Why are we in Uganda?

As a travel photographer, what I would like to do is develop photography projects on different countries to show everybody the world through my eyes. That's how the project on Malaysia started. But of course, as a professional (photographer or whatever) you can not rely on just one project. So what about another country?

But the world is full of countries, you can't imagine how many of them there are. How to choose the right one?

First of all, I am not alone in the world, so the chosen country should be a country which could be suitable for Zuzana and me. Other important key to choose a country is Fitur, the International Tourism Trade Fair in Madrid. It is a good way of knowing which countries could be interested in promoting themselves. Last year I already had several contacts with the tourism board of some countries, and this year the fair was going to be in January.

We wanted an English speaking country with a good NGO and development institution presence, stable, safe, with a minimum of infrastructures and, at the same time, it should be interesting from a tourist point of view and not too known in Spain. If you put all these things in a cocktail shaker, what you get is Uganda. It has a lot of things in the sector of development cooperation, and for me it has nationals parks in the savannah, with lions, elephants and so on, it also has mountain gorillas and mountains over 5000 m, in fact the third highest mountain in Africa is in the border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Plus a lot of interest when talking about the different people living along the country, in terms of culture and tradition. It seemed that Uganda could be a good place to go.

After some research, I met with Santi Jimenez in Barcelona, who is the only person in Spain managing visas with the Ugandan Embassy in France and the focal point for contacts between Spain and Uganda through the website "Uganda in Spain", to explain him the project in a meeting we had he told me that he thinks that it would be a good project to do in Uganda and he gave me some contacts.

One month later, in Fitur, I had a few meetings, with the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA, the institution managing all the National Parks in Uganda), with different tour operators and with the Chairman of the Association of Uganda Tour Operators.

At the same time, Zuzana started to make a research on the development cooperation sector in Uganda, and she found a lot of possibilities to try.

So here we are. Zuzana will try to find a job in development cooperation and I will try to show you all how nice this country is.

I hope we can see a lot of it and that we all like it.