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  We could see the valley below and across from us, a volcanic mountain that is no longer active.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.