Adjusting to a new time zone

Flying in to Heathrow from the East, I failed to appreciate that I was going to gain time. This was something that I was not yet understanding even though I had been told about it many times.

I think it became light over Austria and of course having hardly left time zone GMT +3, my body clock was not used to time zone changes. So when the sun came up and we were given our breakfast, I started thinking that as we flew and got nearer to Heathrow, so did the time move on. Well, of course the clock does not click as fast as it should if one is flying east to west.

When we landed at Heathrow, I thought that it was sometime in the afternoon. Of course it was not. It was still in the morning and I think I should have taken that on board.

But with the problems that I encountered with immigration I took my eye off the clock. The excitement being let through and seeing the UK for the first time, I completely lost track of time.

Later on in the day the fatigue and the new phenomenon of jet lag were to take hold in a rather interesting way. Quite dramatic!

We had a light lunch, my first meal in the UK which was vegetarian. I found this one a new one on me. In Uganda at the time vegetarian meals were not that much of a favourite.

In fact for one to have a purely vegetarian meal meant that one did not have enough money to supplement their meals with meat or chicken. When the lettuce was served, I thought the family I was visiting despite having a nice house did not have enough money to buy food! Besides, they were not cooked! We in Uganda, fry a lot of our food.

Once one of my friends from the UK joked that we are about to fry water. That was a difficult meal. Thankfully Jackie whose parents I was with at the moment had written an A4 sized letter to her parents as a sort of "operation manual". So we were later on to eat quite a lot of chicken to my delight.

Later on, Harold decided to take me and my sister to have a quick look around the immediate area. We walked down Park road, across the Worthy Road and into Russell Road the aim being to get to the fields beyond and enjoy some bit of countryside within a city. Well, that was the plan until he got a brain wave! "A change of plan!" as he so triumphantly announced. He knew of some nice tidy pub nearby called the Hyde Tavern on Hyde street.

The Hyde Tavern introduced to me the traditional English pub. Slightly stuffy with a lot of "organised" clutter yet very intimate. It was one of those places that one never heard loud music. Just quiet enough for a contemplative pint. Harold asked us what we wanted to drink. With the excitement of finnaly tasting English beer I could hardly contain my self. However, I could hardly recognise a single one so he ordered for me a half pint of Wadworth 6X. My first taste of proper English beer. 6X! For a while that is all that I ordered anywhere we went.

On the walk back home, that is when the jet lag and the fatigue finally took hold. It was like a tiredness that I had never experienced before. I felt like throwing up (no it was not the beer), I lost my sense of distance.

Everything seemed really far. My legs felt like they were encased in cement and I started speaking nonsense. Thankfully my sister was still with us and she quickly took control of the situation. As soon as we got back home, I was sent to bed for a quick nap. I was to awake a few hours later, thinking that it was a different day because it was still light.

Anyone who has not travelled far beyond the tropics of cancer and Capricorn, the length of day remains pretty much the same all year round. In Uganda, the fact that the country is astride the equator means that day and night are equal. Its twelve hours each. This has affected even the way time is told. When I woke up later in the day, my cheap digital watch was reading something like 0813PM. But I failed to internalise the PM bit. I thought that it was 0813 in the morning because I had never seen it light that late in the day.

The sun along the equator rushes up the sky in the morning then crawls across it through the day roasting the ground and the people. As soon as it gets about 1730, the sun literally drops out of the sky! As a young boy, I watched the sunset many times with my father and it always excited me seeing the huge red sun drop behind the hills on the horizon.

Within minutes, the stars would be out. That evening, my first evening in the UK, the sun seemed to refuse to go away! I could not believe it seeing day light until way past 2100 hours!

Welcome to Great Britain

My first proper step on to British soil was just after 13.00 hours on April 23, 1995. After that gruelling questioning by immigration officials and the anxiety that it had all caused I felt a little scared of what I had let myself in for. To look back now and think of all the negative thoughts about this great country that had been sowed in my mind just because of one immigration man!

Harold and my sister took me to the car park where Diane had been waiting all that time. We again seemed to walk for ever through halls filled to capacity by people from all nationalities.

I was anxious. I wanted to get out of this huge building and yet it seemed to go on for ever. Even getting to the car we had to through a tunnel.

