Boda boda ride through the park

My first taste of Lake Mburo national park was from the backseat of a boda boda which was tripling the 30 km/h speed limit. I clutched on to the back for dear life, hoping that an obstinate buffalo didn’t decide to grace our path around the next corner. Luckily, all we nearly ran into were a family of zebras who seemed to be on the ball enough to scatter as we sped through them. We secured the largest and most expensive cabin in the park (everything else was booked out) and after paying not only for our entry but also that of both of our boda boda drivers and their vehicles, we were ready to sit down in the expensive restaurant and order a pricey lunch. It all became worth it when we noticed the party of hippos wallowing in the lake a few metres from our table, poking their heads up every few minutes to take note of what we were doing. Grazing nearby were the seemingly harmless warthogs, snorting away as they got down on their knees to be just that much closer to the grass they were munching on. Don’t be fooled by the laugh lines in their jovial faces – they don’t seem to like it when you get too close and I got a couple of warning charges from one particularly moody one. The excitable warthog pups ran around the elders playfully with their skinny tails sticking straight up and ending with a frizzy puff at the top. Whenever I so much as looked at them they would lay down flat in the grass with their chins on their hooves thinking I could no longer see them. As the monkeys raced around wrestling with one another and searching for open windows in the car park, we watched a narcissistic bird continually attack its own image in the side mirror of one of the SUVs.

It only got better. That afternoon we took a boat ride out on the lake and noticed that we were being monitored carefully by sets of eyes and pairs of twitching ears belonging to the enormous hippos who chartered our progress. They didn’t seem too perturbed by our close proximity, but we managed to startle a group that was closer to the shore. One of the males heaved his body out of the water, showing off his wrinkly pink bib before diving in and swimming away. Every once and a while we’d see a baby hippo (a popular snack for Nile crocodiles) poke his relatively wee nose out of the water for some air. A rather judicial looking water buffalo stuck to the shore resting near the water while several crocodiles (one very large) basked in the sun on the shore doing their very best to look like harmless logs. Much to the delight of our birder boat mates, we also spotted several rare bird species. We arrived back at the restaurant and puttered about until nightfall when the hippos come out of their watery dens to forage for food. Thankfully they are vegetarians, but still wouldn’t hesitate to trample anyone who gets between them and the water. We left before we actually saw any – without our flashlights I was unwilling to risk getting trampled on a technicality. While others camped right on the shore, we went back to the relative safety of our cabin in the middle of the bush which was a fair distance from the bathroom that we had to visit a couple of times in the middle of the night. It was a scary experience as there are warnings throughout the park that one is prohibited from wandering off without the protection of an armed ranger.

Tracking our progress

We awoke at dawn and met our armed guide, Jamieson, for our walking safari. There were loud groans sounding all around us, not from those having to get up so early for the safari but from a couple of dominant male hippos fighting in the water over a kilometer away. While the zebras, steenboks and warthogs tended to intermingle at night and the early morning for protection and to discuss who killed who last night, the buffalo stood apart, a menacing solitary figure that glared at us from behind bushes just daring us to come closer. The zebras were definitely the most stylish of the bunch with their outrageously striped jackets and punk hairstyles. While we couldn’t get enough of the zebras, our companions were more interested in the birds. After each sighting, a Birds of East Africa book would come out and there would be much discussion over which species we had seen. After it was determined to be a Red Faced Tit Babbler (or whatever) a giant check was satisfyingly made beside the photograph, and the book was returned to the bag. Unfortunately, Jamieson was not able to use his firearm on my assailants. I must have stepped in an ant highway and several of the little vampires sank their teeth into my ankles, stomach and neck. I was ordered to strip while Brett had to inspect that all were dead and gone before we were able to move on. I guess I too would be upset if someone interrupted my morning commute to deposit me somewhere inconvenient.

Stepping off the crowded Matatu in Kabable we were followed by several boda boda drivers and a couple of special hire taxi drivers who tried to extract our bags from us, continually asking where we were going. Brett said “here”… I said “for lunch,” but this didn’t seem to dissuade anybody. We left the taxi park with an entourage that followed us past the ominously titled Lord’s Mercy Barbers to a woman sitting behind a table with a telephone on it. These serve as the public phones in Uganda, and in the most unlikely of places there seems to always be one. I gave her a number and while she dialed it the hushed crowd awaited an answer. It came in the form of Friday (named for the day of the week he was born), a worker at Byoona Amagara Island on Lake Bunyoni. Rather indiscreetly, I made reservations for that night and no sooner had I hung up the phone, a renewed flurry of excitement erupted. Everyone wanted to be the one to take us to the dock. We disappointed them all by ducking into a nearby restaurant.

Warthog pups

Our tummies satisfied, we looked for the cheapest way to get to Lake Bunyoni. Luckily it was market day, and pick up trucks overloaded with people, rice, pineapples, sheet metal and anything else you can think of transport people between the two locations. We piled into the back with everybody and waited about forty five minutes until so many people and goods were loaded on that we resembled Dolly Parton in an A-cup. Trapped in the middle of the truck and seeing nothing more than elbows and braids, we actually started to move and I suddenly had three kids holding onto my legs for balance and a woman clutching my left breast as if it were a handrail. We turned a corner, moving a total of about ten meters to load for another fifteen minutes before returning to our original loading spot for half an hour. When we finally started moving again we made six more substantial stops before climbing the mere nine kilometers to the lake. By this time, I was starting to think that walking would have been faster and more pleasant. Next to me a woman breastfed her talking, walking and demanding two year old who roughly grabbed down her shirt and slapped at her face. Halfway up the steep hill, everybody had to get off the truck in order for it to make it up the hill. We finally made it to the banks of the lake where rows of dugout canoes awaited the trucks arrival. As everyone busied themselves loading their goods onto the wobbly dugout canoes, we climbed into Nicholas’ canoe and paddled the last hour of our journey across the quiet lake to a little island in Lake Bunyoni. It was at this point that we could truly appreciate our surroundings. Tall green hills surrounded a calm and peaceful lake and as I sat back and enjoyed the tranquility, Brett was given a paddle and ordered to row. Ah, the joys of being the inferior sex!

The view from our Geo Dome

The destination more than made up for the hassle of getting there. We were shown to our Geo-dome, which was a thatched dome atop a hill with a large balcony that overlooked the lake below. Although it was fully sheltered, the wall was a semi-circle which allowed us to go to sleep while gazing at the stars from our queen sized bed and wake up watching the sun slowly light up the mountains on the opposite side of the lake. It was such incredible accommodation in the most beautiful setting imaginable. In the mornings the lake was like glass and after being woke up with the chirping birds, we would lift our lazy heads and see perfect reflections of men and goods in their canoes as they quietly dipped their paddles in and floated by.

We spent our last few days in Uganda lounging on our sun deck or the larger restaurant, reading books from the library and taking the occasional swim. The place is not only a mecca for travelers but also an important fixture in the community, using their proceeds to help fund the local school, provide a library and computer facilities to children and instruct all those who are willing to learn about computers and the internet. They also teach cultivation techniques, allowing those without property the opportunity to grow food on their land and introduce a huge array of crops that are a departure from the exclusive sweet potato and sorghum in the area. In a country full of foreign NGOs (non government organizations), its nice to see a grassroots organization such as this one making sure that tourist dollars get put back into the community.

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