Tricia, the other resident, and I went on a safari this weekend. It was an awesome experience. It started on Saturday with our driver, Jeffery, picking us up. We had about a 3 hour drive to Masindi which is just outside of the Murchinson Falls National Park. For about another hour or so we drove on red dirt dusty roads (seeing baboons and baby warthogs) until we made it to our lodging (Red Chili Camp Site). After lunch and finding our tent (and watching warthogs for awhile, Pumba was much cuter than the real things. Also they have an incredible sense of smell so we weren’t allowed to leave any food in our tent because they would destroy it trying to find it), we crossed the Victoria Nile.
Let me digress into a little geography lesson. The Nile has several branches. It starts in Jinja, Uganda as the Victoria Nile coming off Lake Victoria. Near where we were for safari, it joins the Albert Nile coming off of Lake Albert and reverses its flow and heads north where it meets up with several other branches before dumping into the Mediterranean Sea in Egypt.
After the ferry ride, we saw hippos off to the side in the water and we picked up Emmanuel, our guide for the game tour. He is extremely knowledgeable about the Park (basically a park ranger). We started off seeing lots of animals from the antelope family. (This part is for you, Anita.) We saw the Hartebeest (apparently a very dumb and forgetful creature that lions like to eat), a Defassa waterbuck, tons of Ugandan kobs, and lots of small antelopes that I don’t know the names of. We then saw a variety of giraffes and some water buffalo. Then we went to a marsh area with tons of hippos. They are odd creatures, extremely fierce in that they kill more humans than any other wild animal, but they mostly lie in the water all day and eat plants at night (they kill humans but don’t eat them). Tricia decided that instead of being a doctor, she’d rather be a hippo for obvious reasons. On the way back to the ferry we saw a group of elephants….it was quite cool. I should mention, the van we were in had a top that could be lift up so we stood up in it and looked around the whole time. We crossed the Nile at sunset which was amazing. After dinner and a much needed shower, I tried to sleep but it was insanely hot and kept feeling like I was getting eaten up by bugs despite tons of bug spray. (Also many of cases of malaria that we had seen the week before, were likely contracted at Murchinson, so that freaked me out a little).
The next morning we had an early start (and I really hadn’t gotten eaten up). We went on another game tour and this time we saw many of the same things but also lions. Initially we saw two lionesses and a lion far off in the distance (I’m glad I invested in some binoculars). Later on, we found another lioness and we played ring around the rosy with it, chasing it with our van around some bushes until it found a way to hide in them. It was kind of amusing. The lioness had an extremely annoyed swagger throughout the ordeal. After that we found a leopard far off in the distance laying in a tree probably stalking its dinner. After lunch, we went on a boat tour up the Nile towards the falls. It too was awesome. We got closer to hippos, and even saw a baby one. There were lots of different birds. We went past a family of elephants and saw a couple of different types of monkeys. The crocodiles and hippos were hanging out together (even crocodiles are afraid of hippos). Then we got near the falls. As we approached tons of white foam appeared in the water from the falls. We were able to see them from a distance and then headed back. It was another hot night.
The next day were drove to the top of the falls. That was incredible. It’s a very powerful drop with amazing scenery. Then we drove out of the park. That was very dusty (I now have a once white shirt that now is more redish brown). Then we drove back to Kampala, where traffic wasn’t horrible.
Tuesday was a national holiday (Liberation Day) and Tricia and I had today off. We went with her sister to visit her host family in Mukono, about an hour or so from Kampala. I’ve decided I prefer being out of Kampala. Traffic is soooooooooo much better and there are less people. We had to take a couple of shared taxis today which are cheap but crowded and it meant going to the taxi park which is insane with tons of taxis, people, stuff (lots of stores and people wondering around trying to sell you stuff).
Clinic this week (all of one day) was busy…I got to remove a benign couple of millimeter mass in someone’s forearm…that was fun…I put in two layers to close it. We keep seeing lot of babies from the nearby orphanage, Watoto, and hope to go there and see the place. Apparently there are about a hundred of kids under age 2 there.