When we finally got to the car parks, I wondered how we were ever going to find the car that we needed. The size of the car parks just completely amazed me. Again looking back thinking about the largest car parks that I had seen in Uganda at the time were hardly larger than the average car park at a supermarket.

Now it seemed cars had taken over where people had been. There were cars for as far as I could see.

People weaving and rushing between them with trolley loads of luggage. But I had never seen so many cars in one place. Yet Harold did not even stop to think as to where he had left his Red Volvo Estate. Poor Diane had sat in the car waiting for us all that time. It must have seemed like a quick stop and pick up but alas it was not to be. I have never asked her what she must have been doing all that time waiting in the car. This was the time before SUDOKU. Maybe she had the crossword.

Greetings exchanged, we loaded the car up and headed for the exit. For a while as Harold drove round looking for the exit, I panicked thinking that we were yet going to take a long time just to exit this maze.

Hitting the M4 Heathrow spur, with the Concord model that used to be on the roundabout, I quietly let a smile spread across my face. I felt at that moment that we were away from the clutches of air travel, the airport, the endless carpeted corridors, immigration, the throng of humanity; peoples that I did not even know existed.

Cars everywhere! People seeming to be in a constant state of panic. Rushing. Waiting nervously watching blinking screens. I let myself relax and decided to take in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. I could not wait to explore this island and meet its people and traditions.

Uganda is renown for its dust. Red omnipresent dust. It clogs everything. Covers every surface and controls ones pace during the day. The tropical heat bakes the ground and it all turns in the stuff. When it rains, parts of the country just turn into a quagmire. It is never ending. The lack of it when I exited the airport took me by surprise. I was like "where is the red dust?" It was no where and I honestly I felt relieved. Also the tropical heat can be debilitating. On a recent visit to Uganda, the temperatures averaged 40C everyday. On this April morning, with the spring at its height, I thought the country was air conditioned.

When we joined the motorway network, I was in for another shock. Bearing in mind that this was a Sunday morning, not a lot of traffic was about. But I have been told that I was amazed at the amount of traffic about.

Cars seemed to be whizzing past at a very high speed. There also seemed to be a variety of cars. Africa has been taken over by Japanese cars. And they are all white! So to see a red Mercedes or black Toyota was great. I had only seen cars like Alpha Romeos in Time magazine or Newsweek. Now they were sailing past me.

Driving in some parts of Africa can be a real hazard to pedestrians. In many parts one will find that they have to fight for that road space with domestic animals like cows which are let out to graze for themselves.

In Uganda, the situation is just as bad. With the roads being very narrow in certain places one wonders how really nasty accidents are avoided. Driving down Worthy Road in Winchester after we had left the motorway, I half expected to see all these people walking about doing there business.

Maybe a few cows here and there. There was nothing. England seemed all to empty at the time. I wondered where everyone was? But I knew where I was. Winchester!

Rumours of swine flu

I flew into Uganda on July 16th 2009 on a pretty rickety Kenyan Airways Boeing 737. It was one of those nights that the tropical heat hits you in the face like a wall. Tired, with my family in tow, we made a dash for the immigration desks.

This, for those who fly into Entebbe airport, is one of the most annoying times in ones travel to Uganda. Immigration staff just take forever to process anyone. The problem is further made worse by the fact that the airport is small enough for one to be able to see loved ones waiting the other side.

The end to one's journey, in many cases long haul flights, is near. Yet these servants of the state just slow down to a near halt!On this balmy evening, I had failed to appreciate the effects of swine flu and the coverage that it was getting in my adopted country, The United Kingdom.

> Thanks to Sky News - which is widely watched in Uganda - and other media outlets, travellers from the UK are viewed with suspicion. The growing perception even on the dusty streets of Kampala is that we in the UK are dropping like flies from this disease. Which actually makes for interesting observation because we in the UK, thanks to Sky News and other media outlets think that they in Uganda and Africa in general are dropping like flies from all manner of disease and poverty.

>Another layer of safety had been added to the defence of the Republic. Men with surgical masks corralled everyone off our flight into another corner so that we could fill out a form on whether we had had the symptoms or not. I actually wonder who admitted to having had them.

>I could see a flurry of Bic pens quickly ticking the "no" boxes. The lines grew longer as these men with the masks milked the situation, making us more irate. They too were asking questions which I thought would normally be asked by immigration staff only.

