Despite its small size, with a population of around a million, there is plenty to do. The Uganda Museum is worth a look, with a huge collection of maps, photographs and periodicals taking the visitor through hundreds of years of African history and culture.

If you're into your markets, Owino is also worth checking out. It is a mesmerising maze of booths that line a number of truly chaotic alleyways, offering an enormous range of pretty much everything you can imagine.

Another of Kampala's most interesting features is its mosque - an enormous domed building up on a hill just outside the city centre which, I'm told, is the largest anywhere in East Africa. In my room at the Namirembe Guest House, I could hear the call to prayer through the mosque muezzin at 5.30am every day, something I'd never experienced before.

But putting the tourist attractions aside for a minute: if, like me, you'd never been to Africa, you'll soon realise that you don't necessarily need to visit the obvious sites to get some entertainment. Just take a drive around the city and its surrounding countryside and look around you. You'll be left captivated.

You'll quickly discover, as I did, that people don't live at the same pace - or with the same sense of stifling conformity - that we in the West do. On a street in Britain, you generally see pedestrians doing formulaic things - walking to the shops, going in and out of offices, parking their cars. In contrast, by the roadside in Kampala and its surroundings, you see a million and one activities going on.

My driver was completely unsurprised, for example, at the sight of a man riding a bicycle down the Entebbe to Kampala highway with a large glass door attached horizontally to his back basket, obstructing most of the road and forcing cars into dangerous passing manoeuvres.

On another occasion, driving down a dirt-track with potholes so big you'd call them ditches in the UK, I encountered something completely surreal. As we went through an extremely poor little village filled with shacks and mudhuts, we encountered a huge chalk board placed in the middle of town and on that chalk board was written the following message in giant handwriting: "England v Croatia," it read. "Kick off 11pm. See it here," with an arrow pointing at a larger shack by the roadside.

Why on earth, I asked my driver, would people living in a third-world African village in the hills care a less about a match between two European teams to decide on qualification for a tournament Uganda could geographically never qualify for? "They love English football," he said, shrugging as it was the most normal thing in the world.

In a country like Uganda, you also get used to the fact that tragedy is a far more normal way of life than in Europe, and that many of our worries are piffling in comparison. My driver and I went past what looked like a hotel that had never been completed - a giant colonial structure, half made of brick and half of scaffold - that looked desperately ugly. "That hotel collapsed while it was being constructed, crushing 400 people to death as it fell. I lost friends there," my driver said. The problem, I was told by my driver, was that in Africa builders use wooden scaffolding which often collapses. Ugandans also remember all-too-well the Idi Amin years, when the country was turned into a pariah, and hundreds of thousands were killed.

Wherever I went, I could not help but notice the differences in people's behaviour compared to those typically seen in the UK. Instead of keeping their eyes down when others pass, as seems to be the norm in London, I encountered people regularly looking up, smiling and communicating. Children frequently wave and pose for photographs as you pass. One pointed and shouted something. I asked my driver what it was, and he replied: 'White man.'

Now here's the part of Kampala where every visitor has to be careful. In a less developed society to your own, don't be naïve. Realise that, unfortunately, a minority will try to persuade you to part with more money than you should, romance you for financial benefit, or simply steal your cash. I suffered both romance and then, failing that, straightforward robbery.

Upon taking a taxi from my hotel to the conference venue the female 'tour guide' (who apparently has to accompany a taxi driver by Ugandan law) chatted in a friendly manner to me and asked me for my number. She said this was to ensure she could contact me if I needed another taxi. Within an hour, she had started to ring me and, eventually, I received no less than 20 calls in one day from her, and other taxi drivers, asking me if I wanted a lift. The number, quite clearly, had been passed around.

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