GULU, UGANDA—A man in nicely pressed yet worn shirt and slacks stands in the cramped bus aisle, jostling for space among ladies selling candy, young boys with loaves of bread, hankies, knickknacks, bottles of juice—anything a passenger might want to buy before setting off from Kampala to Gulu, a town in Uganda’s northern region.

The man in slacks is selling one booklet with illustrations of anatomy and another, an English-Swahili phrase book. He reads the phrase book aloud, though it’s unclear if this is an explanatory or sales tactic, or both. My seatmate, a man with distinct Northern features, inquires about the anatomy book. Five k, or about $3, such a high price because the book was printed on South African paper, the man in the slacks says.

Unlikely, I think.

My seatmate takes a careful look, passes the book back to the man in the slacks, then yells to another passenger in Acholi, a language from the North, familiar to me from many trips there but still less familiar than Luganda, the dominant language in central Uganda.

Shania Twain plays on the radio and passengers make last-minute purchases—exchanges that take place unhurriedly, because although the bus is leaving, it isn’t leaving soon—not until every seat is filled.

Every seat is filled about an hour later and we set out on the journey north. We immediately drive off the main road, ostensibly to avoid the “jam” (traffic); the coaster rolls down a steep dirt road into a swampy slum, and does not emerge onto the main road for another hour.

We continue on through the area just north of the city. Luweero, once infamous for bodies buried three deep, the evidence of which is now buried deeper than those shallow graves, looks like every other idyllic part of this landscape, indistinguishable for its past atrocities as Northern Uganda is for its more present atrocities.

The bus stops at a trading centre (think strip mall without a parking lot, fluorescent lights, or chain stores, and— actually, don’t think strip mall, and instead think small block of stores made from concrete) and men and women selling roasted goat, barbecued bananas, liver and mineral water flock to the windows of the bus. Their aggressiveness is rewarded by the UGX 500 (thirty cents) I spend on yummy warm bananas. The seatmate who had declined the “South African” anatomy booklet buys two kebab-style sticks of liver, as if to make up for his lack of liver diagram.

We continue on as green hills recede and roll into yellow flatlands. From Bantu to Nilotic, from school uniforms in navys or maroons with sweaters and proper hems to smocks made from cheap fluorescent fabric, from stable and prosperous to reeling from insecurity and financially tottering.

I listen to the Beatles on my iPod and wonder how far they penetrated into Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1960s. Everyone now listens to BBC, but did they back then? The Beatles set the musical trajectory for the West for decades. Maybe their absence here at that crucial juncture explains the current popularity of Shania Twain.

We travel on and my seatmate falls asleep, in spite of the pot-holed road, and his body lurches as the bus sways until he settles at an oblique angle in my personal space. I look out the window, now with streams of water and dirt obscuring my view of our forward momentum.

On my last trip here, an older Congolese gentleman and fellow journalist made us stop at every trading centre en route in search of the perfect cassava. On another trip a box full of baby chickens, several dozen of them, pecked at my feet.

After a while I remove my headphones and listen to the bus wheels on the tarmac, the wind sneaking through closed windows, the circus-like sound of the bus horn, perpetually in use as our bus driver announces our presence to other passing vehicles and villagers, and cows.

We arrive in town. In retrospect I feel nervous: seven hours’ journey, all that swaying from side to side, seems ominous after the fact. Exhausted from so much sitting, I pay UGX 1000 for a boda boda, motorcycle taxi, from the center of town to the guesthouse where I’m staying, which is 100 percent more than I should pay, and is also an extra 30 cents.

I ride on the back of the motorcycle in the light rain, and finally, I arrive at hotel to a hot meal, a cup of tea, and bad music videos on a fourteen-inch TV.

Tomorrow I continue but for now, I rest.