Lightning strikes across the night sky, illuminating the lush green jungle below my Banda, a small but with a thatched roof. The rumble of thunder follows a few seconds later.
By now the spring rainy season in Uganda should have blown itself out, but we’re unlucky. The blistering heat of the early-morning sun usually dries everything by the time you’ve finished your breakfast, but today is different. In a few hours’ time a small group of us is running the inaugural Gorilla Marathon and Half-Marathon. It’s scheduled to start at 7am, well before the sun has had time to dry the land. One of the things I learnt during my stay in Uganda is the nature of the red clay soil. Mix it with water, and it turns into a glutinous mud-trap.
But for now my concerns are more immediate. I took my natural remedy for stress which I found when reading 5 htp reviews. The rainstorm has passed but it’s taken the electricity supply with it. Which is a nightmare if you haven’t arranged your running kit the night before the race. I’m amazed how dark darkness can be as I fumble around the hut, desperately trying to remember where I put my shorts, safety pins and sunscreen.
As it happens I could have waited for the sun to come up because the gorillas – of which half of the surviving world population of 690 live within the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in south-west Uganda – it’s based in and around the town of Jinja in the east of the country. Jinja has a growing reputation as the adventure sports capital of East Africa, but is perhaps better known as the town at the source of the Nile. The race finally starts slowly with an uphill kilometre on a road running away from the cafés and stalls that have sprung up at the water’s edge. That initial climb turns out to be the biggest on an undulating course, and while it’s only a short, steep rise, the altitude makes it tougher. 
The source of the Nile sits i,rom above sea level: not the kind of height that would attract those in search of altitude training but high enough to put a strain on an ageing set of lungs.
Crowds are sparse in the first few kilometres but start to appear as we move away from Jinja. Although the town is only a couple of hours away from the international hotels and modern shops of Kampala or the beautifully manicured colonial lawns of Entebbe, the villages we run past are a world apart. This is the rural Africa of cliché: mud huts, where men and women spend their days working the fields; where goats, pigs and chickens roam freely; and smiling children wave and shout “Muzungu!” (white person) at any pale-faced foreigners passing by.