California Potpourri

Grandma's 80th birthday was a blast. Mary had sent out invitations to old family friends & relatives, organised food and beverage with Auntie Terri, baked a cake and planned a full program of entertainment. Uncle Bill had the job of digitizing the old family movies and photos & compiling the highlights of grandma's 80 years into a 15 minute DVD as well as being the MC for the evening. The festivities were held in the comfortable library at San Clemente Villas, the old folks home.The party got off to a steady rolling start with early guests arriving by zimmer frame. There was a good hour of grandma & her kids greeting old friends & family and getting everyone loaded with a plate of scoff and a drink. Then things got underway with uncle Bill's steady raconter of very funny anacdotes about his mum, plenty of interjections by grandma's brother uncle Ronnie with his humourous recollections of his big sister.Then an announcement that grandma's favourite singer was here for the party, Tom Jones himself and we were treated to a very suave tuxedoed young Tom (aka Otie) lip syncing,"Its not unusual to be loved by anyone" which was immediately followed up with an instrumental rendition of "happy birthday" by Otie on the clarinet.

Next up was a hip hop duo (Lotte & her cousin Jane) doing a choreographed funky boogie to "Bounce". That went down a treat. Then a more cerebral item of magic and sleight of hand by cousin Ross which bought out oohhs & aahhs from the crowd. The show went on and an old woman came in on her zimmer & started singing the song "Thank god I'm old". Who was she? the crowd wondered, as she appeared to be wearing grandma's necklace & cardi, with grandma Ross's hat upon her head. Itwas only at the final refrain when she clambered up on the zimmer balancing on the top rail belting out the final notes when we realized it was Lotte.She bought the house down, it was very funny.Then the final act, the grand finale with the premier of "the chronicles of grandma" uncle Bill's DVD which was fantastic, a musical & visual masterpiece pulling together moving and still images of grandma's life including clips of her parents, her mother & father-in-law - the movie bits having never been seen before by Mary, her brother & sister. It was a great show & a very memorable evening enjoyed by all.Grandma was very happy and over the next couple of evenings we ate & drank leftover food & wine and watched the chronicles quite a few times. The last couple of weeks has seen us based out of grandma's condo in Orange County, packing up her house now that she is permanently and happily ensconced in the Villas.

A trip down memory lane for Mary as treasures from the family past & her childhood are unearthed as the cupboards and drawers have been progressively excavated.

We took a break from concrete suburbia for a few days and went up in LA to stay with Karen & GP and to do some cultural stuff. We attended an evening of poetry readings by war veterans, most of which was read by the veterans themselves. There are alot of young soldiers here in the US and this programme is a pathway to help stressed combat veterans to rehabilitate back into society. Some of the poetry was raw.

The next day Mary, Max & I spent the afternoon at the JP Getty Center and saw beautiful artworks in particular paintings by the French impressionists like Gaugin, Monet, Renoir & Van Gogh.

We saw photos by Capa, Dutch masterpieces, works by Rembrandt & Millet, sculptures & an exhibition of illuminated manuscripts all displayed in a group of galleries situated on a ridge with a spectacular panoramic view of LA which we watched at sunset.

Our final cultural destination was the Museum of Tolerance, which is part of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

We saw an excellent exhibition on the US civil rights movement and took the kids thru the Holocaust exhibit. It was really well done and detailed the rise of Hitler & Nazism in Germany and the escalating persecution of German Jews which led ultimately to the systematic murder of 6 million European Jews.

The emphasis in the exhibit was on the process that gave rise to the persecution showing how ordinary people can become conditioned to behave inhumanly, rather than dwelling too long on the gruesome implementation of the murderous policies. At the conclusion of the tour we attended an hour long talk given by an Auschwitz survivor. Dr Henry Osler's talk of his harrowing existence from 1934 to 1945 was riveting and very memorable.

He told of his family's life in Colonge Germany under Nazi rule, their initial deportation to a Jewish ghetto in Lodz Poland, eventual deportation to Auschwitz, surviving in the hell there and then a forced death march back to Germany just prior to liberation.

