Kampala

Kampala drapes itself over green hills beside Lake Victoria — a lake so vast the Baganda rightly treat it as a sea — and hums with the particular joy of a city that never quite stops talking. This is the living capital of the Buganda kingdom, whose kabakas rest at the Kasubi tombs under great thatched domes, and whose ceremonies still order the calendar; around the palaces, the city trades, preaches, dances and debates on every hillside at once.

The traveller greets the tombs and the Buganda parliament; braves Owino market, where everything ever manufactured is for sale twice; eats the city's masterpiece — the rolex, a rolled chapati with eggs, invented here and named with a grin —; rides a boda-boda (helmet on, driver chosen by app) across town like a local; watches the marabou storks supervise the avenues from the lampposts; and ends at the lake shore in Ggaba or Munyonyo, where the fishing boats come in gold at dusk.

The Guide's practical counsel: Kampala's traffic is an epic — plan around it and treat the boda as a skill, not a default —; greetings open every door, and 'oli otya' opens them wider; the equator itself crosses the road half an hour south, worth the photograph with a foot in each hemisphere; and the city is the gate to everything Uganda hides upcountry — the Nile's source at Jinja, the gorillas of Bwindi, the crested cranes that gave the flag its bird.