Lots of animals and the kindness of strangers

This weekend’s adventure is brought to you by Queen Elizabeth National Park! I took Friday off and spent most of it traveling to the park. (Three matatus, all crowded and hot!) I got dropped off in Katunguru where the Locals told me it was a 20 km walk to the park gate, and I would have to hire an expensive car to drive me or I would meet animals on the walk! Well, I didn’t want that, but I decided to try Lonely Planet’s suggestion of hitching a ride with passing safari vehicles instead of paying for a private car. A local woman runs a craft shop by the turn off to the park, she helped me flag down a park vehicle and we chatted while I waited. Her 4 year old daughter doesn’t speak English yet, but we had good non-verbal communication and when I stopped there on my way out she recognized me and ran to me for a hug!

Once in the park I was confronted with the super high costs for everything. A game drive costs $115US! So instead I set out to make friends with other travelers to share costs. I met a tour group who was planning a game drive and nature walk for the next day and was able to go with them for MUCH cheaper. Of course it’s hardly necessary to go on the drive, wildlife is everywhere, warthogs graze around the canteen and the lodge, and a hippo walked by the canteen my first night there!

The game drive was great, we saw a hyena, baboons, waterbucks, kobs, warthogs, forest hog, monitor lizard, and an elephant. And tons of birds. And the kobs were mating; we saw a male trying to mount a female, and also some females mounting each other! Take that you right-wing bastards who say homosexuality isn’t natural! Unfortunately I didn’t get a picture of the lesbian kobs in action, every time I got my camera up they got shy and stopped (and who can blame them, I wouldn’t want tourists in my bedroom either.)

We had a tasty lunch at Jacana Safari Lodge (the best pasta I’ve had in Uganda!) where there were black and white columbus monkeys playing in the trees near the bar, and even running through the lodge. Then we went on a walk through the forest to the bat cave, where we saw thousands, if not a million (in the words of our guide) Egyptian fruit bats. And a python.

Then back to the Mweya where I stopped at the lodge for a drink and saw a huge herd of 40 or 50 elephants across the gorge.

I still hadn’t seen a lion though, and I was quite disappointed by that. I decided to do a nature walk on Sunday morning even though I knew I wouldn’t see much that I hadn’t seen on the game drive, but I fancied a walk and another drive would have been way too expensive. So at 7am (these things start early) I met my guide and a Finnish guy who is biking around Uganda for the walk. Before we even started the guide showed us a lion hanging out across the gorge, but of course it was too far away for pics. However, within a few minutes into the walk we saw two female lions. Not too close, but close enough to see with the naked eye and to get some good pics! (Don’t worry, I didn’t stick my head in their mouths Heather!)

Then after a great breakfast at the lodge I headed out of the park with the tour group I had met earlier. The best elephant sighting of the trip came when our vehicle had to stop and let several elephants cross the road, right in front of the van!

I then got into the worst matatu I’ve seen yet. It started stalling all over the place and was filling up with noxious fumes, plus making sounds that convinced me that it was about to blow up! I decided that it just wasn’t safe and got off and walked down the road to a tiny village to try and flag down another (hopefully safer) matatu. There was almost no traffic on the road, and I was the most exciting thing to hit the village in ages, a group of men sat across the road from me and were hoping and hollering, and generally laughing there asses off at the stranded mzungu. I was getting quite self-conscious about the whole thing when an aid vehicle stopped to offer me a lift.

The silver lining of the whole story is that the people in the vehicle were quite concerned that I get safely home that they insisted their driver take me into Mbarara and see me onto a bus. So instead of traveling that leg of the trip in a smelly crowded matatu I got a lovely ride in an air-conditioned SUV. Plus, before their driver took me on they had to stop at a silk worm farm (their project is developing the silk industry in Uganda) and they insisted on showing me around. Then they also showed me around the factory where they were stopping for meetings. So I got a nice ride and a neat little bit of site-seeing that I would never have seen but for the health-hazard of a matatu and the kindness of strangers.

I have tons of pictures that I'll be posting later this week, pictures of the rafting still to come as well.