He was 16 at the end of the war, was one of only 18 German born Jewish children alive in 1945 and was the only surviving Jew from Cologne. He was a wonderful old boy, answered questions, showed us the Auschwitz inmate number tattooed on his arm (which is also his car number plate) and was happy to be in a photo with our kids. When you hear a story like this you feel so thankfull for the lives that we lead and for the time and place in which we live.

We took the kids down down to the Santa Monica pier for some light entertainment after the seriousness of the afternoon where they enjoyed the roller coaster, they met the snake man, saw street performers & Otie met Elvis.

We had a quick look around Hollywood including some very interesting back block suburbs as we attempted to get up to the Hollywood sign.

We saw Christine Aquilera outside the Chinese theatre in town for the premier of the film "Burlesque" with Cher that very night.

I saw in the LA Times a couple of days later that a well known movie star publicist was murdered when she left the premier after party.

Then closer to the condo, we had the Sheriff's helicopter overhead for an hour, about 20 cops running around leading to the arrest of a suspect in a home invasion about 150 meters away. Life here really is just like the movies!

We headed out to Joshua Tree in the Mohave desert for our final national park visit of our trip.

We stopped for dinner at a Mexican greasy spoon and I talked to a local who thought all the campsites in the park would be full as it was the weekend, and he told us to go to a locals camping spot nearby which we did.

We found ourselves along a dusty road up in the hills among the cactii and we popped the van top for a relaxing night. However a gale blew up in the night rocking the van with strong roaring gusts and peppering us with sand. It was the stormiest night of our holiday and not much sleeping was done by Mary & I. We had a marvelous day in the park going on a couple of hikes through the rocks & Joshua trees which must have been the inspiration for Dr Suess' illustrations. It is winter now so we saw no wildlife as the desert tortises & reptiles are hibernating.Later in the afternoon we met up with Karen who had organised us to attend a soundbath. This was our "out- there" Californian experiance held in a geodisic dome in the desert with perfect acoustics, lying on mats with a load of cosmic travellers, with our yogi playing an array of crystal bowls giving off eerie noises that reverberated inside one's head. It was actually relaxing, yeah! Gave us lots to talk about anyway.
The next couple of days we spent in an older peoples (55+ yikes!!) community near Palm Springs where Karen's parents have a place.

Huge communities of older retired people who play golf everyday & many "snowbirds", retired people from the colder parts of the US & Canada who winter over here. Mary's brother Bill. his wife Renee, their kids, Karen's husband GP and kids all were there to make up the full house.

Alot of poker & monopoly was played. We went out to a Japanese restaurant where chefs cooked in front of us which was very entertaining. We also visited the Living Desert a zoo which specialised in desert flora & fauna. They are involved in breeding programs for endangered animals like the Arabian Onyx. Then back to Orange County for Thanksgiving and the last couple of days of our travels.

Nilefest & Bujagali farewell

This is the fourth time I've spent time kayaking a river whose whitewater is scheduled for destruction from the construction of a hydro dam. Its a bittersweet experience with intense kayaking on doomed rapids.

This Nile section is even more so because of the teeming wildlife and rainforest islands in the Bujagali section which will slip beneath the lake to form behind the 30 meter high dam wall.

With these sobering thoughts in mind Max, Roy & I embarked on a week of kayaking to make the most of our remaining time in Uganda along with Cam who joined us when he could get a break from his busy life.

With Roy along the standard of kayaking lifted and everyday saw some newer bigger waves surfed & harder rapids surfed. We found a pushier wave immediately upstream of superhole which we called Mumba (COW in Swahili). After a thrashing in this wave we would go down to superhole for a mellow surf and to practice blunts, cartwheels & loops. On our first day on this circuit Roy ran Kalagala falls making it look very straight forward.

We kayaked the lower section down to the Nile Special where Club was working well giving big awesome bouncy rides to all of us down the face of the wave with its 1 meter high surging foam pile up on top. Kelly met us at the takeout having driven 18 kms thru the back blocks to pick us up.

