A waterfall and a safari.

I have been so busy with work this week that I haven't even blogged about my safari outing last weekend. But fear not, I am alone in a puppy-stinkified apartment this afternoon, and so I have nothing to do but blog.

When I got back from Rwanda last week, I had two days off from work before I left for my safari. I wasted one of these days spectacularly, but had some adventures on Friday. I finally made it to the Baha'i temple in Kampala, which happens to be approximately 5 minutes away from where I live. The temple has acres and acres of gardens, and it's up on a hill so it has nice views of Kampala. I wasn't allowed to take pictures inside the temple itself -- and besides, they had a guy up in the rafters cleaning the ceiling -- but it was very pretty on the outside.

On Saturday morning, I got a special hire to take me out to Red Chilli Backpackers in Bugolobi, where I was meeting my travel buddies and our driver to head up to Murchison Falls. I got there early and almost fell asleep waiting for everyone else, but they arrived eventually. There was immediately drama: Irena's travel agent friend had told us we would be doing a game drive on Saturday and on Sunday, and the driver insisted that there wouldn't be time to do a game drive that day. He had a pretty bad attitude about it, which did not bode well for the rest of the trip. In fact, his bad attitude came and went. By the end of the trip, some of the people in our group loved him, but I was still fairly ambivalent.

In any case. We set out a bit late, at around 7:30, and our driver informed us that we would need our passports to get into the park. Well, no one had told us that. Most of the group had their passports, but Sona and I did not. As it happened, we drove right near my neighbourhood, so I asked the driver to swing by my flat so I could get my passport. Problem solved.

We made a stop early on for snacks and water, and then I passed out for the next 4 hours or so. I woke up in time to see some of rural Uganda, which is really green. We stopped in Masindi for lunch at a place called "Traveler's Corner" and was full of mzungus... Red Chilli was running its own trip to Murchison Falls that weekend, and we kept bumping into their group of 20+ tourists along our way. The food was all right... I got a cheese sandwich that was mostly toasted bread, but it did the trick.

After lunch, we drove another two hours or so to get to the top of the falls themselves. Along the way, I got to know my travel companions. I already knew Sonakshi and Irena, but Cary and Loida were new. Cary is getting his masters in international development policy at Duke and did Peace Corps in the Ukraine, while Loida just finished her masters in public health at Emory with a focus on infectious disease. Everyone on the trip except me was working at UNICEF in Kampala, mostly in the Technology for Development program.

We eventually got to the falls. Murchison Falls is a spot on the Nile in central Uganda where the entire river squeezes through a spot that's about 6 meters across. It apparently has gotten wider over the years due to erosion, but it's still fairly impressive. I'm a bit spoiled for waterfalls, as I've been to Victoria Falls on the Zambia/Zimbabwe border -- and Murchison pales in comparison to Victoria Falls. But it was a nice spot with some nice views.

At first, we were the only people up there. After a while, though, a big group of Ugandans showed up... and a lot of the men had beers, which made me really nervous. The last thing I need to see is a drunk man falling into a giant waterfall. Our driver told us about how, even if you somehow miraculously survived the waterfall itself, you'd end up getting eaten by the crocodiles at the bottom of the falls. Nice of him to put that image in our heads. Like I said, he was sort of a strange guy. One of the Ugandan tourists was blatantly taking photos of Sonakshi and me with her cell phone camera. She wasn't even being subtle -- we were staring right at her as she pointed her phone at us. Weird.

Cary, Loida, me and Irena

After hanging out at the top of the falls for a while, we started the fairly long drive back to our lodging for the night. We couldn't find any spots inside the park itself, so we had to go back through the gate to this women's cooperative full of bandas (huts). We took very cold showers and then Irena, Loida and I went out for a "community walk." Since the lodge site is within the community, I guess they have members of the community take tourists around to see the village. I didn't catch our guide's name, but his English was very good.

Apparently, the village is actually made up of people from 8 different tribes, including migrants from DRC. Since they all speak different native languages, they use Swahili to communicate with one another. Our first stop was a tobacco farmers' homestead, where he had a giant structure with drying tobacco leaves inside. He told us (through our guide's interpretation) about the process for cultivating tobacco, which apparently takes almost an entire year for one season -- from planting to selling. He said it's good money, but it takes patience and a bit of risk-taking, because the structure that the tobacco dries in is really flammable and so it can be dangerous to light the fires inside. His grandkids were hanging around too, and they followed us around for a while.

