Dona and I got reservations to go looking for Mountain Gorillas in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in southwest Uganda on January 15. We didn't have a lot of choice regarding dates by the time we went looking for permits, so we had to arrange the rest of our trip around that. Since we were pressed for time, we flew from Tanzania to Entebbe. You'd think that would be easy; after all, it's right next door, just "up the lake." But no... There is long-lasting enmity between the two countries as a result of the Uganda-Tanzania War of 1979, so there are no direct flights between the two countries. We had to fly from Dar es Salaam to Arusha to Nairobi to Entebbe; a two day ordeal for a 1070 km (660 mi) trip which should only take two hours by plane.
We had a rental car reserved for pick-up at the airport, a Toyota Rav 4. The rental company had no obvious office at the airport, but the agency assured me they would meet us. We stood around for a while and finally I called them; they told us to go to a non-descript little corner office which said nothing about car rentals or the company. But when we stepped inside and introduced ourselves there was someone expecting us; the driver had been there about as long as we had, each of us waiting on the other. The non-multinational rental companies, meaning local ones, probably can't afford to have an office at the airport. They keep their cars off-site and deliver them to the normal passenger drop-off/pick-up parking lot, where they turn them over to the customer. The delivery person makes his/her way back on their own somehow. There must be a number of companies that pool resources and all use the same corner office outside the airport alongside the snack vendors, where they sign papers and turn over the keys. We got checked out, such as it was.
On our way out of town we gave the fellow who had brought the vehicle to the airport a lift back to near his house. That was a good thing, as he showed us the cut-off road we needed to take to head southwest towards Mbarara, Lake Mburo, and Bwindi. It was an unsigned, unimproved, insignificant dirt track, and after we let him out we wondered if we were indeed on the right road. It took us half an hour or so to get to the main paved highway; we stopped on several occasions to ask people if this was the way to the highway to Mbarara; most didn't seem to know much. We were about to get worried when we finally ran into it and turned west.
Our Rav 4, however, did not look like the one in the link above... It was vintage, but not in a good way. Our plan was to grab the car, drive to Mburo National Park, and have a leisurely afternoon looking for birds and other stuff, relaxing and settling in. That was the plan, anyway. We arrived not very well rested, and we needed that rest and relax. But it was not to be. We were pretty frustrated right off the bat — none of the towns we went through were on the map, and there were absolutely no road signs. We didn't even know for sure if the road we were on (the main highway in the whole country going towards the southwest) was really the road we were on. We just assumed it was because nothing else was paved and it was going the right direction.
After about two hours a motorcycle policeman pulled us over. The first thing he asked was why didn't I stop. Uh... How do I know I was supposed to stop? I thought he was just returning the hello wave I gave him back there... The second thing he asked was why I was going 111 km/hr. Huh? I wasn't going more than 80, and the speed limit is 100. We had quite a discussion, about how things work where I come from, how a policeman tells you to stop, what happens if you are going too fast. I told him that where I come from you are allowed to go 15 km/hr over the limit if you are passing someone, and that if it's a first offense and not a lot over you usually get a warning. What I forgot to tell him was that bribery is illegal and if you accept a bribe or solicit one you usually lose your job and can never get another one as a policeman. In the end, all he wanted was a bribe, like every other policeman in Uganda. And Tanzania.
With that out of the way, we carried on, a half hour thrown to the wind. I was really frustrated, as I know I was not doing anywhere near 111 km/hr. At least not according to the speedometer.
About a half hour later, we were about 6 km outside of Masaka town on our way to Mbarara when the engine just died. There was a bit of a shoulder and I pulled over; fortunately Masaka is a pretty large town/city. I checked what I could, which wasn't much without any tools, to no avail. So I called the rental help number and they said they would send a mechanic out from Masaka.
In about 15 minutes a mechanic showed up with a set of tools, riding shotgun on a motorbike. He seemed to know what he was doing, or at least was very familiar with the Rav 4. The engine would turn over fine; he checked for spark, then tried to check the timing belt but couldn't get the cover off. Then he figured it was a fuel problem and began looking for that. Yep, no fuel. It looked like the fuel pump was bad, and it's under one of the rear seats. So we emptied the car and took the rear seat out. About that time he got a call from another mechanic, who had him check fuses. Low and behold, there is an "Ignition" fuse under the instrument cluster. A 7.5 amp fuse was blown. There was even a spare under the hood. We popped it in and voila! we were up and running. An hour lost...
