Images flushed of the days
we would take 5 days to a week just to get to Arua, the days when our only
airline was unreliable that the option to 45 minutes journey was 5 to 7 days
and that is if you reached alive!
Without the Fokker
friendship it was a nightmare of a trip, hanging high above on a truck of goods,
people and animals for there was no choice if you had to travel between Arua
and Kampala! A journey of bumps, man holes, mosquitoes and scorpions in the
night, we were told tales of “Jok jok” the spirit of the night that presented
in form of a fire ball or the “abiba” the invisible spirit of the wind,
traveling sometimes at 10kms per hour we saw fresh wreckage of fighting from
previous encounters while engulfed in a sea of green men on a stretch of less
than 30kms…
Sometimes coming to a
complete hold in the advent of a possible ambush … it was the most dreaded
journey of the times! However our parents insisted that we needed to understand
that we came from this part of the world! Sometimes I wondered whether it was a
worthwhile venture….
Anyhow that was back in the day however fresh it sounds, so you can imagine the anguish when my friends from the
International community asked about a good place to go see wild animals, I
quickly suggested Queen
Elizabeth National Park…
I was not excited about Murchison Falls National Park,
it was a memory of a dim hope, a memory of time lost, lives lost, wild animals
lost, a memory so inhuman that was not worth thinking about, I just didn’t
want to share my pain with my International friends and so I reluctantly agreed
to the change of plans…
We were soon off to
Masindi, the traffic out of Kampala was crawling, it was already evening rush
hour by the time we hit the freeway, it was getting dark however we were
determined to spend the night in Masindi, something you could not think about
back in time…. Driving at night! Snaking through the dark highway
illuminated by our headlamps we drove through Luwero and turned to the west at
Kafu to Masindi.
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| The Restaurant at Kabalega Resort |
The TV was basic, something
was wrong with the channels, so I turned to my laptop and watched the water flowing and listening to the sound of
wind from my last video made from the tour of Kapchorwa slowly
drifting off to dreamland wishing for Reiki to work... I dreamed of a peaceful
world and prayed for all those still engaged in hopeless wars…
I dreamed of a
world without fire arms… and then went to sleep listening to the sound of the
night insects just outside my window!
Unlike the previous night
the morning was a buzz of activity, many tourists leaving barely before the
sun rose, to have a very early game drive … “you might chance seeing the king
of the jungle” they said. The lion was the hardest animal to see… We had a quiet
late breakfast and agreed we would do the game drive the next day.
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| Monkeys on the road at Budongo Forest |
Slowly driving into the
park we got into the thick budongo forest, it was cooler, darker and a habitat
for monkeys, birds and countless insects…
The road was narrow and
dump with moisture from the plants, the monkeys seemed to own this part of the
park walking all over the road and only leaving when motorists insisted on
passing by, we braved on passing over some narrow bridges.
We finally got to
Sambiya River Lodge. Having booked to spend the
night at Sambiya, we dropped off our luggage and were advised that here humans
lived in harmony with animals, watching some buffaloes grazing nearby... they
seemed harmless, however we had to be escorted just in case they
were hanging around the verandas outside our cottages …
Anyway we did not
temper with their space… we were soon off to catch the boat cruise the
highlight of the afternoon…
Cruising slowly against the
tide, some brown earth like/inverted basket like objects appeared and
disappeared from the surface of the Nile, they looked like none living objects
with birds perching on them from time to time… when the hippos emerged from the
water, they were indeed a mass of one of the largest animals I’ve seen, they
moved together near the shores of the Nile they kept their distance and we did
not dare get very close too…
Under the water must be a
whole world with its governors, highways, cities, villages and shopping centres
and innovation hubs… I mused watching the waves form behind the boat as they faded in the distance I took it all in…
Soon the boat slowed again
this time there was a wild pig at the shores looking keenly at us but not bothered at all,
in the far distance was a large parade of elephants young and old flapping
their ears and grazing like we didn’t exist, they went about business as usual…
Further upstream we were cruising, when the boat slowed down again, there at
the shore was a lone crocodile with an open mouth, collecting its prey, it was
dead still, you could swear it was dead, we did not hang around too long, lest
we suffer its wrath …
Soon we came to a curve
slowly opening up to the falls far in a distance… It's indeed a miracle to
see water en-mass forced through a barely 6 meter wide tunnel, the water flows
with so much force and gusto that particles fly high up into the air to form
some kind of rain in the surrounding areas, looking at the falls from the upper
side one sees a trough that looks like a death pit, Smokey white water fighting
for space to the lower grounds further down the Nile - we felt the raindrops
and the violence of the water against the rock…
This indeed was the climax of day one, having seen the bottom and the top of the falls, we drove quietly back to Sambiya for the night, except for a sharp bite from a Tsetse fly, which I think made me sleep like a baby in my cottage little did I see or hear in the night – I guess the animals also slept quietly.
Part 2 coming soon...
