Living the Good Life: 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.