Queen Elizabeth NP

Hey Guys!

Queen Elizabeth NP was the cherry on top of our time in Uganda. It is a beautiful national park, and our first taste of the vast savannah plains of East Africa, teeming with game. 

We started our time off with a game drive. Here we are poking out our rooftop with our guide, Cris. He was a really cool guy and was very involved in his community. He was helping to run a bee project, and the revenue from the honey helped fund community projects. The african bees will swarm an elephant herd, and since an elephant never forgets, a few stings mean this herd will not return to that area. That might seem mean, but this keeps the elephants away from banana plantations and valuable crops. By limiting the elephant and human interactions, it keeps them safe. 

Our first sightings were of herds of kob. 

Scanning for leopards in the Euphorbia candelabra trees 

We saw two lions! I know they look really tiny, but it was still super cool to look at them through the binoculars. It is lucky to see them here in the park, without doing a special lion tour. Here's hoping we get more lion exposure in the Serengeti. 

Water buck

The elephants were amazing! There are almost 5000 here in Queen Elizabeth, and we came across this herd of 20 as we were returning from Lake George. Can you see the baby nursing? 

They all passed right behind the vehicle, it was great. 

We checked out buffalo, warthogs and hippos as we bumped along the road

Then we headed to Kasenyi fishing village, where Cris grew up. We also made arrangements to come back the next day to try and spot the endangered shoe bill, but more on that below. The bird in the picture is actually a Marabou stork. I have a love-hate relationship with this bird. In person, it is actually kind of creepy, with it's multiple red and fleshy pouches. It is also the height of a small child, and it feeds on meat. We would see groups of them lurking around the open-air butcher shops around town, trying to get a scrap of meat. The love part of the equation? I guess they just intrigued me. 

Yes, that is a herd (or bloat) of hippos behind the girl in the picture. Cris said he commonly tries to tell his neighbors to stay away from the hippos because they are dangerous, and he is met with varying degrees of concern. 

I guess if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

Fish for sale in the market. These were called mudfish. 

I was having a genuinely great time playing with the camera and looking at birds through the binoculars. 

After lunch we went on a boat cruise up the Kazinga channel. The channel connects Lake Edward to Lake George, and there are a lot of wildlife to be seen coming down for water. In this picture, you have hippos and water buffalo, plus a lot of bird life (cormorants, egrets, hammerkoep). Just off to the right is a Nile Crocodile hiding half-submerged in the water. 

Here is a hippo up on the land. They can only spend short periods of time out of the water, because their bodies are so heavy. More on that later....

Babboon in a tree, surveying things

A pied Kingfisher whizzing by. I'm thinking Kingfishers have been mentioned in at least 3 of the last few blogs.....

Three bull elephants had come down to munch on elephant grass. These rafts of grass are actually floating, and will move along the channel with the wind. 

Here we are on the prow of the boat, admiring the herd of buffalo. 

And being cute. 

We drove by Lake Nyamanyuka, which translates to 'smelling bad' in the local language. I can attest to this, we could smell it before we saw it. It is a sulphur lake, and it also disappears in the dry season. 

This was our digs for the night, at Bush Lodge- an amazing place. 

We sat and sipped gin and tonics as the sun went down over the Kazinga Channel. For sure one of the coolest places we have ever stayed. 

However, there is an asterisk to this story. After dark, we awoke to the sound of VERY LOUD munching. It was actually a full moon, so we had a decent amount of night vision. We peered out the front of the tent (we had only closed the netting) and could tell there was a very large mammal RIGHT in front of our tent. I thought it was an elephant, Jared said a buffalo. He walked to the front of the tent and looked out. As the monolith lifted his head in the moonlight, Jared whispered to me: 'It's a f*&king hippo.' I was so terrified at this point, I started entertaining the idea that I really could die. I just laid there frozen in fear (but a little exhilarated) as he slowly worked his way across the grass, just like a cow would. He was so close, we could have walked out of the tent and touched him. I kept thinking that one of the night guards was going to come and save us by shooing the hippo away, but this never happened. He must have got scared off when one of our neighbors went out for a pee, and I sighed a big breath of relief. Also, does that guy realize how close he was to death?

 However, around 2 am he came back! I was just as terrified, but I also really like sleep. So I fell asleep with the feeling of abject terror, which is kind of a weird state of affairs. 

The next morning I asked one of the hotel staff about it. He was super casual, and didn't sound at all surprised that we had a hippo right near the tent. What were you so worried about? 

Although sleep deprived, we continued on with the next day as usual. We headed out on a boat on Lake George to look for shoe bills. There are listed on IUCN's Red List as Vulnerable. For us, they were just a little to rare to spot today as well.

Here is what they look like, from the internet. 

We did see an enormous amount of birds that weren't shoebills. 

This is the goliath heron in flight

As the sun rose up in the sky, the terns were going crazy.

Of course there were a lot of hippos

We saw a group of warthogs running on one of the islands. Did you know a group of warthogs is called a sounding? 

We ended the tour and thus concluded our time in Queen Elizabeth NP. We had an amazing (and sometimes terrifying) time. 

We had the most beautiful drive through tea plantations on our way back to Mbarara. Next up is Rwanda. 

Until Next Time! 

The End of VWB Placement

Hello all. It's been a long time since I have wrote on here, years actually. Roberta has been doing a great job, but I guess that I should put in some of the effort as well....

