A whole new world

I spent my birthday in Uganda without the boys, but they celebrated in Shanghai for me, and Christine and I had cake to celebrate in Kampala.

My birthday gift to myself was a safari, I had a weekend during the trip that was unaccounted for- no one wants to meet on a weekend and work, so safari it is! I researched a bunch of places, and even more options at those places- chimpanzee treks, gorilla treks (not for the faint of heart or out of shape– otherwise I would have been on that, I’m hoping to bring the boys with me next time and we could go together), rhino preserve, and then truck safaris. I signed up for a two-day truck safari to Murchinson Falls, I got picked up at 6am by Eddie, my guide. And buckle up folks because this is going to be another Caitlin adventure.

Christine is so worried about me going on this safari by myself and that I need to text her a picture of the driver and the license plate, so if I’m kidnapped, they can find me. Eddie was the nicest guy, no threat of kidnapping at all, besides, let’s face it, I’d be a little hard to kidnap. So, picture taken and sent, I go to climb in the truck and as I’m stepping up, I hear this really loud snap and my whole leg feels like I’ve been stabbed. But you know me, I got in the truck anyway because I figured I had 5 hours of sitting in the car and surely it would feel better by then right? And I wasn’t going to give up my opportunity for a safari. I put my foot up on the ledge and tried not to move it.

Turns out it was just me and Eddie, no one else had signed up for the weekend- so I had an 8-person truck all to myself. Around an hour and a half outside Kampala the truck breaks down… now one aspect of this safari is that we have to be up at the park by a certain time to get to do a Nile River Cruise- so Eddie gets on a motorbike with a local mechanic and heads back to find the piece that fell off the truck to see if it can be fixed. And I sit in the truck by myself on the side of the road at someone’s house, and panic because that’s what I do.

This cat belongs to the house we stopped at, he was hunting bugs in the grass, and was very cute- he reminded me of our cat Jack- and just watching him was calming.

This was part of the house that we were stopped at, there were pigs and chickens running around, and a small boy who was intrigued by me in the car. I felt like it was a nice little slice of Uganda life that I got to steal a peak at.

My safari truck, with the local mechanic and Eddie working on whatever belt was broken. It was neat to see them working on it, I’ve never seen an engine under the seats before.

Luckily for me, all the tour guides know each other, and another truck stopped to check out the trouble, and Eddie worked it out with the other guide (Alex) to take me with him up to the Falls so I wouldn’t miss the cruise. The bad part was climbing out of the truck and up into the other truck on my jacked-up leg. My calf was as hard as a rock and hurt with every step or even while sitting, but I’m nothing if not stubborn.

I was so thrilled to see a monkey, it’s not the best shot as it was taken from a moving vehicle, but man was it exciting! We accidentally ran over a really beautiful snake crossing the road, but we saw lots of birds and monkeys on the way.

This was my view at lunch, it is a camp site inside the park with a little restaurant that most if not all the tour guides stop at. There are also some resort hotels on this side of the Nile at all price points ( although the campsite is cheapest).

I don’t remember what I ate there, I remember it being good though- chili and rice maybe? But the most important thing was the beautiful ice-cold coke! After 4 hours on the road in a not super cooled car, it was perfect.

After lunch, it was off to the Ferry and the Nile Cruise. The boat was mostly full, but we still had some room to move around and change seats to avoid the sun a bit.

To get onto the boat, I had to step up and one giant long step from the land to the boat… I was not sure I was going to make it with my leg, I made it but just barely and only really with the help of the captain. I wasn’t really sure how I was going to get off the boat on the other side- but why borrow trouble?

Just a bird sitting on the fence by the ferry- I will warn you that a few of the cruise photos are a little blurry because we were moving, if I had a better version of the picture I would use it, but I want you to see as much as you can!

This is a sausage tree, when I first saw them along the Nile, I thought that they were sandbags from boats that someone had thrown in the trees (kind of like being in the US and seeing sneakers thrown over the telephone lines). These are big fruits, they can grow to 3 feet long and up to 30 pounds, people can and do eat them as well as the leaves of the tree.

