Shithole Itinerary III:The Misadventures of Romesh Ranganathan S4.

The fourth series (but the third blog, for some now forgotten reason I bundled up seasons two and three in one blog) of The Misadventures of Romesh Ranganthan (BBC1 - having moved over from BBC2/iPlayer) takes place entirely in Africa. Madagascar, Rwanda, and Uganda. Rom was initially going to visit the D.R.Congo but it was deemed unsafe so Madagascar was a late replacement.

It's a good watch. You can't help warming to Rom as he's likable, self-deprecating, and willing to give (almost) anything a go. First stop is Uganda where Rom asks "is Uganda all about Idi Amin?" before getting in to some Ugandan discussions (not of that sort, get that out of your head) with his guide Alex - an actual princess - though one of many thousands in the country. Landlocked Uganda is home to forty-five million people and Winston Churchill once called it "the pearl of Africa".

Its capital, Kampala, is super hectic and soon Rom is taking a boda boda (a motorbike taxi) through its busy streets and being shown around Mengo Hill and taught about the Buganda people and the Buganda kingdom. When the Brits colonised Buganda they mispronounced it as Uganda and the name has stuck. The Ugandan (or Bugandan) royal family still live in the Mengo Palace - though they're mostly ceremonial these days.

Alex talks a bit about Idi Amin and his reign of insanity and terror, there's some frankly terrifying looking white water rafting, a visit to the source of the Nile - and a statue of Gandhi, and there's lots of wildlife to be found in Uganda's various national parks:- elephants, crocodiles, and hippos being the big stars.

Oh, and there's a lot of homophobia to be found in Uganda too. The country having recently passed anti-gay legislation in which it is possible to be executed for homosexuality. Guide Alex, like many Ugandans, is conservative, traditional, and Christian, and - there's no avoiding it - homophobic. She believes men are men and women are women and that men marry women. She also believes people choose to be gay and supports the death penalty for homosexuality.

All of which, understandably, makes Romesh uncomfortable. He speaks, on the phone and with their voice disguised to protect their identity, to a member of Uganda's LGBTQ+ community who tells Rom that gay people are being accused of being child rapists and that most Ugandans are more than happy to conflate homosexuality with paedophile rape - not least because the accusations often come from highly respected preachers.

Yet more Christian hatred polluting the world. On a more positive note, Rom meets a guy called Mugabe Roberts who makes banana beer and banana gin, gets pissed on those products, does some (drunken) basket weaving, and meets with a herbalist who deals with cures for malaria and snake bites and, er, makes "sex medicine".

He also visits Idi Amin's former hunting lodge. Uganda seems a fascinating country with lots of wonderful things to see and do but the horrific homophobia that is only getting worse makes it a destination I have no intention of adding to the list of places I want to visit. Rwanda is a country many Brits, specifically the last few Conservative foreign secretaries, have chosen to visit recently but it won't be housing any migrants who arrive on British shores any time soon.

Perhaps Rom's visit would tell us a bit more about the country, perhaps we would learn if it is, or isn't, a "safe country". The problem is, however, Rom is treated to a sanitised side of Rwanda. It looks great - which I'll get to - but he's not shown, or told anything about, the rumoured human rights abuses, the crushing (with violence) of dissent, the invasive surveillance, and the death squads who are widely believed to operate in nearby countries.

All of which makes Rwanda sound like a very unsafe country. The Rwanda that guide Hyppo (!) shows Rom, however, looks not safe but almost idyllic. You can see why Arsenal (Rom's team) players have "VISIT RWANDA" on the sleeves of their jerseys and you can't deny that - previous caveats excepted - it's come on a long way from the genocide of 1994. An event that resulted in the deaths of more than half a million people - including Hyppo's own father.

Hyppo, quite understandably, gets very emotional when, on visiting a museum dedicated to the genocide, they finally talk about what was one of the most distressing events in all human history. Hyppo now writes poetry to help him exorcise his demons and since the genocide the country has banned the terms Hutu and Tutsi. Everyone is, quite simply, Rwandan.

