The Canadian Forces Polaris carrying the Prime Minister, his aides, and reporters to the Commonwealth Summit left Nice, France after refueling just before 7 a.m. local time and we landed at Entebbe, Uganda around 4 pm local time. (left)We’d left the first snowfall of the year 18 hours earlier in Ottawa and walked into bright sunshine and 27 C weather in Entebbe. Entebbe, of course, was the scene of the famous raid by Israeli forces to rescue Jewish hostages in 1976. You can still see bullet holes on the flight tower at the airport (bottom right).
Most of us slept from Nice to Entebbe, the PM included, I assume. We don’t know, of course, what the PM was up to at the front of the plane in the spartan cabin, once jokingly nicknamed the ‘Taj Mahal’ by Prime Minister Chretien. Harper did not come back to talk to reporters nor did we expect him to.
In fact, the only time we saw Harper at all this day was when he got off the plane and got into a car to take him to the Kampala resort that all the leaders are staying in.
The rest of us piled in a bus and headed to our hotel in Kampala, a 40–minute drive north of Entebbe.
Uganda is a verdant, hilly country. It is a poor country but not, as Canadian Press reporter Alex Panetta told us on the bus ride in, as poor as many other African countries. Alex has travelled to other African countries with other prime ministers and, in his view, Uganda looked relatively wealthy so far as sub-Saharan nations go.
The hotel we are in is called the Imperial. We are its first customers. The carpet, PMO advance staff told us, had literally been installed in our rooms that day. The hotel is new but not yet completely built. Only one elevator bank is working; the place has an odour of curing cement; some exterior and interior walls have not yet been finished and, perhaps most disconcertingly for someone who has been up in transit for 36 hours, there are no mattresses on the beds — only box springs. Oh well, at this point, I’m just happy to be sleeping in a bed.