Uganda

OK, the golden monkeys were worth it.  

After the gorilla trek, we drove across the border to Mgahinga National Park in Uganda.  This is the first land border crossing I have done on this trip and I was kind of curious to see how they transition from driving on the right in Rwanda to the left in Uganda.  It turned out to be anticlimactic.  There is a gate on the Rwanda side, about a hundred yards of no-man’s-land, and then a gate on the Uganda side.  There are so few vehicles crossing that there are usually just one or two cars waiting in the middle.  Not long after we crossed into Uganda, we crossed the Equator as well.  In the Andes outside Quito they told me it was the highest elevation point on the Equator.  Today was only about a mile high in elevation.

In the morning I went to the park headquarters to join my group which turned out to be only one couple from Germany and me.  They were half my age, of course.  My legs were sore from the gorilla trek and it turns out that the golden monkey trek is even steeper.  What possessed me to think I could do three treks in four days?  Needless to say, I hired a porter, and while Isaiah did not pull me up the mountain they way that Peter did, he held my hand on all of the steep and/or muddy parts so I would not slide down the mountain.

Unlike the jungle where the gorillas live, there are no thorny bushes, but rather bamboo, so it is easy to walk and see through.  The lower part is called secondary forest and the upper part virgin forest.  You can see that the elevation is over 8,000 feet at this point and we had already climbed 1,200 feet.

Needless to say, the view from the mountain is beautiful.  We could see the valley below and across from us, a volcanic mountain that is no longer active.  So there are perfectly laid out fields on the entire outside of the mountain and inside of the cone.  On the steep slopes of mountains they grow tea.

Not that the gorillas were not interesting, but they sat and ate tree branches.  The golden monkeys climbed and swung from branch to branch and ate tree branches.  They would swing to the ground, pick up a branch, and then climb back up to eat it.  It was almost impossible to take a picture of the monkeys because they never sat still and the bamboo forest created too much shade.  But we were all sad when the guides said our hour was up.  It just flew by - no pun intended - but they did let us have another eight minutes.

We had an interesting drive to our next destination - Queen Elizabeth National Park.  To say that the roads here are not good is an understatement.  Any paved road is a highway even though there are serious speed bumps as you pass through each village as well as on every incline and decline, and random other places.  Mostly we have driven long distances on unpaved, deeply rutted roads.  There had been a rock slide on the only road to the park, and vehicles were stopped in both direction.  Men were moving rocks around by hand.  My quick judgement was that the road would not be open for a long time and we needed a Plan B.  (Bear in mind once again that I am a city girl.)

After a few minutes of watching, my driver told me to walk to the other side and wait for him.  You are going to drive through this, I asked incredulously.  Yes, he said.  So I picked my way to the other side and watched the tourist van in front of him get stuck in the mud a foot deep.  Men dug a path forward and put rocks in the path to get traction.  Finally the car got through and the men ran after it to collect some money for their efforts.  My driver picked his line, gunned the engine, and drove right through.  I am not in Kansas, Toto.

The next morning I was back to a familiar activity:  a morning game drive.  Uganda borders Tanzania and has much of the same vegetation and animals.  Queen Elizabeth National Park is one of the smaller parks in Uganda, but I felt the same endlessness in it that I did in the Masai Mara.  It felt like the view just went on forever.  We saw cape buffalo, elephants, warthogs, and two types of antelope - kudu which I had seen before and duiker, which I never heard of.  It is amazing how many types of antelope there are.  Like in the Masai Mara, there were grazing animals for as far as you could see.

This park is known, however, for its tree climbing lions.  My guide was so excited to show them to me that I did not have the heart to tell him that I had seen lions in trees in both Tanzania and Botswana.  But it is an unusual behavior in those places.  Here, the lions routinely climb trees and sleep there all day.  We found a female sleeping in one tree and three young males in another.

The afternoon drive to our next location was much less eventful, but there is always something to see.  The hotel had packed me a lunch but we stopped at a restaurant where my driver could enjoy local food.  He is picking up some kind of banana paste with his fingers and then taking pieces of the fish with it.