The next day Cam was able to join us for a trip down the upper section through the dam site, together with Roberto as guide and his brother Steve to take photos. We all successfully ran the left side of Bujagali falls. We surfed Easy Rider and we all had a wild time kayaking down Big Brother without mishap. I was at the back of the group and got a great view of kayaks getting tossed around everywhere as I came down the great tongue. In one of the eddies Cam spied a swimming forest cobra which I paddled over to.

When I was about 3 meters away it coiled up, lifted its head up out of the water and spread its hood and I backed off. I also followed an otter which popped up out of the water about 6 times & got close to a big monitor lizard climbing up the bank which didn't notice me behind it. The wildlife on the river is so prolific & stunning here.

Cam had organized a VIP lunch for us on the rafting lunch island which was a welcome break in the shade from the hot sun.

The afternoon saw Roy & Roberto kayak the top part of Overtime with the rest of us only running the waterfall in the second part. Then we kayaked around to Chop Suey a big bouncy rapid passing under a huge tree laden with sleeping bats.

The pools between the rapids in the afternoon section are long and it gives an opportunity to check what the fishermen are catching and to find out all about local life from the Ugandan kayakers including their tribal and clan background, indigenous religious beliefs (the Kilagala camp is beside a cultural area on the riverbank where local deities are worshipped) and current Ugandan politics. Roberto told me that as a kid he would occasionally swim with the otters but said many of them are being killed in fishermen's nets.

Roberto's family farm beside the lunch island and as a kid he would hang out when the rafting trips came by & help where he could and this led to him getting a job with Adrift. The rafting company is run almost entirely by Ugandans and provides work for dozens of local people. Adrift is a very tidy and safe operation setting a high standard which the other local rafting companies are unable to match.

That night I cooked Nile perch for dinner.

One of the hazards at Kalagala camp are safari ants which march in big columns working together and are vicious if you stand on them, swarming up your leg and then all biting at the same time.

The Mcleays had some horror stories of their ant experiences over the past few years. During our stay at the camp I saw three separate ant columns at different times, but luckily I never got bitten.

One day we had a break from the river & helped Cam & Chest transport a 1.1 tonne diesel generator across the river to Wildwaters lodge using only the muscle power of 28 local labourers who manhandled the generator down a river bank, onto a raft (which us mazungus paddled across), up the bank on the island and then pushed on wooden rollers about 100 hundred meters to its shed. The process took 3 hours and I can now imagine how the ancient pyramids were built!

We were rewarded with a fantastic lunch at the lodge. That evening we did a lower Nile run, getting in some classic surfing at Fatlip & Club and finishing right on dark. We were treated to seeing a family of red tailed monkeys on the riverbank. Our drive back to camp was on dark roads congested with people returning home.

Cam lent us his truck & we drove to Jinja to do another run down the upper section. It was nice to be greeted by the Adrift staff who we had got to know greeting them in their local language Lugandan & doing their local handshake.

I had a pleasant surprise to see Jan, who I had met my last time in Uganda and his family from Belguim who were rafting for the day.

Kellie was also rafting.

We had a very pleasant time on the doomed rapids with good lines & good surfing. Max & I made the most of our last run down Big Brother running straight down the middle.

I almost made it all upright getting thru the first 2 waves but got absolutely nailed on the big Silverback wave which crashed right down on top of me.

Luckily I had taken some extra deep breaths coming down the tongue as it took me awhile to roll upright. We were in front of the rafts & had a ringside seat of the rafts coming down the tongue & into the white chaos.

I saw the biggest monitor lizards of the trip, 2 of them the size of medium sized crocodiles on the bank. We saw a fish eagle catch a fish. I paddled all of Overtime with Roy.

We woke the bats on the tree by Chop Suey and it was a surreal scene with the blue sky full of hundreds of whirling bats flying in full daylight with a fish eagle calmly perched on a tree right in the middle of this frenzy as we kayaked by down a roaring rapid trying to watch the wildlife & pick a line thru the waves all at the same time.

Roy kayaked all of Intunda with Henry who was guiding us for the day.

