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.