How I discovered the coolest hangover remedy in Lira Town

We would have made it in time, but the old connecting road is currently under water due to rising water levels and we were unaware. Someone should put warnings on that road. Seriously.

By the time we turned back to find the right alternative road, we lost time and ended up spending a night in Zengebe Landing Site on Lake Kyoga. This is still about my raging thirst by the way.

After coming to terms that we weren’t going anywhere, we had gone out looking for rooms to sleep in only to find that the town’s accommodation is from another century, to put it mildly. The only way we would lay in these beds without losing our sanity was if we were all drunk out of our wits.

So we had gone and sat at some roadside place and ordered rounds until we were blazed enough to not worry about our interesting accommodations. In the morning, we had raised our heavy heads from questionable pillows and headed for the pier.

We had boarded the first ferry with our hangovers and landed in Namasale Landing Site in Amolatar. As soon as we had entered the van, we had all dozed off until we arrived in Lira Town at around midday.

This is why I was very thirsty when I arrived in Lira. I was now all alone. The team continued to West Nile after dropping me. When I called my Lira friend and told her my situation, she told me the only solution to my hangover-induced thirst in Lira was tamarind juice. Lira Town has a rich juice culture.

Streets are lined with juicers with different flavours on sale. No other town in this country has so much juice on display than Lira. Juice is a huge part of street food in Lira Town. And you can tell tamarind juice by its brown colour. I grabbed myself a glass of tamarind juice with some ice cubes and bro, what a remedy! Clean slate in mere minutes.

I was here for the Miss Tourism homecoming event. Atino Lucky Bianka, the reigning Miss Tourism, is from Lira and the town was throwing her a hero’s welcome. But that was for later and I had a whole afternoon to snoop around for what makes Lira a fun city. And if you know Lira very well, then you know that Teso Bar is the place to start a fun evening in Lira.

Teso Bar is not a bar for starters. It is a neighbourhood in Lira town for omuntu wa wansi, where beer is sold at retail price and food is cheap. We can all guess how it got its strange name.

With the large hospital and the police barracks nearby, the place has a steady flow of people looking to eat and drink on budget. It capitalises on the dense population in the area to be as fun as possible while also being cheap.

On top of cheap beer and food, Teso Bar is where you go to taste the best ajono in the whole of northern Uganda. Men sitting in circles with long straws planted in clay pots is the most prevalent sight here.

This, one can imagine, is the way beer was originally meant to be drank; together and united. One can only imagine the kind of deep friendships that start from these joints. After an evening in Teso Bar, it was time to head to Space Lounge on Ayer Road.

Space Lounge is one of those little nice pubs that if you were dropped here blind-folded, you’d guess it was somewhere in the nicer parts of Kampala. The music is very nice, the setup is clean and proper.

This is where the home-coming kasiki was slated to start at 10pm, but the place was decked with revellers by 8pm. Yes, it was Friday night but it is not normal for a bar to be full of party animals by 8pm.

And yet here we were. The only reason, it seemed, was the anticipation to meet and greet the beautiful Atino, daughter of the land, reigning Miss Tourism. By the time she arrived with her friends at about 10:30, the place was a real shindig.

The girls were too regal to stay too long, plus they had a long day tomorrow, but the party didn’t stop till the wee hours of the night. The next morning, tamarind juice sellers made a killing.