My hotel that night was called Crater Lake Inn.  For some reason that I don’t understand, there are thirty eight crater lakes in this area.  It is beautiful to drive here and I had a lovely view from my porch.

In the morning I set out for my third and final trek - to see chimps.  Unlike the two climbs, however, this was just a walk in the woods.  Or should I say, a walk in the jungle.  They do not send trackers ahead for the chimps, and after an hour or so, it seemed to me that the guide had no idea where we were going and was just leading us in circles.  They had told us that you do not always see the chimps, so I was ready to chalk this one up as a no-show, when all of a sudden, there was movement in the trees around us.

The chimps are very cool.  They climb incredibly fast, swing around easily, but prefer to just stretch out and nap during the day.  This chimp was sitting when we arrived but almost immediately lay down in a fully splayed out position.

We saw males and females, young and old.  Once again, when our hour was up, we didn’t want to leave.

We had driven a bit from the park headquarters in the morning and then trekked for over an hour and a half.  Coming back, we made it to the park headquarters in forty five minutes.  Hmmm.  I would say we might have walked around in circles a bit.

And that’s it.  It took all afternoon to drive to Entebbe which, it turns out, is two hours from the capital, Kampala, so I didn’t even get to see it. But Entebbe is on Lake Victoria, so at least I have one last nice view.

I had expected Rwanda to be a beautiful country, but in the end, I spent only two days there and three in Uganda.  Both were lush and green, and Uganda seemed no less hilly to me that the Land of a Thousand Hills.  But apparently it is, as Uganda is self-sufficient in food production while Rwanda must import everything except potatoes, tea, and coffee. It was warm and sunny when I trekked in the morning, but shortly after we began to drive, there was a downpour.  I guess that is what it does in an equatorial rain forest, and that is why everything is so green and lush here.

Obviously I had a very limited experience, but the people I met in Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Uganda were all extremely nice and friendly. My guide here was not the least bit concerned about leaving my second bag in the car overnight while in South Africa, the guides said that anything left in the car would be stolen, probably by breaking the car windows. The houses are one room shanties or "rowhouses," usually but not always with electricity, but no one has running water. Since no one has a car, the sides of the roads are crowded with people walking. According to my guide, it is difficult to start a business in Rwanda but there are no government regulations in Uganda, so everyone is an entrepreneur, selling something from ramshackle kiosks in front of their houses. This is certainly not the way we live in America, but ... are the people here unhappy? I don't think so.

Rwanda

I arrived in Kigali early in the morning and set out for a quick tour of the city with my guide, Douglas.  The highlight of the tour was the Genocide Memorial that I had not wanted to visit - I have seen enough Holocaust Museums and had read enough Rwandan history to know what happened in 1994.  But the Rwandans are insistent that they not forget the past, but learn from it, and they take all visitors proudly to the Memorial.  It turned out to be not only a moving experience, but possibly the best genocide/holocaust museum I have been to, and I have been to a lot.

The museum makes clear that there was no age-old conflict between the Hutus and Tutsis.  In fact, they are not really separate tribes, and people moved fluidly from one category to the other.  Until ... the Belgians were given Rwanda after Germany, which had been given Rwanda in the late 19th century, lost its African territories after World War I.  The Rwandans had no idea that Europeans were determining their sovereignty.  The Belgians decided that the best way to rule was to create a ruling class to dominate everyone else.  So they decided to elevate the Tutsis, mistreat the Hutus, and make everyone carry an identity card.  Later, as European colonialism was falling apart in Africa, the Belgians decided to enfranchise the majority Hutus and turn them against their "oppressors" the Tutsis.  Thus, the Belgians left a legacy of hatred to the first post-independence regime, which unfortunately decided to continue to use it.

