Dan Birchall

Glancing over a tourist map/brochure today in Kampala, I read about the Kampala Railway Station:  This unique and beautiful building has seen millions of people and thousands of adventurers pass through its gates since 1931, when the first train, "Lunatic Line," arrived in Kampala. Unfortunately, the railway passenger service is no more, and the station is a sombre memory of better times. The "Iron Snake" still plays a role as Uganda's link to the sea, as most of the bulk cargo still moves this way to and from Mombasa. Since I was sitting not far from the station at the time, I wandered over, took a couple photos of the facade, then took a couple of an old passenger carriage through the fence, at which point a passing police officer or two explained that I couldn't  do  that without proper permission, as out-of-service carriages were Critical Transportation Infrastructure™– of course. So after deleting the photos from my digital camera while they

Every couple years, the Reuters Foundation - the charitable arm of the huge media service - teams up with the World Conservation Union (IUCN) to honor the best articles in the environmental media. Prizes are given out to the best articles from each of six regions (Europe/Middle East, Francophone Africa, Anglophone Africa, Asia, Oceania/North America/Caribbean, and Latin America), and a global winner is also selected from among the regional winners. This year's ceremony happened today, as a press event at the conference I'm attending. The primary photographer on my team was busy going off to the airport to photograph Kofi Annan, so I wandered over to take pictures of the ceremony, with a friend and colleague who used to work for IUCN. Upon arriving, I was approached by a nice lady from the Foundation, who asked whether I was the official photographer, and explained that all of Reuters' local photographers had also gone off at the airport to photograph Kofi

Team dinner in Nairobi was at the Safari Park hotel's Nyama Choma Lounge. "Nyama Choma" is Swahili for "roast meat," and there was plenty of it. They started off with a soup (which I skipped) and a rather salty salad, then progressed from familiar to exotic meats - sausage (I skipped it), chicken, beef, pork, goat, spare ribs, more chicken, crocodile, camel. And cheesecake for dessert. I was a little disappointed that they never brought over any lamb, since it was on the list, or ostrich, since they hinted that they had some. In America, most people use goats for milk and grass/rubbish disposal, but in the Caribbean and Africa they're commonly eaten. Goat tastes somewhat like lamb, not bad, really. Crocodile wasn't very appealing. It doesn't have much flavor, and is pretty chewy. I only ate a little bit. Camel is pretty chewy, but flavor-wise, it's not really that far from donkey, so although some of my teammates had a hard time w