![\"murchison-falls-hippo\"](\"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/amandaschmidt\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/41\/2015\/06\/murchison-falls-hippo.jpg\")
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Tricia, the other resident, and I went on a safari this weekend.\u00a0 It was an awesome experience.\u00a0 It started on Saturday with our driver, Jeffery, picking us up.\u00a0 We had about a 3 hour drive to Masindi which is just outside of the Murchinson Falls National Park.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 After lunch and finding our tent (and watching warthogs for awhile, Pumba was much cuter than the real things.\u00a0 Also they have an incredible sense of smell so we weren\u2019t allowed to leave any food in our tent because they would destroy it trying to find it), we crossed the Victoria Nile.<\/p>\n
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Let me digress into a little geography lesson.\u00a0 The Nile has several branches.\u00a0 It starts in Jinja, Uganda as the Victoria Nile coming off Lake Victoria.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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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.\u00a0 He is extremely knowledgeable about the Park (basically a park ranger). \u00a0We started off seeing lots of animals from the antelope family.\u00a0 (This part is for you, Anita.)\u00a0 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\u2019t know the names of.\u00a0 We then saw a variety of giraffes and some water buffalo.\u00a0 Then we went to a marsh area with tons of hippos.\u00a0 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\u2019t eat them).\u00a0 Tricia decided that instead of being a doctor, she\u2019d rather be a hippo for obvious reasons.\u00a0 On the way back to the ferry we saw a group of elephants\u2026.it was quite cool.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We crossed the Nile at sunset which was amazing.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 (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).<\/p>\n
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The next morning we had an early start (and I really hadn\u2019t gotten eaten up).\u00a0 We went on another game tour and this time we saw many of the same things but also lions.\u00a0 Initially we saw two lionesses and a lion far off in the distance (I\u2019m glad I invested in some binoculars).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It was kind of amusing.\u00a0 The lioness had an extremely annoyed swagger throughout the ordeal.\u00a0 After that we found a leopard far off in the distance laying in a tree probably stalking its dinner.\u00a0 After lunch, we went on a boat tour up the Nile towards the falls.\u00a0 It too was awesome.\u00a0 We got closer to hippos, and even saw a baby one.\u00a0 There were lots of different birds.\u00a0 We went past a family of elephants and saw a couple of different types of monkeys.\u00a0 The crocodiles and hippos were hanging out together (even crocodiles are afraid of hippos).\u00a0 Then we got near the falls.\u00a0 As we approached tons of white foam appeared in the water from the falls.\u00a0 We were able to see them from a distance and then headed back.\u00a0 It was another hot night.<\/p>\n
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The next day were drove to the top of the falls.\u00a0 That was incredible.\u00a0 It\u2019s a very powerful drop with amazing scenery.\u00a0 Then we drove out of the park.\u00a0 That was very dusty (I now have a once white shirt that now is more redish brown).\u00a0 Then we drove back to Kampala, where traffic wasn\u2019t horrible.<\/p>\n
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Tuesday was a national holiday (Liberation Day) and Tricia and I had today off.\u00a0 We went with her sister to visit her host family in Mukono, about an hour or so from Kampala.\u00a0 I\u2019ve decided I prefer being out of Kampala.\u00a0 Traffic is soooooooooo much better and there are less people.\u00a0 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).<\/p>\n
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Clinic this week (all of one day) was busy\u2026I got to remove a benign couple of millimeter mass in someone\u2019s forearm\u2026that was fun\u2026I put in two layers to close it.\u00a0 We keep seeing lot of babies from the nearby orphanage, Watoto, and hope to go there and see the place.\u00a0 Apparently there are about a hundred of kids under age 2 there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Tricia, the other resident, and I went on a safari this weekend.\u00a0 It was an awesome experience.\u00a0 It started […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/amandaschmidt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/amandaschmidt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/amandaschmidt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/amandaschmidt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/amandaschmidt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/amandaschmidt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/amandaschmidt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/amandaschmidt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/amandaschmidt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}