We put the car back together, but I didn't want to continue without another spare fuse. So we took the mechanic back to Masaka town and he and I went looking for another fuse. We found lots of 10A fuses, but no 7.5A ones. Eventually I settled for 10A ones. Another hour lost.
I kept the speed way down, about 50 km/hr according to the speedometer; I had been trying to do 60 - 70 but there were speed-traps everywhere, and unsigned speed-bumps before every little town. The speed limit in towns is 50 km/hr, and you never really knew if you were in a town or not.
But eventually we found the turn off to Lake Mburo National Park. We headed down the dirt road; after about 10 km it started looking a bit less like poor small farms and more like park.
Then we got a real treat! We saw two Crowned Cranes out in a field; they were doing a courtship dance. I started to take pictures and then Dona reminded me I could take a movie. Unfortunately, part way through some local kids on their way home from school decided we were a good mark and came up and stood in front of the camera.
With evening upon us, we checked in to the park and made our way to the campground. The campground is right on Lake Mburo. On our way down to the lake we saw zebra, bushbuck, baboons and impala. The lake is full of hippos, and there were lots of birds around — a nice spot, and it was more or less empty.
We were pretty tired after all our troubles during the day but in good spirits because of the nice setting. We didn't feel like eating much; Dona was still feeling ill, and we didn't have much in the way of food anyway. In addition, we didn't have any fuel for our stove. I had planned on picking up a can of fuel someplace, but we didn't have the opportunity. The small butane cans for our stove appear to be pretty scarce in Uganda and maybe east Africa in general; if available at all, we probably would have had to go into Kampala proper to get one. That is something everything we had read warned us not to do — drive in Kampala. Our Bradt's Guide to Uganda indicated you didn't need a stove, as there was wood for campfires everywhere, so it looked like that would be our best bet.
We set up the tent. It was dry as a bone so we left the fly off and hit the sack. We woke up to the sound of hippos and birds. I got up, made a fire, heated water and boiled some eggs for breakfast. We had a great time checking out all the birds and animals. The monkeys in the campground were a real pest; you couldn't leave anything out for a second or they would grab it. I put a liter of juice down on a bench and walked ten feet to take a picture, trying to keep one eye on the bench; In the time I took a picture a monkey had grabbed and spilled the juice. Grrr...
We spent the morning having a leisurely breakfast and taking pictures of birds in the campground, then did a slow drive around some loops in the park and back out to the highway.
As we headed out of the park we passed some young boys moving a heard of ankole-watusi cows. Boy, do those cows have horns! They were not only long, like Texas longhorns which used to roam wild in the western portion of the United States; they were massive. You could make a heck of an alphorn out of one of those!
Our goal for the day was Queen Elizabeth National Park. On the map it looked easy; the main paved highway from Lake Mburo went west to Mbarara. From there there was a main paved road going north, one going due west, and another heading southwest. We wanted the one going due west. As mentioned earlier, Uganda has virtually no directinal road signs. We came to a fork in the paved highway and took the left one, thinking we were avoiding the road going north. After quite a while it became apparent we were on the wrong one and heading southwest. Never fear, the map showed other roads heading across the hinterlands to the park. We just needed to find one of them. After a bit we came to an actual sign pointing to Queen Elizabeth National Park. We turned off with great delight, confident we were on the home stretch, and that from here on out there would be signs pointing to this important visitor destination. The road was heading west, a good sign. That was the first and last sign we ever saw for Queen Elizabeth National Park.
Uganda, and East Africa in general, is a crazy place. It seems like 95% of the people in a village have absolutely no idea of where they are in relation to anyplace else. We would come to a branch in the road, point down one of them and ask if a town was that direction, and everyone would just put their hands up and indicate they didn't know. Every town we went through had a name that wasn't on our map. We were pretty lost, but we were still heading west. So that part was good. We finally resorted to waving down passing motorbikes; those people ventured farther afield and knew their way around.