It was an impressive sight as the rapid is about 500 meters long and which gets more intense nearer the end. Roy had a great run past the holes called Pencil Sharpener, the Cuban, Ashtray & the Bad Place, none of which he would want to go in. The rafts, Max & I portaged most of the rapid, just running the last 200 meters.

There was however raft carnage with Kellie's raft skirting the Bad Place and losing 4 rafters overboard from the left side including Kellie & the raft guide. The raft floated into an eddy and Jan was the only leftside survivor but he had lost his paddle.

The raft was floating towards a hole at the top of the eddy so I became the raft guide giving orders remotely from my kayak to reseat the remaining paddlers & get them moving back from the hole.

One of the Adrift safety kayakers soon took over guiding the raft out into the river but took it straight into a big crashing wave which flipped the raft throwing everyone into the water. Max, Roy & I then busily rescued the passengers back to the raft. It was all pretty exciting and we had a good laugh over beers & kebabs at the end of the trip.

Roy, Max & I walked thru the fields back to Kalagala and this walk was one of my highlights of our trip to Uganda. We had a couple of local boys guiding us on the meandering trail thru fields along the top of the riverbank overlooking the Nile and met & chatted to some cow herders.

Our last day of kayaking started with Max, Roy & I all running Kalagala falls, which had a straight forward line landing in soft foam after the drop. Max was the main motivator to kayak the rapid and we all had a good run with a crowd from the lodge watching the action. Cam organized a raft & guides so Kellie & Bella were able to come along too.

Archie came along for the day kayaking to do his first run down the lower section. He followed me down all the rapids, which were solid grade 3 with big waves. He has a good roll and rolled up on Arrow, Vengence and Kulu Shaker. I got too close to him on Hair of the Dog and we got tangled up in a big wave which recirculated me & although he swam he got back into his boat and it looked like he was trying to paddle out and surf Fatlip. Roy & I had rides on a very big wave above Fatlip which up until then I had been avoiding, but which wasn't too hard to get off.

Fatlip & Club were hard to get onto but gave good surfs when you could get on. As with every other day there was lots of wildlife and todays highlight was a family of otters.

3 other kayakers came along & set up a tow rope attached to the bank for towing onto the Nile Special. We all tried it & Roy was successful first. A weird experience to hold a rope in your left hand, your paddle in the right, while steering with your paddle with one hand at the back as the boat is planing sort of uphill out into the current while you lean the boat on edge to carve out to the steep middle part of the wave & then let go.

It took Max & I longer to master but we both eventually got 3 Special rides, although the rest of our group had long since left with the raft.

It was an excellent final days kayaking and our day ended with a wonderful evening at the lodge having dinner with Cam, Kate, Chest and Jan.

Max & Archie stayed the night at the lodge so they could also have breakfast there as they are both addicted to bacon, pancakes & hash browns.

Our last morning in Uganda was spent driving to Kampala, doing coffee & shopping at the Friday craft market which had awesome stuff including Congalese carvings. We farewelled Kate & Cam & headed to the airport with Max & I heading to the States & Roy & Kellie heading home to NZ.

Mazungu Safari

Hi blogees, my first blog from Africa is called the legendary Nile & is in the October blogs.

Meanwhile back in our second week in Uganda we were joined by Roy & Kellie Bailey from Wanaka and the morning after their arrival we headed off on safari to Murchison Falls national park located in the north-west of the country. Our journey took us thru rough red dirt back roads to link with the main road north from Kampala.

It was a good opportunity to see rural Uganda with small villages & fields of maize, sugar cane, cassava, bananas, coffee, mangos, rice, beans & pineapples. The mode of transport here is either by foot, bicycle, mutata (small white passenger vans licensed to carry 14 people) or bota bota (motorbike taxis usually with the driver & 2 passengers).

The locals put huge loads on the bikes and bota botas usually to get their goods to market. Every village has many little ramshackle shops where produce is sold. The local economy is very low cost as a daily labourer's wage is about $2 - $3 per day.

This is a subsistence economy.

People live in small brick or mud huts and do their daily living including

cooking, washing & bathing outside.