>I could see the immigration desks empty with two bored looking officers waiting for us. Their sole purpose, I suspect, to make our journal longer! I wondered what they would do if this airport were to suddenly get two large plane loads of passengers.

Fourteen years previous, I had landed at Heathrow airport fresh from a long haul flight from Muscat. Our GulfAir plane had touched down on time. The flight though uneventful, had seemed to take forever! I had watched as The Bosporus, Greece, Switzerland and all of Western Europe lazily float bellow us at a painfully slow pace-or that is what it seemed.

We had taken such a long time to arrive in London that I started thinking that either London did not exist, was moving further away from us or the pilots had missed a turning somewhere and were now hurdled over some atlas thinking "that place down there looks really iced over".

We got off that plane and I thought that I would rush to immigration as I do at Entebbe, clear with them and collect my luggage and hey presto! There was Diane and Harold! Little did I know that, I had entered what seemed to be the largest building I had yet encountered.

How long does one have to walk from an aircraft to those immigration desks? For a while I wondered whether I had indeed left Heathrow (and London) and was probably heading for another country still in one building. We turned left, turned right and the fear that I had encountered before of pilots missing London altogether started to creep over me.

I wondered whether those arrows pointing me in the right direction were actually not intended for me anymore. My assurance was that I could still see that lady who was looking after me. She too was following these arrows with a grim determination.

Then I hit the lines. I had never seen so many people of so many different nationalities in one place. A family in front of me clutched American passports. I was privately satisfied that they too were here lining up, waiting for their turn. A group of South Americans, or so I thought as they spoke Spanish, nervously thumbed through their passports making sure all visa stamps were correct and glued in.

Then I panicked! For at this moment it dawned on me that I had not looked at my passport again in the preceding 24 hours! Where was it? I could not even find my chequebook sized air ticket.

I was carrying enough junk on me as hand luggage to fill up a council tip! I even had the in-flight magazine on me. Who ever carries those off a flight? After a brief "pit stop" on the side, where everyone kindly waited for me to regain my position in the line, I had the offending items.

I rejoined the snaking lines to immigration where my nightmare begun.As I was travelling solo, having been invited for a summer holiday at two addresses, I had not carried much money. In Uganda, for one to go and spend a holiday with someone in their home means strictly that.

One stays at home. And if your host were to be so kind as to take you see a place, they foot the bill. So, I arrived with a paltry £50 in my wallet for a ten week stay. I approached that desk as the lady who was looking after me approached another one.

I thought we were going to be waved through together. She was. I was not. The interrogation started. Same questions repeated over and over again. Thankfully, I had memorised exactly what I had written on my visa application form. Any diversion from what I had written I politely corrected the immigration man. Any question as to why some information that I was providing at the moment had not been disclosed earlier I defended myself that it had not been asked of me in that application form.

>An hour into my interrogation, my suitcase was given to me, taken to a separate room and they proceeded to search it. It was an old leather case that my father had been using and regarded as an important family possession.

>I was horrified when these two burly looking men appeared with a pen knife and proceeded to cut the bottom out of it. I was distraught. I knew nothing would be found and indeed nothing was found.

>My toothpaste tube was emptied completely and a bag of millet flour spread out on the table. Still nothing was found.Two hours into the ordeal with I no wiser as to what they were looking for, I saw Harold and my sister being marched into another room.

Friendly faces at last. The immigration officer returned with both of them to me, took my passport and endorsed it with a six month tourist visa. I protested! I wanted only ten weeks not six months. Not after his shoddy treatment.

He mumbled something about procedure, let me through and wished me a nice stay. A nice stay? I could have decked him! I was furious, tired but happy that at long last I was on British soil. I broke down and bawled like a baby.

My sister who does not do emotional stuff just walked ahead of me. Harold, who I was to learn later did not also do this kind of emotional stuff, stiffly put an arm around me. I was to learn later on that that £50 was my undoing.

They thought that I was coming to work illegally.After that two hour delay at Heathrow I take the delays at Entebbe with mild irritation. An acceptance that these defenders of the state have a job to do.

That man at Heathrow (whom I would love to meet in a dark alley with no witnesses) had a duty to question my £50 pocket money. I will also one day ask Harold and Diane what the total parking bill for them was on that day.