While our road was going the right direction, it was also steadily degrading. It got narrower and narrower, rougher and rougher. But the few people on motorbikes said we were heading the right way. Eventually we came up behind a tanker truck carrying fuel, headed our way. That was a really good sign — he wouldn't be out here heading this way if it wasn't a "main" road. Then the road narrowed some more, and over half of it was covered in a steady line of piles of dirt — it was being worked on. That was a good sign too, except it was now so narrow the tanker truck almost tipped over each time he went over one of the piles, one wheel half-way up the pile. The road doesn't look too bad in the images below, but that's because they were taken with a wide-angle lens.
We kept going over ranges of hills, up and down and around and over; there were people and villages tucked in everywhere. Eventually we started descending a bit, and finally came to yet another town not on our map. We stopped a few more people and asked about Ishasha, the town at the south end of Queen Elizabeth National Park, and they indicated we were headed the right way. As nearly as we could tell, the road we were on teed into a road that was supposed to go due south right through the park.
It was getting pretty late in the day, and it wasn't clear we were going to get where we needed to be, which was someplace we didn't know where it was — we needed a place to camp, and if we were in the National Park, we couldn't camp just anywhere. Luck was with us; we came to a sign that said something about "Queen Elizabeth National Park, 2km," and right next to it were three signs for lodges. Our Bradt guide listed all three; based on that information we turned off and headed for At the River. We rolled in about 18:30. It sits on the Ntungwe River and has both camping and "Soft Camping". We decided to splurge and go for the Soft Camping.
I'm not sure we really benefitted much from going the soft camping route. What we got was a hut crammed with two twin beds shoved tight to the walls and barely standing room between them. It was not mosquito-tight but did have a net. No room for a table or a chair; not much different than a tent except you could stand up. They also have larger, more spacious accomodations, but we didn't really need anything more.
Whether camping or soft camping, they have hot showers. As with many places in rural Africa, hot water comes via a "Donkey Boiler," a 55 gallon drum with a fire under it. It was much appreciated.
We arrived just in time for dinner, so we cleaned up a bit and then sat down to a delicious meal of beef roast, rice, veggies, soup with roll, and dessert. They had wine, beer and soft drinks, but no fruit juice, which was disappointing. Coffee accounts for about 20% of Uganda's exports, so we were surprised to see them serving Nescafe. We were pretty tired and crashed right after dinner; Dona was coming down with my cold or whatever it was, and I was worried it would hit her right when we needed to be feeling good to look for gorillas a few days later.
As advertised, the place is on the Ntungwe River. It's a pretty stream; muddy and low at the time we were there.
We didn't see as many birds as we had hoped the evening we arrived; nor did we see much the next morning at first. When we drove in we went through a km or so where the locals were conducting a controlled burn, so the air was pretty smokey. That's probably one reason for the lack of birds and butterflies. There also weren't many trees flowering or fruiting; we obviously weren't at the best time. But as we were preparing to leave a small group of Ross's Turacos came in, which was a treat. We saw birds back in the depths of the trees across the river but never got a really good look at them.
We got glimpses of a really pretty big green butterfly, and also a big blue one. But they were uncooperative and we didn't get any pictures. Bummer!
However, as we were driving back out to the main road we went through some tall grass with lots of seed heads, and there were quite a few birds messing around in there — sunbirds, bee-eaters, widowbirds, and others.
We found a few butterflies and dragonflies too. But again, not as many as we had hoped.
On our way out we went past a small shop which, judging by the sign, uses its proceeds to help orphans. We didn't check that, but we did buy a few things. There was a cool short-tailed gecko on one of the posts. I don't know if s/he was born that way or if it got chopped off somehow. Since geckos are autotomous, they can lose their tail as a defensive mechanism. Seems like a nice feature to have, especially if you have a long tail! But if I were a lizard, I'd feel better if it would grow back completely too. How would you feel at the lizard ball with only half a tail?
We left "At the River" and entered the Southernmost part of Queen Elizabeth National Park. We were just going to be passing through, but we were hoping to see some interesting things along the way. However, we were also concerned about how long it might take us to get to our real destination, in the southernmost part of Bwindi Impenetrable National Park.