The point of the museum is that genocide does not come from tribal conflict or past hatreds.  Genocide is always a government policy.  The government fostered hatred and fear, convincing the Hutu majority that the Tutsis planned to kill them, so they should strike first.  The government enacted policies that were very similar to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 in Germany.   And the government prepared lists of Tutsis as well as dissident Hutus, indoctrinated and trained troops of young men, and armed them.  Thus, when the killing began, it was well organized and conducted countrywide.  In a one hundred day period, over two million Rwandans out of a pre-genocide population of seven million were killed.  And the country itself was destroyed.

In the late 1990's, Rwanda and Angola were both failed states on the brink of anarchy.  Angola still is, but Rwanda today is a modern African success story.  The second and most important point of the museum is to explain how that happened.  In two words ... the recovery is based on acknowledgement and forgiveness.  The Rwandans insist on remembering in detail what happened, but not taking revenge on anyone, for they understood that revenge creates a never-ending cycle.  Everyone - Hutus who had taken part in the killing, and Tutsis whose family and friends had been killed - tells their story and asks for or grants forgiveness.  Today, they insist that they are all Rwandans and refuse to accept other labels.

The museum has displays on several other genocides including Armenia, Cambodia, European Jews, the Balkans, and one in German West Africa (modern day Namibia) that I had never heard of.  The common theme is that the government perpetrated each genocide and no other countries or international bodies intervened.  In the case of Rwanda, French troops helped the Hutus, the UN pulled its peacekeeping troops rather stop the slaughter, and the US refused to intervene.

As depressing as this sounds, I could not help but be impressed with how Rwanda had taken such a horrible time from its recent past and is using it to move forward.  It reminded me somewhat of South Africa which has also taken the position that they must acknowledge the past so they can move forward.  This really makes me think about America where a lot of people refuse to acknowledge the wrongs done in the past so it would never occur to them to ask for forgiveness.  And whether it is conscious or not, the hatred and fear that they promulgate is the first step toward government sanctioned genocide.  Not a happy thought.

I have read enough African history to understand that the Europeans took the land and natural resources while enslaving the natives, either literally or effectively.  Again, the first step was to see the natives as savages who were incapable of or did not deserve to conduct their own lives.  Sadly, the first generation of local leaders after the wave of independence from 1960 to 1980, turned out mostly to be kleptocrats, taking as much as they could while in power.  In almost every country that I have visited, everyone said that the number one problem in their country is corruption.  They need new leaders who do not steal everything for themselves.  Rwanda is the only exception I have seen.  More food for thought.

I cannot think of a good way to transition from the genocide museum to gorillas.  My guide took me on a quick drive through Kigali, the capital of Rwanda.  When I thought that I would be staying here for a day, I made a reservation at Hotel Mille Colines, the site immortalized in the movie Hotel Ruanda.  But in the end, I am not spending a night in Kigali, so I went to the hotel for lunch.  Then we drove two hours to Volcanoes National Park for my next day's activity - trekking to see the mountain gorillas.  I noticed on the drive that very few people have private cars. Motorcycles are used as taxis here, as I saw in Vietnam also, and some private individuals have them as well. The primary vehicle seems to be bicycle, but … Rwanda is the land of one thousand hills.  They ride the bicycles downhill and push them up.  Or, they just use the bicycles as a means of transporting goods.  I have seen people pushing bicycles with huge bags of potatoes or containers of water.

I knew I had to trek for a few hours to reach the gorillas, but had not focused on the fact that they are mountain gorillas.  That meant trekking uphill.  They have porters available to carry your pack and I thought, I can carry my day pack.  But then the guide said to think of them not as porters but as helpers, so I hired a porter.  Peter held my hand and pulled me up the mountain, and on the way down, he prevented me from sliding down the mountain.  I don’t know if the young uns that I hiked with were jealous of me for having my own personal porter or laughing at me for being the only person in the group to need one.  Don’t know; don’t care.  Best decision I made.  