 Rwanda, capital - Kigali, is about the same size as Wales and Rom and Hyppo visit the hotel where asylum seekers from Britain would have been housed (Rwanda already takes refugees from Burundi, DR Congo, and Afghanistan), have a pint of milk (milk is very big - and very significant - in Rwandan culture), and visit an artist's co-operative where they make rather beautiful tiles out of cow shit.

Is that what inspired Chris Ofili in his work? Rom camps in the savannah, makes friends (he always does this easily as anyone who's seen him on TV - and he's on TV A LOT - will know), and joins a group of mostly female cyclists (cycling being very popular in Rwanda). There is, also - of course, lots of wildlife:- giraffes, zebras, impala ("posh goats"), lions, buffalo, and mountain gorillas who live on, or near volcanoes.

The people, for the most part, are nearly as impressive as the animals. Rwanda has the highest proportion of female parliamentarians in the world (though it did strike me that it might be down to the grisly reason that so many men who would now be of that kind of age were killed in the genocide) and there is, as Romesh remarks, no litter anywhere.

That's because plastic bags are banned and the law dictates that every adult in the country up to and including the president must take part in a mandatory litter picking session at least once a month. It seems a good law - and maybe it would make people think twice about littering in the first place - but imagine somebody trying to introduce it to the UK. Good luck with that.

I know less about Madagascar than I do Uganda and Rwanda. In fact most people know more about the film Madagascar than the country. Some will be disappointed that it's not home to a zebra that talks like Chris Rock and a giraffe that talks like Ben Stiller. In fact neither zebras or giraffes are native to Madagascar. It's got its own thing going on wildlife wise which I'll get to soon.

The former French island is the fourth largest island on Earth (behind Greenland, New Guinea, and Borneo) and it's not an easy place to get around. It's a good job Rom's guide, a diving instructor called Bic, is so friendly as they end up taking some very very long car journeys together. Taxis for long distance journeys don't seem wise if the driver we see hotwiring his own car is anything to go by.

Madagascar's chaotic capital, Antananarivo, is home to more than three million people. Many of whom, it seems, like to enjoy a soup made from a zebu's penis. A zebu is a type of cow but it's very much the Dirk Diggler of the bovine world, having an average length penis of one and a half metres. You can make a lot of the soup with that - but I wouldn't try. I'm quite glad to be a vegetarian.

Bic takes Rom to visit the Rava, the palace of the mad and cruel Queen Ranavalona I (reign:1828-1861). She bathed in bull's blood, slaughtered thousands of Christians, and threw her political enemies from the top of a cliff to their deaths. It is estimated she was personally responsible for the death of over two and half million people.

Away from capital, and the blood curdling tales of Ranavalona I, the country is vast, wild, and poor. There are bandits but there is also much beauty. The needle like rocks of the Grand Tsingy are stunning, there are extraordinary baobab trees, pristine sandy beaches, and impossibly cute lemurs which, rather worryingly, we learn that some people still (illegally) eat. People who don't fancy eating a zebu's cock perhaps.

There is fine dining - neither lemur nor zebu penis - to be had in Belon'i Tsiribihina's Mad Zebu restaurant, there are multiple ferry rides - including one in which a snake is an uninvited stowaway, there's a launch of a schooner (which is such a big event that there's a party to celebrate), and there's a story of a tribe who believe twins to be a sign of bad luck and are so sure of this belief that infant twins are left in a yard with a zebu until the zebu crushes one of the babies to death.

It's a grim story to end the trip to Madagascar, and the whole African tour, with - and it's certainly not one you can see DreamWorks incorporating into any future Madagascar films - but it's not really typical of Madagascar which seems a friendly, if terribly poverty stricken, place. All three countries had amazing things to see and it'd be nice to visit Rwanda and Madagascar as a visitor (not so Uganda for reasons outlined above) but I don't think they'd be easy places to live in and I certainly don't think any of them - and Rwanda in particular - would be suitable places to send some of the world's most vulnerable asylum seekers. But we don't have to worry about that anymore. That plan is as dead as one of Queen Ravalona I's enemies.