The road through Queen Elizabeth National Park was straight, flat, potholed and dusty. It was also somewhat uninspiring. We stopped occasionally to look for birds and butterflies, but there wasn't much going on. Most people visit this part of the park to see "Tree Climbing Lions." The advertisements all say this is the only place in the world where lions climb trees, or at least that is what they would like you to believe. We've seen lions in trees on other occasions, and decided we'd rather spend our time in less crowded places looking for more colorful and to us more interesting things.
After passing through Queen Elizabeth National Park, the countryside became more varied. At first we were traversing foothill farmland, but as we got further along it turned more to tea plantations. Our permits to track Gorillas were in the Ruhija section of Bwindi Imepnetrable National Park. This is a more remote section of the southern part of the park, and to get to it we had to drive through the park and up and over some of the lower mountains. Somewhere along the way we crossed a bridge where four guys were staring up into the trees with cameras and spotting scopes. We stopped; they were from Hungary and obviously looking for birds. Their eyes were much better than ours, and had found a black sunbird way up high plus a few others as well as some monkeys. Once we entered Bwindi park itself, the road wound up and around, then down and across, then up and around, then down and across..., It was interesting terrain, and we stopped frequently to look around. It got steadily steeper, but fortunately the road was in pretty good condition. We went through a few villages where we stopped to inquire if we were still on the right track and were assured we were.
Fortunately the turn off to our lodging at Broadbill Forest Camp was well marked, or we would never have taken it. It was a steep, rutted, uninviting two-track, and I was very thankful it had not rained too much in the preceeding couple of days and we had a four-wheel drive somewhat higher-clearance vehicle.
When we arrived the receptionist told us the campsites were unavailable because of some construction they were doing. They initially wanted to put us in one of their tented camps, but then someone in the construction area broke the water line to the tents, so we ended up in one of their "cottages". I would have preferred the tent, but the cottage worked out ok. It was not mosquito-tight and did not have a net, but we had our own which we could rig. The more annoying part was the windows had semi-permanent blinds so it was dark inside. We ended up proping the blinds up with Dona's hiking poles so we could see out a bit and let some light in.
I chose Broadbill Forest Camp as our place to stay for several reasons. It was only a few km from where we needed to be in the park to start our gorilla trek, and it has excellent birding on the camp grounds. The owner, Emmy Gongo, is an avid birder and is restoring native forest to attract more birds. After we got settled in he took us out and showed us around, helping us identify quite a few of the locals.
Broadbill Forest Camp literaly sits on the border of Bwindi Impenetrable Park. There is a wide gash cut in the forest along the border of the park to delineate it. It is probably a good idea given the problems the park services in many countries have with poachers, our own (United States of America) included. The cut also provided a nice place to walk looking for birds.
There were Blue Monkeys that frequented the grounds, as well as a wide variety of birds, butterflies, and a Jackson's (three-horned) chameleon.
Dona was busy on her knees with the flowers...
Dona also chased down lots of flutterbyes. They fluttered a lot, but she is persistent!
The day came for our meet-up with the gorillas. It had rained the night before and I was a little worried about getting back out to the main road, but the Rav 4 did a great job of negotiating down the rutted, muddy track and back up the other side to the main park road.
We checked in with the rangers and were assigned to a group. In the Ruhija part of the park there are only four gorilla groups habituated to people, so the maximum number of groups that can go out on any given day is four; the maximum group size is eight. On this day, like almost every day, there were four groups. Since we were old geezers we were assigned to the bunch looking for the Bitukura group; apparently they are usually closer to the ranger station so getting to them is usually not as arduous as the other groups.
There were only seven in our bunch: two women from Australia, a woman from Japan, two young women from New York University in New York, and Dona and me.
We had two guides; our main guide was Sarah. In addition, we had two armed guards, Abraham and David. Three trackers, Bernard, Luke and Ivan, had already headed out in the forest a half-hour or so before. They were in radio contact with our guides. This basically allowed us to hike along hacked out trails in the rainforest until we were relatively close to the gorillas. Once we were close, the guides would hack out a crude path to get right to them. In addition to our guides and trackers, it was possible to hire a porter to carry your backpack. I had even read that on occasion a porter has carried a person who wasn't really up to the trek. After seeing what was involved, that would be quite a job. In our situation, because Dona was still feeling a bit weak, we decided to hire a porter to carry her pack with her lunch, raingear, and a few other things. It wouldn't fit in my day pack, which I had stuffed with my raingear, camera gear, lunch, and a first aid kit. Dona was the smart one, as she wore her gaiters; I wore rainpants instead, but gaiters would have been better on this day.