We met at the headquarters for the Volcanoes National Park at 7 AM and were put in groups of eight.  I understood that they group you roughly by ability but somehow I got put in a group of twenty and thirty somethings, so I knew I was in for a long hike.  We drove from the headquarters partway up the mountain to the start of the trek.  Then we climbed half an hour to the start of the national park through fields of potatoes and pyrethrum, which looks like a common daisy but its flowers are used to produce some kind of liquid that is an insect repellent.  I have driven through a lot of farmland in a lot of countries and have been surprised at how few people I see working in the fields.  OK, I’m a city girl.  I guess crops just grow themselves and you don’t have to do much day to day.  But here in Rwanda, I see men and women working in each field, and the only tool they have is a hoe.  They turn the earth, which looks dark and fertile, and pick the potatoes, all by hand.

Hiking past fields of potatoes

The fields end at the beginning of the national park and we continued to climb on a pretty good path through rain forest.  Trackers leave about an hour before the trekkers to find where the gorilla family is, and radio the guides when they find it.  When the trackers sent directions, we had to leave the path, so we put on our leg coverings, rain jackets, and gloves to protect us from the thorny undergrowth.  My guide had given me leggings so my lower legs were okay, but I could feel my hands and thighs getting itchier and itchier.  Fortunately, the sting is not poisonous and the itchiness only lasts a little while.

The sign says "Dian Fossey Site" and the elevation which is over 9,000 feet

Once we got off the path, I understood why the guides carried machetes.  Whatever I may think about the European colonists, I marvel at the first explorers.  I’m not sure what the point was of searching for the source of the Nile, but no matter.  They traveled thousands of miles where there were no roads or even paths.  After we got off the path, it was virtually impossible to proceed without the guides chopping back branches with their machetes.

Suddenly one of the guides said, there is the silverback, and there he was, sitting like Buddha in the middle of the jungle.  The guides hacked off a few branches so we could see him better.  Young males until the age of twelve or so are blackbacks, but at maturity, the males backs turn silver; hence the name.  They weigh over four hundred pounds, much of it in their stomachs, so they really do look like buddhas. They seem to do nothing but sit and eat branches, and while they are covered with fur, their faces and hands do look human.

I had pictured all of the gorillas in a clearing with us sitting and observing them for a while, but it was not like that.  They live in the jungle and are well hidden.  Duh.  It was only a few feet to the femaies and young males, but I never would have seen them if the guides did not point them out and hack back the branches.  We watched a female holding a baby so closely that we could hardly see his head poking out.

All too soon the guides told us it had been and hour and we had to leave.  An hour into the hike down, we came upon another silverback alpha male - sitting like buddha of course.  He was from a family assigned to a group that got a shorter trek, so we were not allowed to stay and watch him, but we got a bonus viewing of a second silverback and a two young males in a tree.

I still have no idea what a golden monkey is, but they better be pretty spectacular for me to spend another day hiking uphill.

Botswana safari

On Sunday, we had time for one last game drive in Chobe National Park before we left for the Okavango Delta.  On the way to the park, our guide saw fresh leopard tracks so he tried very hard to spot the leopard.  It didn’t happen, but we did see three lionesses and we stalked them for over an hour.  Two of the lionesses were on the left side of the road while a herd of impalas was on the right side with the river behind them so they could not escape in that direction.  The lionesses would move forward a bit, then sit and watch the impalas.  The impalas had guards posted at the back while the rest grazed.  We were pretty sure that the third lioness was further forward, and was going to chase the impalas into an ambush by the two.  Impalas are much faster than lionesses, so the latter have to resort to stealth and strategy.

It is amazing that we were totally engaged and on the edge of our seats as we sat there watching the lionesses, watching the impalas, and trying to figure out the strategy.  Finally, the impalas realized that the lionesses were there and they took off … fast.  The two lionesses had to give up.  We were right that the third lioness was further forward, but when she came back to the two, we saw that she had hurt her foot and was limping.  We think that is why the planned attack failed.

In the end, it felt like watching a 0 - 0 soccer game; nothing happened if you just look at the final score, but the drama gripped us for well over an hour.  I wonder how often lionesses succeed in their hunts and how often they strike out like they did this time.

After a quick lunch, we went to the Kasane International Airport to board our tiny, one engine plane to the Okavango Delta.  A tiny company called Mack Air runs charter plane service in Botswana.  The airline magazine in the seat pocket had biographies of all of the pilots, and I was reassured that our our pilot was twenty seven years old because he looked like he was seventeen.