As Roberta has already mentioned, we spent the vast majority of our placement with a local vet, Kwesiga. The fact that we were paired up with such a great guy made the whole experience that much better. Kwesiga is definitely an extrovert and from the time we picked him up in the morning to the time we dropped him off, he was talking with us or on the phone or to Warren our driver. His laughter was contagious and we spent a large part of our time laughing. Some of this came at my expense at attempting some of the local language: Runyankole. As I have heard many times before (in other languages as well), my strong western Canadian accent makes it very difficult for people to understand me. But for the first time, the Ugandans had a hard time understanding my English as well. This meant that most farmers who did speak English would talk mostly to Roberta. Since we wanted to promote gender equality, this actually made it a bit easier. Roberta, as usual, caught on to the local language quite quickly. I could see the look of surprise and then respect in the farmers' faces after Roberta would greet them in the local language. I on the other hand was usually met with laughter...

We actually got into quite the routine while we were there as well. It was a very peaceful place where we were staying out on the farm with rolling grass hills broken up by the live fences and banana plantations. The road out to it took about 20 mins from the main highway and resembled some turkey trail out in a pasture with a lot of potholes. We would bounce our way back to the main road in the morning passing many people. Women carrying all kinds of things on their heads. Men usually on pedal bikes carrying either milk canisters or loads of matooke (bundles of bananas). We would pass through a couple small villages with buildings mostly made of mud or brick and many bare-footed children running around. Our van became known since it was passing a couple times a day and people would peer in to get a glimpse of us. The kids would smile, wave frantically, and yell "MUZUNGU, MUZUNGU!!" (which means foreigner). Warren had thought many of them hadn't seen a white person before.

We would then pick up Kwesiga and visit a couple farms in the morning before retreating to Mukwano Hotel for lunch. They knew what we wanted for lunch before asking us by the end. The local food did not blow your socks off with flavor, but it did fill you up for the day.

We would then usually go to a couple other farms to look at sick animals and then to Julius/Robina's farm for a lecture on some topic with Kwesiga, Sheldon, and Sam followed by pregnancy diagnosis practice. Sheldon and Sam were attending agriculture university with the thought they may become vets.

By going to the same place on most days, we were able to get to know this family and the workers. They had 3 sons and 1 daughter with another one on the way. They were always welcoming and the kids always wanted to be out with the cows or just playing with us. Sometimes it is the simple things that become memorable.

We were invited to Elijah's 2nd birthday the night before we left which was a nice way to conclude our stay. Ran around with the kids, had rectal sleeve fights, and had a few beverages to end the night.

Nothing like blown up rectal sleeve fights...

The next day was our last in the area. We headed back to Robina and Julius' to drop off some gifts for the kids that we had forgotten and had another short visit. Robina ended up giving us an echanzi which was awesome as it will really remind us of Uganda. I don't know if we mentioned this earlier but pretty much every farm we went to had a round out-building in which they would have family gatherings and welcome guests. Within these buildings there was always some hides on the floor, a bench around the outside, many echanzis (the black "cups" below), and a few larger gourd containers. We were offered the local drinking yogurt at many places within the echanzis. The yogurt had a smoked flavor as the inside of the echanzi was smoked with certain grasses (as is being done by Robina in the picture below). The larger gourds were for making Ghee which is of sour cream consistency and tastes like blue cheese. It made the perfect gift.

After the short visit, we headed to a wedding with Kwesiga and his wife, Nije. Yes, we went to a wedding. Roberta was really excited for the cultural experience. We had been asked at many farms what I had to pay to Roberta's dad for a dowry. A dowry is a payment towards the brides' family which in this part of the world is usually cattle. I bet Byron is wishing this was the custom in Canada as having 3 daughters he could have gotten 30 cows!!

 Within each tribe the weddings are a bit different. The wedding we attended was actually an arranged marriage. We arrived there in the early afternoon and had some lunch. The actual marriage was happening at the church during this time, but since weddings are so large here, a lot of guests just go to the venue. This is usually done at the groom's family's place. Kwesiga said it was the least amount of people he had seen at a wedding. There was probably 300 once the wedding party arrived. Usually it's 1000! During this time when the wedding party was still away, two MCs entertained the crowd. It was very different as they talked about all the current events going on in the world and talked about the different people arriving in the tents. All of this was in Runyankole but Kwesiga kept updating us. A number of community leaders were called up to talk as well. Since we were the only muzungus, we stuck out in the crowd. I think we were mentioned at least 6 times by the MCs. We were even asked to come up and say a few words. It didn't feel totally right so we just thanked them for their hospitality. Kwesiga ended up talking for a while about what we were doing and giving advice to all the farmers in attendance. It was quite different from what we are used to.

Thankfully once the wedding party arrived, the attention was off of us. It is customary for the bride to walk extremely slow and act inanimate with no expression. The couple cut the cake and then a reverend gave an impassioned speech that got the crowd laughing. After this, many people came up to speak in which a number of cows were apparently gifted to the couple. It was at this time that we decided to slip off as things were winding down.

We were headed up to Queen Elizabeth National Park that night, so we had to say our goodbyes to Kwesiga. It was more like talk to you later as I'm sure we will keep in contact. It was a great experience with VWB in Uganda, but it was time to hit the road again....