We went from place to place, meeting with people and hearing their (very rehearsed) stories about life in the village. There was a party going on at a bar (if you could call it a bar) in the middle of town, and we tasted their "local brew," a sort of maize-based beer. We learned all about the different crops as we walked through fields of them, identifying sorghum and potatoes and cassava. We finally ended up at a man's homestead where he told us about childbirth (???) and the ceremony surrounding it. At that point, it was getting dark, so we headed back to the lodging for dinner. The food was so good... they had said they were making goat, which I was a bit worried about, but everything was in separate pots so I could easily avoid the goat. There was rice and beans and potatoes and cabbage, and it was probably the best Ugandan food I've had so far.

There was a generator running the campsite, which was nice because otherwise it would have been pitch black. We all got ready for bed, which was quite the ordeal. The beds in the bandas had mosquito nets, but there were SO many bugs and mosquitoes inside the bandas (and outside the nets). Loida and I got a bit hysterical, considering leaving the light on so we could "see the enemy." The generator shut off at one point, so Loida and I lay in the pitch black dark and laughed hysterically about how dark it was. But we made it through the night no worse for the wear.

We had hoped to get up really early to get a good start on our morning game drive, but the gate to the park only opened at 7am. Our driver tried to bribe the gatekeeper, but to no avail. So we entered the park at 7, and drove the hour and a half or so to the ferry site to be there for the 9am ferry. The game park area was on the other side of the Nile.

Cary, Sona and Loida

The ferry ride only took about 5 minutes, and then we got back into the van and drove into the game park. Our van had a "sunroof" that popped up, so that we could stand up and see around us and to look at the animals. 

And then the game drive started. We saw loads of animals (although no leopard -- I still haven't ever seen one!) -- Ugandan kob, Jackson's Hartebeast, elephants, one really bedraggled lion, huge herds of giraffes, and water buffalo.

 

After a few hours, we headed to the Red Chilli site inside the park for lunch. The restaurant was REALLY busy, and it took us over an hour to get our food. We grabbed the food and ran, because we were supposed to be on a boat ride down the Nile to view the falls. Apparently 5 other people hopped onto our boat, and they were like, "okay, 5 people, let's go!" and left without us. So we arrived at the river and there was no boat. Our driver freaked out a little bit, but eventually this privately hired boat agreed to let us on. It turns out the boat was hired by an Indian couple whose families had been expelled from Uganda under Idi Amin, and this was the wife's first trip back to the country since her childhood.

It was interesting to talk to them, and we saw even more animals from the boat -- like about a million hippos, which was terrifying, and a couple of really huge crocodiles. We also saw some elephants on the shore, and one big bull elephant who had probably been expelled from his herd hanging out in the middle of the river. True fact: hippos kill more people every year than any other animal in Africa. They're incredibly aggressive, and while they won't eat you the way a crocodile will, they will snap you in half with their jaws just for the fun of it. (I am really afraid of hippos.)

It took us about 2 hours to get to the falls, and when we got there, the view wasn't all that impressive or different from the top of the falls. But the boat ride was nice in its own right, so I guess it was okay.

It took about an hour and a half to get back, and then we went back to the Red Chilli campsite. We weren't staying at Red Chilli itself, but rather at at Ugandan Wildlife Authority guest house inside the campsite. This meant we had our own rooms and a little house to sleep in. But we used the Red Chilli showers (one of the best showers of my life), and we got dinner at the Red Chilli restaurant again. After dinner, we bought a deck of cards and Cary and I taught Sona and Loida to play hearts.... which I handily won, despite Cary's trash talking.

We had an early start the next day, so we all turned in at around 11pm. The generator had been shut off, so we got ready for bed in the dark. The mosquito nets were all sort of sadly hung, and we found a huge spider in the house that Cary had to get rid of for us. It wasn't the greatest accommodation in the world, but it worked.

We left by 6am the next day, and the drive back was uneventful. I got dropped off near the bypass and walked back to my flat, where I changed and went into work. It was the beginning of a truly crazy week at work, which is now over. My supervisor and I were working on a report on women, adultery and customary law in South Sudan -- it's really interesting stuff, and has involved some actual statutory and legal analysis, which I've really enjoyed doing.