Safari at Murchison Falls

Last week I went with some of the other HELP Volunteers and two med students from the UK on a safari at Murchison Falls. Murchison Falls is the largest national park in all of Uganda. We left Tuesday late afternoon and spent the night at the Red Chili Lodge in Kampala. We left from the lodge at 8:30 am on Wednesday morning and arrived at the Red Chili campsite around six that evening. The drive down wasn’t too bad and the van we traveled in is the nicest car I’ve been in for three months(it really wasn’t that nice, be in comparison to the yucky taxi vans here it was luxurious). The last few hours, however, were rather bumpy and I felt like I was on the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland as we made our way through the national park. On the way there we saw tons of baboons, monkeys, beautiful birds, and elk. We arrived to a campground infested with wart hogs! The wart hogs situation was fine because if you don’t bother them then they don’t bother you. Before dinner we walked down to the Nile, that was bout 500 meters away, to be greeted by some hippos. The following morning we left for our game drive at 6:30 am. We took our Safari vans and then had to take a ferry across the Nile. The vans’ roofs lifted up so you could stand and see the animals, or you could sit on the top of van in shallow metal baskets at the front and in the back. Our game drive was three to four hours long and we saw elephants, giraffes, gazelles, baboons, more warthogs, elk, and a pack of lions feeding on a dead wart hog. Our driver got us incredibly close to all the animals except for the elephants and I was glad to have been sitting on top of the van when we were only ten feet away from the pack of lions. The picture of the giraffe was taken up close and personal. We parked right next to them and they just stood there and let us take tons of pictures! The other picture is of Mandy and I (we life guarded together at the Heleman Halls pool a few summer ago) sitting on top of the van. I finally had a good excuse to wear my awesome one dollar DI (Goodwill) find safari hat.
We then went back, had lunch, and got on a boat to see more animals. The boat was fairly large with an upstairs and a downstairs. We saw schools and schools and school of hippos, water buffalo, alligators, more elk and wart hogs, and some gorgeous birds. The day was absolutely amazing and it was so incredible to see so many animals so close and in their natural habitat. That night, we had kind of a scary encounter. I was sound asleep when my tent mate, Melissa, woke me up only to discover that there was a hippo right outside the windows over my bed. Its face was in the first window and its bum was in the second window, to give you an idea how close it was! I leaped out of bed and onto Melissa and her bed and we both froze in silence as we listened to the Hippo eat the grass around our tent. After a few minutes he walked to the front of our tent and then left. Just a few minutes after the hippo left, Melissa said that she had to use the restroom. So we waited a few more minutes gathered up our courage and left the safety of our tent and into the hippo campground. We were very relieved to make a trip to the restroom with no hippo encounters.
Friday morning we left the campground at eight and drove up to the top of Murchison Falls where we hiked around for a while and then began our descent back to Lugazi. Our ride back was very much like most transportation experiences in Uganda. The van broke down four times on our way home and instead of it being a four hour journey it turned into a nine hour journey. Our driver didn’t seem to know what he was doing and at one point started siphoning water or maybe oil out of some tube with his mouth.. Whatever he did, manage to get us to the outskirts of Kampala where a new van came and picked us up. Luckily, we were well supplied with snacks and I had a few books with me, so it actually wasn’t too bad. However, we had to take the same road that we take to Gulu to Murchison Falls for part of the way which means we got to go over the two hundred and seventy something speed bumps all in a road for a third and then a fourth time.
This week I’ve got some family planning classes to teach, a new hospital to visit, a dental hygiene lesson to teach to the street kids, begin passing out some of our donations, following up with sexual education curriculum at a school in Mukono, and a few latrines to build in a rural village. We then leave for Rwanda Saturday at one in the morning from Kampala and will return Monday night of next week. We plan on going to the genocide memorial museum as well as many other memorials at churches and schools where massive amounts of Rwandans were killed. I’m currently reading the autobiography of Paul Rusabagina (the man who’s story inspired the movie hotel Rwanda) and I’m trying to finish it before we leave on Friday. The title is, “An Ordinary Man,” and he does a beautiful job of describing daily life in a rural village in Rwanda, which is very similar to life here. He also goes into great detail about the history of the Tutsis and the Hutus and all of the propaganda that played into the genocide. Until next time….Hill