invited me to mount a climbing expedition with the club into the peaks of the Rwenzori.

The MCU was founded in the geography department of Kampala's Makerere University in 1946. Early members—the vast majority of them Europeans living in Uganda—conducted numerous mountaineering and scientific expeditions to the Rwenzori. Between 1948 and 1962, the year Uganda gained independence from Britain, the MCU built a circuit of six huts, published several guidebooks, and began introducing rock and ice climbing to a fledgling nation.

But when Idi Amin came to power in 1971, all semblance of civil life vanished in Uganda. Preternaturally homicidal, Amin overthrew Prime Minister Apollo Milton Obote and then spent the next eight years executing some 300,000 civilians before being ousted by the army of Tanzania in 1979. Milton Obote returned to power in 1980 and ruled for another five bloody years, until former defense minister Yoweri Museveni's rebel army captured the capital of Kampala in January 1986 and installed Museveni as president. A benevolent yet autocratic leader, Museveni has instituted national elections (he was re-elected in 1996 and 2001) and rebuilt Uganda's economy on privatization, foreign investment, and coffee exports.

Though better developed and more politically stable than many African nations, Uganda today shares some of the same problems as its neighbors. Since 1982, AIDS has killed a million Ugandans, and Museveni's government faces several rebel insurgencies in the north, as well as sporadic fighting along the western border with the Congo. In the mid-nineties, guerrillas fighting in the Congo began using the Rwenzori as a redoubt, prompting the Ugandan government to close Rwenzori Mountains National Park in July 1997 and send in the military. The Western world heard almost nothing of this conflict until March 1999, when Congolese insurgents slaughtered eight Western tourists and a Ugandan warden in Bwindi National Park, Uganda's popular gorilla sanctuary, 100 miles south of the Rwenzori.

Trail by trail, the rebels were killed or driven out of the park, and in July 2001 Rwenzori Mountains National Park reopened. Since then, the country's tourism industry has tripled, with more than 100,000 travelers visiting the nation's ten game parks in 2003.

Yet adventure sports are luxury activities that germinate only in relatively stable conditions. After a long hiatus, the Mountain Club of Uganda has no climbing gear, and of the 300 affiliated members, only 18 are currently active—and only a handful of those are experienced at altitude. (Most of the 300 members are Ugandans, but more than half of the active climbers are expats.) Because our expedition would be the club's first major ascent since the early days, Nelson e-mailed to ask if I might teach basic mountaineering skills.

For this I would need a partner, and I had just the man in mind: Steve Roach, 44, a mission programmer for NASA, computer science professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, and solid mountaineer. Steve is unflappable, wry, and up for anything—he once drove a school bus loaded with used computers to Guatemala, giving them to a school. Before I explained what my dream trip was all about, Steve said, "I'm going." The two of us arrived in Kampala with bulging duffel bags of equipment—donations of clothing, gear, and ropes from fellow climbers, as well as new tents from Mountain Hardwear—for the Mountain Club of Uganda.

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