I knew before I came that the Okavango Delta is the largest inland delta in the world, but I had not thought about what that meant.  The Okavengo River flows into a vast area that has only a few feet of elevation change, so the water spreads out in all directions, creating marshes and islands.  Just driving to our camp - Sanctuary Stanley Camp - was an experience.  The guide told us we would be going through water.  That was an understatement.  Large sections of the road were underwater and the water was over three feet deep.  Our vehicle seemed to be part boat.

Just for comparison, you can see in the last photo that our vehicles are four feet tall in front and the water frequently came over the front.  Also, you can see on the left side there is a periscope.  Apparently this feeds air to the motor so it does not stall when it is underwater.

Our guides told us that three lionesses had feasted yesterday on a zebra that they had killed.  They took us to the place where they were lying under a tree looking full and lethargic.  Then we drove near the kill site and found a male lion sitting nearby.  And we saw all of these lions just on the way to our camp.  We haven’t even been on a long game drive yet.

On Monday morning we were scheduled for an Elephant Adventure, but I had no idea what the adventure would be.  It turns out that two odd people, Doug and Sandi, found each other and three elephants about thirty years ago.   So they have been living here in Botswana for all this time, raising the elephants, and showing them to the tourists.  We learned all about the elephants and had the opportunity to touch them and interact with them.

Eventually, we all had lunch:  the people sitting at a table set up for us, and the elephants standing near us, while Doug and Sandi continued to talk to us about elephants and life in Botswana.  Sandi is from South Africa and visits her family once a year.  Doug is from Boston and has not been back to the US since 1987.  Imagine the culture shock if he went now.

After our afternoon break which found me in my natural habitat reading at poolside, we were taken out on makoros in the marsh.  Makoros are flat bottomed canoe-like boats that are propelled by poles.  It was like riding a gondola through the canals of Venice.  Sorta.   Very peaceful and interesting riding in the fading light.

The road to the makoros was even deeper than the roads we drove on the day before.  Our guide said we were hurrying to watch the sunset.  Then, after driving through a particularly deep lake, there was our bar, set up at roadside as soon as it came out of the lake.  Amazing.  After drinks and appetizers, we got back in our vehicles to return to camp.  I was in the second car.  Suddenly we stopped as the driver of the third vehicle had radioed that he was stuck in the middle of a lake.  We all got out as our driver backed into the water, attached a winch, and pulled the car out.  We are not in Kansas, Toto.

It is not every day that I get kissed by an elephant, take a ride in a makoro through a marsh, and drive through four feet of water.

After a morning game drive, on Tuesday we flew once again on Mack Air.  Our group is big enough to require two planes - a twelve and a six seater.  I always choose the smaller one.  According to the airline magazine, our pilot this time had graduated graduated flight school yesterday.  Okay, it was really last year.  Still …

The roads in this part of the delta are dry although there are watering holes everywhere.  Our camp, Sanctuary Chief’s Camp, is the nicest of all of the Sanctuary Camps we have stayed in. All of the Sanctuary camps have private cabins with secluded porches, excellent dining, animals wandering around, and a swimming pool.  At Chief’s Camp, however, we each have a small pool on our veranda, and behind the resort is a watering hole with hundreds of birds and animals.  They warned us that there are two elephants that roam the property and lions nearby.  We are not allowed to walk to our rooms after dark without a security guard.

There are more animals at Chief’s Camp than at Stanley Camp, and our afternoon game drive on Tuesday was the best one so far.   We saw a rhino in the wild - a very rare sight.  Then we saw some wild dogs.  Interesting looking animals.  Unlike hyenas, they look just like dogs, and they have beautiful markings.  But they hunt in large packs and are quite viscious.  Finally, we came across a pride of lions:  four females and at least eight cubs.  We watched them from no more than twenty feet away for quite a while, and they seemed quite unconcerned about us.