They sleep inside on floor mats.Cooking is done on small charcoal stoves.There is little or no electricity & each village had a central well where children fill yellow plastic jerrycans & walk that water home.There were many schools in the villages so education is freely available although those schools looked totally under resourced.

Our kids have no idea how easy they have it! The locals are very friendly and children wave & yell "hey mazungu" (white person) as we drove past.

We stopped briefly for supplies and roadside snacks & arrived late in the afternoon in the park & immediately went into safari mode climbing up onto roof top seats to start wildlife viewing.

The first part was driving thru the Budongo forest reseve with baboons, butterflies & giant spiders whose webs stretched across the road between the trees, and hawks flying alongside Cams car thru the tree corridor.

We took the barge across the Nile at Paara, picked up Opio an armed guard and arrived after dark at our campsite on the Nile delta right by the river situated under 3 large fever trees.We quickly put up 2 tents & had dinner and G and T's to the sound of nearby snorting hippos climbing out of the water to start their nocturnal grazing.

We got away early and had an amazing mornings viewing of wildlife including mongoose, squirrels, giraffe, hippos, orabi, water buck, Jackson haartebeest, bush buck, cob, buffalo, elephant and our absolute highlight was being able to get under a tree to watch a leopard

who climbed down from that tree sauntering off into the scrub.

The birds were numerous and included weavers, storks, kingfishers, wydahs, guinea fowl, eagles, grey hornbills, bustards, pelicans, bee eaters and my favourites crested cranes & red bishops.

Returning to our camp we saw a lioness & 2 cubs only a couple of hundred meters from our tents. I was really excited because in my previous visits to Ugandan national parks I had only ever seen 1 lion in the distance. After a siesta & a walk with our guard, we packed the vehicles & headed off for a picnic at Pakuba an old ruined hotel from the Amin era.

On the way we saw many elephants and while Max was driving came across a very agitated female with young resulting in Cam ejecting Max from the drivers seat & speeding off as the elephant was moving towards us trumpeting & flapping her ears.

Poaching is a problem in this area and fishermen from the western bank of the Albert Nile, from outside the park, set wire snare traps near the waters edge to catch animals for food.

We saw one elephant with part of its trunk having been severed by a snare and another elephant with a snare around its leg.

We arrived at Pakuba on dusk and were met by a herd of stampeding warthogs who had taken up residence in one of the rooms and who made a paniced exit when we arrived. We explored part of the complex & the boys discovered a monitor lizard trapped in the dry swimming pool.

Cam the wild man jumped into the pool grabbed the lizard by the tail, swung it round his head a couple of times & threw it up out of the pool.

Meanwhile hundreds of bats were emerging from rooms, nooks & crannies and flying past us quickly on silent wings.

We had dinner and didn't stay long as it was a spooky place. It was a long drive back thru the park and we got a puncture in the middle of nowhere. On the way back we briefly saw a hyena, saw civet cats & lots of rodents which Cam thought were jerboa (kangaroo rats).

Back near camp we engaged in some hippo chasing which was hilarious & then saw a lion, which on closer inspection appeared to have a snare around its waist.

While we were quietly viewing the lion in the car headlights we heard a thundering noise & a crazed hippo galloped by between our vehicle & the lion initially giving us a fright, but we all burst into laughter as it looked very funny.

We then drove back to camp & found Opio cowering on the roof of the other truck. He told us that after dark he was tending the fire & heard a noise. He spun round with with a torch to see a lioness in the camp less than 10 meters away which he said was preparing to pounce on him.

He threw a burning stick at the lion which moved away and he climbed on the vehicle roof staying put until we returned. He was very lucky as Bella had lent him her torch as his had run out of batteries. This dramatic day ended with a rain storm during the night which flooded our tents.

The following morning we drove to Paara and embarked on a Nile river cruise upstream to Murchison Falls. We viewed large groups of hippos and learned from our guide the complexities of hippo societies where the dominant male hangs onto power forcing weaker or younger males into what the guide referred to as "loser" groups.

