We could have made it on time, but due to the rising water level, the old connection road is currently under water and we were not aware of it. Someone needs to put a warning on that road. Really.

We lost time when we turned back to find the correct alternative route and spent a night at the Zengebe Landing Site on the shores of Lake Kyoga. This is still about my severe thirst, by the way.

After agreeing that we weren’t going anywhere, we went looking for a room to sleep, only to find that the town’s accommodations were, to say the least, from another century. The only way we could sleep in these beds without losing our sanity was if we all got drunk.

So we went and sat at a roadside spot and ordered tours until we were too inflamed to worry about our interesting accommodations. In the morning, we lifted our heavy heads from the suspicious pillows and set out towards the pier.

With our hangover, we boarded the first ferry and landed at Namasale Landing Site in Amolatar. As soon as we got into the minibus, we all fell asleep until we reached Lira Town at noon.

So when I came to Lira I was very thirsty. I was completely alone now. After dropping me off, the team continued towards West Nile. When I called my Lira friend and explained my situation, she said that the only solution to my hangover thirst in Lira was tamarind water. Lira Town has a rich juice culture.

The streets are full of juicers offering different flavors for sale. No other town in this country has as much juice on display as Lira. Fruit juice forms a big part of street food in Lira Town. You can tell tamarind juice from its brown colour. I got myself a glass of tamarind juice and some ice and boy, what a cure! Clean in just minutes.

I was here for Miss Tourism’s homecoming event. Atino Lucky Bianka, the ruler of Miss Tourism, is from Lira, and the town welcomes her like a hero. But that was later and I spent an entire afternoon researching what makes Lira a fun city. If you know Lira very well, you know that Teso Bar is the right place to start a fun evening in Lira.

Teso Bar is not a bar for beginners. A neighborhood in Lira town where omuntu wa wansi is located, where beer is sold at retail price and food is cheap. We can all guess where this strange name comes from.

Thanks to the large hospital and police barracks nearby, there’s a constant flow of people looking to eat and drink on a budget here. It takes advantage of the dense population in the area, ensuring that it is both cheap and as fun as possible.

Along with cheap beer and food, Teso Bar is where you go to taste Northern Uganda’s best ajono. Men sitting in a circle with long reeds planted in clay pots is the most common sight here.

One might think that beer was originally intended to be drunk this way; We are together and united. We can only imagine what kind of deep friendships will begin from these joints. After an evening spent at Teso Bar, it was time to head to Space Lounge on Ayer Road.

Space Lounge is one of those nice little bars that if you were dropped in here with your eyes closed, you’d guess it was somewhere in the nicer parts of Kampala. The music is beautiful, the setup is clean and neat.

This was where the homecoming kasiki was scheduled to start at 10pm, but the place was packed with revelers by 8pm. Yes, it was a Friday night, but it’s not normal for a bar to be filled with party animals by 8pm.

But still we were here. The only reason, it seemed, was the expectation of meeting and greeting the beautiful Atino, the daughter of the country, who runs Miss Tourism. When he arrived with his friends around 10:30, the place was a real party.

The girls were too gorgeous to stay for too long, plus they were going to have a long day tomorrow, but the party didn’t stop until late into the night. The next morning, tamarind juice vendors committed a murder.