Safari So Good!

Posing with Basco John

 Every time I hear the word “safari,” I think of the title of a Scooby Doo movie that has been sitting in my parents’ basement for years. I didn’t understand until recently that it’s supposed to be a word play on “so far, so good.” But my safari last weekend was so good, so it seemed like a fitting title to me.

So we left the house at 6:30 AM on Saturday, and did not return until about 6:00 PM. It was a full day.

Upon arriving to Queen Elizabeth National Park, we first saw a gorgeous sunrise.

A reward for waking up early

We saw a few animals like kob and waterbucks and had to chase a hippo off the road, but the most exciting thing was finding a group of lionesses hunting some warthogs. The lionesses successfully isolated one warthog, but he got away. Later, though, we saw him trodding back to where the lionesses had gathered after giving up, painfully unaware of their presence. 

5 Lionesses!

 

 

Their dinner

We moved on, then stopped at a hill overlooking a salt lake that is used for salt mining. I tried some in its raw form; even though it looked like dirt it tasted like salt!

Salt lake mining

Then we ventured out to find some elephants. They are so majestic!! I felt like I was among dinosaurs, because they move so slowly and ominously. But they also looked like such gentle giants. The babies were playful and the mothers patient. 

Down at the Kazinga Channel

We stopped for lunch and I FINALLY got to try a Castle Milk Stout—the only dark beer around here that I’ve tried to order several times but, even though it’s on the menu, resturants never seem to have. I had a typical meal of fried goat meat, rice, and vegetables. I also had some chapati, my favorite snack of deep-fried dough (kind of like naan but greasier). The restaurant was on top of a hill overlooking the Kazinga Channel—it was absolutely blissful.

Meet my new best friend

The view of the channel at the restaurant

Finally, we embarked on a 2 hour boat launch on the Kazinga Channel. SUCH LIFE! There were elephants, buffaloes, baboons, lizards, hippos, kingfishers, cranes, storks, and even a rare black forest pig. We had another beer and enjoyed the breeze. The experience was only a bit tainted by the obnoxious tourists sharing the upper deck of the boat with us.

Thanks for the zoom lens, Uncle Leung!

Kingfisher!

Hippos!

I felt very tourist-y, going on a safari, even though the animals were so amazing and beautiful. Basco John, our tour guide, said that Ugandans have started to visit the park only within the last few years. Before then, safaris were seen as a mzungu thing. It’s cheaper for Ugandans to enter the park, but paying for transportation to even get to the park is an issue for many people. So do not leave this blog post with the impression that safaris are everywhere and super frequent for everyone in Africa. The animals that live in the parks are constricted to those environments because the rest of their habitat has been destroyed. They are protected animals because they are very few; they aren’t just roaming around where people live. Except in the villages within the park.

The Basongora are a tribe that traditionally herds cattle. When their cattle are attacked by lions, they poison the lions. This has been and continues to be a problem for environmentalists who see the need for lion repopulation, and for park officials who wish to maintain the tourist attraction. I learned all this a year and a half ago in an Ecology class at UW. We studied predator extirpation in Queen Elizabeth National Park and Parc National de Virunga (on the other side of the Congo border) and biodiversity in the Albertine Rift, where the Rwenzori Mountains are. I never dreamed that I someday I would actually be in those places! So that made the experience particularly cool.

The majestic Ugandan kob

A less flattering photo

The water buck lets a nasty fart out when it's threatened. The secretion soaks through its meat and therefore makes it undesirable to eat. So it can still be attacked and eaten, but the predator will not likely come back for more. What a cool defense mechanism!

A lake with sulfur-- injured hippos come to heal!