Baboon by the river, I just got more and more excited with every animal we saw. I know that animals don’t care if you’re on a once in a lifetime Nile cruise, so my expectations were low so that I wouldn’t be disappointed if I didn’t see anything.

I have a soft spot for hippos, partially because I relate to their soft cute exterior but secretly are one of the most deadly animals around … that’s goals, also because one time when I was sad, Mark made hippo noises and pretend hippo ears- still makes me laugh today.

So needless to say, I was super excited to see all the hippos, along the whole river I probably saw 150 hippos, maybe even more.

There were even some baby hippos floating around, but they were very hard to get on film.

First elephant sighting! I missed seeing him in the water so I could only get pictures of him walking away.

Because of the reputation of Nile crocodiles, I thought we would see tons of them, but unfortunately there were only two- one I missed while I was taking the land hippo pictures, the other one was this guy sleeping on the bank. There was no better shot than this, and it doesn’t capture his size, this was a large crocodile.

This family of elephants was a sight to see, they were all enjoying some time in the sun by the river- they were not too happy to see our boat though.

The lead elephant pushed the little ones off in the direction of the trees and turned to give us an impressive stance and flappy ears. It was cool to get to see baby elephants in the wild though.

This is the Murchinson Falls as seen from the boat.

A decent number of people got off the boat here to climb to the top of the falls, I was not going to do that before I hurt myself, so I certainly wasn’t going to do it now.

I do have to share with you my nerd story. In the pictures above and below is a tent looking thing, with blue and black sides, this is a tsetse fly trap. It’s used to eliminate the flies that cause sleeping sickness- which is why I was on this trip in the first place, to meet with the group working on sleeping sickness and make connections for my work. I was just stupid excited to see the traps in use, less so when I talked to my guide who told me that sleeping sickness isn’t an issue anymore because of vaccines (there is no vaccine for sleeping sickness and it is still an issue, especially for rangers who work around animals).

After the cruise was over it was back to the dock, where my original guide Eddie was back with a fixed truck ready to take me for a ride to the hotel through the park.

Eddie was hoping I’d get to see a lion that first night, I was just so thrilled that I was seeing any animals, I was fine. Above is a hyde, kind of like a big cow, not so fast.

Giraffe! I absolutely love giraffes and couldn’t get enough of them- sometimes there was just one, but often they were in groups of at least three.

I was trying for the Lion King shot, the sunset over the acacia tree, it didn’t turn out quite like that but I was still pretty happy with it.

We got to the hotel, I ate some dinner, I don’t remember that much about it actually- I got some water and a coke and went back to my room. It was so far out there that I could see more stars than I ever have in my whole life, it looked like a painting- absolutely fantastic. We were told not to go out of our rooms at night because being in the middle of the reserve sometimes animals come up onto the hotel grounds and I did hear commotion at one point early in the evening, so I think there may have been something around outside.

So fun facts about a hotel in a nature reserve in the middle of Africa- the power goes out after a certain point (roughly 9pm) which means the cell phone you’ve been charging, the air conditioning and ceiling fan all stop working. Now, I don’t know if this happens every night or if I was just so lucky to be there on a night when the generator wasn’t working right.

So it is pitch black in my room, my leg is just screaming with pain and now I’m hot, not just hot but like alarmingly hot… and then I realized I had a fever. I couldn’t stop sneezing and coughing, I got up and took 3 cold showers in the dark trying to cool down enough to go to sleep. It was a rough night.

It seems like forever ago, but this was in Jan of 2020… and I had come from China, I was so concerned that I had picked up corona virus in the airport and brought it to Uganda with me. I hadn’t on either account, but in the dark , alone in that hotel room, I was pretty convinced.

I woke up with the worst of the fever over with, but still sneezing and coughing pretty bad. Stubborn as I am, nothing was stopping me from this safari…. not a janky leg and certainly not some chest cold thing. We ate breakfast, got a packed lunch for the road later and we were off to find some more animals.