Kikonko Lodge - Lake Albert - Uganda

For all of you who have followed our blog for some time - we are finally open! Lake Albert - viewing it from your sunbed Our manager Abbe (who now changed his name from Albrecht to Albert in order to make it easier for the Ugandans to remember his name) has really done an amazing job with the final touches! So Kikonko has opened its doors on the 6th of December 2019. The first guests came and absolutely loved the scenery, the food, the comfortable beds and the swimming pool. Now a whole new aera has begun: marketing, marketing and marketing. Stefan has become very conversant with social media marketing and Steffi talks to pretty much any safari car driver she can find on the roads of Kampala.  Our stickers are in the making and so are our new business cards and flyers. Please check out our website:  Kikonko Lodge or view us on Tripadvisor:  Kikonko Lodge on Tripadvisor

We are absolutely THRILLED!! We have our final logo! Big thanks go to Nick (Steffi's brother), who made it possible - you are simply the best! We had struggled with our interim logo, because the orange color in it didn't come out so well and somehow it didn't look as catchy as we had wanted it to. So Nick took it on and developed some new ideas of how to make it more catchy and professional. And here it is: I hope you like it as much as we do! Look out for it in the future!

We finally had a chance to spend a full week at the site to push forward on all sorts of things. We packed the kids and the dogs into the car, loaded it with all sorts of other materials and went to Buseruka at 6am last week Saturday. Everday we worked for about 10 hours: completing the mosaic floor, scraping concrete off the stones in the restaurant, designing the huge lamp shade, digging trenches, erecting the solar heater, planting and weeding, filling and sanding the walls, giving advise on how to instal the toilets and sinks, receiving 12 mattresses and solar heaters way past midnight on the truck from Kampala and many, many more things. Every evening we collapsed at around 8pm in our tents and looked forward to the next day and more work. It seems like a million things still need to be done, but we are truly moving at a very fast pace. The next truck with beds, tables, and lots of cables for our solar system will arrive soon and Stefan is bound to go back to the ...

Heute mal ein deutscher Blogeintrag. Ich (Steffi) habe die letzten 5 Tage auf der Baustelle verbracht und mal wieder viel Fortschritt gesehen. Die Bauarbeiter sind an den letzten Kleinigkeiten dran, die Tischler bauen die Fenster ein und die Balkone an, der Installateur kümmert sich um die Angestelltentoiletten und den septischen Tank. Der Gärtner hat schon die direkte Umgebung um einige Häuser herum auf Vordermann gebracht. Und die Maler haben alle Häuser von innen und außen angestrichen. Sogar die ersten Badezimmer sind fast fertig gestrichen. Wir liegen in der Zielgeraden!! Eröffnung am 1.12. sollte machbar sein! Auch der Pool ist in Auftrag gegeben, allerdings müssen wir dafür noch sehr viel Auffüllarbeit in dem großen ausgeschachteten Loch leisten. Ich hätte nie gedacht, dass wir das Glas so transportieren können und nur 2 Scheiben dabei kaputt gehen Unsere Arbeiter beim Mittagessen - Bohnen, Maisbrei und Süßkartoffeln Die ersten Möbel sind auf...

Last weekend was the first time for me (Steffi) to be at Kikonko more or less by myself! Stefan and the kids are in Germany and Richard was taking care of things in Hoima. So it was me and the builders! This is how the final mosaic looks like! This gave me time to work on a floor mosaic in the restaurant and to start with more mosaic work in the bathrooms. It felt so good to finally be able to do something myself! After all these months of giving advise and watching how the place was built out of nowhere, it was now my time to be creative, to look for stones, break them and lay the mosaic. I am trying to crack the stones so that they fit neatly into each other At the same time the screeding (Estrich) was put in so that the final treatment of the floor can start next week. The bathroom ceiling is being worked on by our super handy man Issac and the guard house at the entrance has nearly been finished by Fred our roofing expert.   I am discussing with Issac the c...