Our game drive on Wednesday morning was equally good. We had barely started when one of the other vehicles radioed to us about some lions near the camp, so we turned around and went to the site.  Two lions were sitting there.  Then we realized that there was a dead cape buffalo nearby.  The lions had killed the buffalo and already feasted, so they were taking a rest before continuing to eat.  One of the guides saw a leopard walking so they followed it and radioed to us.  By the time we got there, the leopard had climbed into a tree, and then we saw a lion walking nearby.  Apparently, there had been a confrontation between the lion and the leopard, and the latter had gotten the worst of it.  He had a large gash on his side, and climbed the tree to get away from the lion.  We followed the lion to where he joined another lion and three lionesses, and then we watched the five of them for a while.  It never gets old.

Later we saw a herd of wildebeest, a huge herd of cape buffalo,  a dazzle (herd) of zebra, as well as a few giraffes and elephants.  We realized that we had seen the big five - lion, leopard, elephant, cape buffalo, and rhino - in a day.  Not quite a single day, but in a twenty four hour period.

I have not mentioned them much, but we have seen incredible birds, especially here in the Delta.  Lots of water fowl like herons, cranes, spoonbills, storks, and pelicans, but also smaller, very colorful birds. My new favorite is the saddle billed stork.

During our afternoon break, I went to my natural habitat to read, but I did not have to go far since we have private swimming pools on our verandas.  After a while, I realized that there was a loud crashing sound behind me.  I had heard it for several minutes as I was reading but it did not really sink into my consciousness.  Finally I looked up from my kindle and saw half a dozen impalas grazing quietly in front of me.  But I still heard the crashing noise behind me, so I looked over my shoulder and saw:

I wasn’t sure what to do.  We had been told that there are elephants often in the camp, and if we see one while on the veranda, we should back slowly into the room.  But the door to my room was towards the elephant, so I just sat there and watched as he came closer and closer, eating branches and trampling trees.  Then he took a long drink out of my pool.

I thought, he is not interested in me; I can just sit here.  Then I thought, this is a wild animal; he can reach over with his trunk and grab me if he wants.  (Although I could not think of any reason that he would want to.)  Then I remembered that I had unlocked the door to my bathroom and that was directly behind me, so I backed into it.  You can see where I had been sitting when the elephant took the second drink from my pool.

I wondered if the elephant would drain my pool, but he moved on, continuing to munch on the trees.  The impalas stayed for a few more minutes and then they moved on, too, leaving me to return to my kindle.

At the beginning of our game drive on Wednesday afternoon we checked again on the dead buffalo.  His carcass was still there but we did not see the lions.  We returned in the dark at the end of our drive and found the lions eating the carcass again.  In the morning, we saw a parade of hyenas walking behind our camp from the direction of the kill site.  We drove there and found buzzards working on the skeleton.  In twenty four hours, the lions and then the hyenas had eaten all of the meat of a large cape buffalo.

Our last two game drives were unspectacular until you remember that on an unspectacular drive you see elephants, zebras, giraffes, impalas, lions, and a vast variety of birds.  I still cannot do justice to describing the two safaris I have been on.  Kenya and Tanzania were like a giant game of Where’s Waldo.  Against a background of thousands of animals, you look for the rarer ones.  Botswana was more like a treasure hunt; you could drive for half an hour or more without seeing anything and then stumble upon something.  But even when you saw nothing, you knew that there were hundreds if not thousands of animals right there that you could not see.  Sometimes we would follow a strolling lion for a while; then he would sit down and simply disappear into the tall grass.  If you had not seen him walking, you would never know that he was there.  It is hard to believe that a giraffe or elephant could blend in, but they are so well camouflaged that sometimes you were practically on top of them before you realized that they were there.

On our last morning at Sanctuary Chief’s Camp, we sat on the veranda overlooking the water and just watched the waterfowl and impalas that are always there, along with a group of warthogs that joined them.  My elephant friend from yesterday returned, eating the branches next to the veranda.

I do not have the words to describe these safaris, but the land is beautiful and seeing animals in the wild is an incredible experience.