We drifted onto a group of sleeping colobus monkeys in a tree overlooking the river & had a spectacular show of 2 waterbuck males fighting on the riverbank. Then in the middle of the river came across a dead hippo being eaten by 12 large crocodiles which was scary & fascinating.

There was much birdlife along the river including pied kingfishers continuously hovering and unsuccessfully diving into the river. I never saw one catch a fish.

We saw a goliath heron, saddle billed stork, fish eagles, bee eaters and jacanas wading thru the reeds. We trekked up to the falls through which the Nile flows thru a 10 meter gap as it cascades down off the edge of the eastern rift valley thru a spectacular chasm.

There was a group of about 30 local school kids viewing the falls and it was encouraging to see Ugandans enjoying their national park as conservation is a foreign concept for most citizens who are struggling just to survive.

We had a superb buffet lunch at Paara lodge before heading back to camp.

On the way we saw lots of elephants, a big monitor lizard which Cam also attempted to grab by the tail, a brief glimpse of a jackal and a pair of crested cranes which performed a brief courtship dance for us.

We had a quiet night around the campfire playing cards, watching ants, furry caterpillars, bats & listening to the hippos snorting & insects chirping.

We had a cruisey next morning with Bella cooking pancakes & Arch as bacon specialist.

We packed the tents. After leaving the camp we came across the whole lion family and had another great close up view of these awesome cats.

With the binoculars Cam was able to read the ear tag numbers on the injured male enabling us to report the snare injury to park headquarters.

We headed back thru the park enjoying for a final time the herds of cob, hartbeest and giraffe.

We stopped for lunch at a backpackers camp, met up with a bunch of kayakers who had just run the Nile thru the park and Max & Bella were charged by a warthog.

This park suffered badly during the Amin years when much wildlife was shot for sport & food. The Ugandan rhino population became extinct during that period. Cam said that during the their visits to Murchison over the past 9 years the McLeays have seen a huge increase in the parks wildlife.

He says that Uganda's wildlife is in good shape and in particular in the north of the country, depopulation caused by the long war with Joseph Kony (which is now over) has led to a boom in wildlife numbers. The park is close to the border of the Congo which is currently suffering ongoing civil war resulting in the degradation of its wildlife. When peace finally comes to the eastern Congo, Ugandan wildlife will safely spill over the border and replenish the wild areas there. There is a big national park in the Congo along the shared Ugandan border but that park has absolutely no resources or tourism and the wildlife will be feeding the warring parties there.

The Ugandan parks do not have alot of visitors in comparison with Kenya & Tanzania's huge safari tourism industry.

We really felt like we had the park to ourselves & only saw one other party bush camping and that was only for one night.

We did come across a VIP safari party with a para-military armed squad and were told it was Colonel Gaddafi's son from Libya. Murchison does have its share of problems with poachers and poor roads. But its biggest issue for the future is the discovery of oil inside the park and we saw more vehicles & people associated with oil exploration than were associated with tourism or park management.

We stopped for the night at the Ziwa rhino ranch which is a project to breed white rhinos to reintroduce into the Ugandan parks.

3 male calves have been born in the last 12 months and we went for a walking safari & saw 2 of those youngsters.

We met a couple of Americans doing an internet documentary on the Ugandan rhinos and they filmed our safari to include in their film. In due course it will be shown on assignmentearth.com

These rhinos are under 24 hour armed guard as poaching for rhino horn is a serious problem. Apparently more than 20 rhinos are killed each month in Africa out of a total current population of 17,000. If you are interested in what is happening at Ziwa look at their website www.rhinofund.org

Max & I, Kelle & Roy drove on our own to Cam & Kates on the back road with no road signs. The key to asking directions is to say the name of the town we were headed to a few people, then say "wapi" (where) and if they all generally pointed in the right direction we were OK. Kate said it was a mistake to point in a direction you think is correct because the locals always agree with you and its very easy to get lost. The back roads were rough, never maintained, with huge potholes, no other cars just pedestrians, bikes & the occasional bota bota.

We arrived back at Kalagala without mishap and our safari was over.