Royal Ascot Goat Races

Royal Ascot Goat Races

An annual tradition in Kampala is the Royal Ascot Goat Races, held in a resort by Lake Victoria. I am sure it’s the only time in my life that I will have an invitation to a marquee in Ascot anyway! So we all dressed up to the nines, some even bought hats for the occasion, and spent a day of drinking champagne and a spot of minor gambling in the sunshine! It was a gorgeous sunny day and we all had tickets to go into what was meant to be the best tent, with free food and drink for the day – hooray! Well free drink all day until it ran out and was replaced with a mountain of empty champagne and wine bottles.

Watching goat racing is absolutely hilarious. For starters, they don’t really want to race at all, so behind them there’s a man pushing a barrier to give them a bit of a shove. And there’s still no guarantee that they will run – if they get distracted by a nice bit of grass to munch on or a bit of attention from the crowd, then they just come to a complete stop. Otherwise they may get into a bit of a huddle and potter along, or go in the wrong direction. Basically, goats are not really designed to run. Having said that, a few of us are thinking of entering a goat into next year’s contest. I wonder if we can get free club membership for pets. Imagine a goat on a treadmill …Sadly, my luck wasn’t in when it came to laying bets. I lost the huge sum of around 4000 Shillings – just over a quid.

By late afternoon the free booze had come to an end, so we headed over to the Latino Bar stall for a few mojitos where we met lots of Colombians! As I’d had a few vinos, then clearly I was in fluent Spanish mode and had a good old natter and found out that one of the girls lived about 15 minutes from where I was in Bogota – small world.

By the end of the day we were all suitably tired and tipsy and piled back into the bus to go home and have little rests before heading out again – or that was the plan – what actually happened was that I woke up the following morning – whoops! Off out to buy the Sunday Pepper (Uganda’s best tabloid paper) to see if we made the final copy!