Before we headed out we got some quick instructions on behavior. We were to be relatively quiet. We were not to try to touch the gorillas, although it was ok if the gorillas initiated contact with us. Once we got close to the gorillas, we were not to have hiking poles with us. We headed out about 08:30, following a trail that went up a ridge. The forest was not as dense as I had feared it would be, or at least it didn't seem that way because we were following a reasonably well-used trail.
Once we got close, we dived off the ridge, following the guides as they hacked their way down. It was slippery and steep. We passed an unoccupied nest up in a tree, and shortly afterwards saw our first gorilla some distance away up in a tree. Gorillas build a new nest every day, so they must get pretty good at it. It had taken us about two hours all told.
Shortly thereafter we came up to one of the older silverbacks. I'm not certain of the names I have placed on these gorillas, as I couldn't find any identifying pictures on the web and I didn't write them all down at the time. The first male we came upon I think was Rukumu; he is an older silverback but not the alpha male.
At this point Dona and I were starting to get a bit annoyed at some of our group members and our guides. The two young women and one of the Australians were constantly chatting; they were more interested in taking selfies than observing the gorillas. We were disappointed in our guides for not telling them to shut up. If I were one of the gorillas I would have been thoroughly annoyed. The young women were incredibly unobservant and disrespectful of the wildlife they had paid so much to come see.
The gorillas were quite spread out. It seemed like each individual or female with kids had their own little spot where they were chowing down. There seemed to be very little communication amongst them while we were there.
Our guides cut a few shrubs and vines so we could more easily continue, and we moved across and downslope to see some of the others.
Ndahura is the dominant male, or at least he was at the time of our visit. I think he is the male in the photos below. He was sitting in a pile of ferns, not doing much; occasionally nibbling on a leaf. One of the fingers of his right hand is injured and he cannot bend it, so it is constantly extended. Depending on what he is doing, it often looks like he is giving you the finger, something he would be quite justified in doing. As with all of the group members we encountered, he seemed pretty much unconcerned by our presence.
As can be seen in almost all of these photos, there were swarms of tse-tse flies pestering the gorillas. One of the young women from NY kept babbling that all she wanted to do was give Ndahura a big hug. If she had, the tse-tse flies probably would have put an end to that idea, and maybe the rest of us and the gorillas would have had a little peace and quiet.
We had left Rukumu behind us when we went on to see Ndahura. While we were observing Ndahura one of the guides nudged me and pointed behind us. Rukumu was coming down the "trail" towards us. He was heading right for me; I just stood there and watched. He sat down a meter or so away, as if used to this kind of a traffic jam. He seemed not particularly intrested in any of us. I was surprised he was so disinterested, despite my close presence. I expected him to at least show some curiosity.
We continued on and came to a female with a young baby. I think this is probably the one reported here. Again, they were completely unconcerned about our presence, despite us being almost close enough to reach out and touch them. Every other wild animal I have encountered with a young child is extremely protective of them, but apparently these particular gorillas are so accustomed to humans they don't see them as a threat. That is probably not good for their long-term prospects; all humans are not as harmless as we were.
We had been watching the mother and her baby for quite some time. The baby had been clambering around, venturing up and down the tree branches a few meters, always returning to the safety of his mother. The baby would peer at us with a somewhat bewildered look, but never ventured or reached out towards us.
Mom was less interested. For a minute I thought she might reach out and touch me, but like the others she was not partiularly interested in us. At one point see began rearranging her position in the tree, and much to our surprise she fell! I'm not sure if she actually fell completely out of the tree or not, but she definitely slipped from her perch and had to rearrange. She was pretty close to the ground to start with, but I did not expect a healthy adult gorilla to slip and fall.
Our one hour limit was soon up; our guides cleared a path straight up the hillside to the ridge and we left the Bitukura gorilla group to spend the rest of their day in undisturbed-by-humans peace.
We were back at the road by 12:30. Since we had a long drive back to Entebbe, we wanted to get at least part of it out of the way. We headed south, continuing on the road we had come in on. We had been assured by the folks at Broadbill Forest Camp that the road we needed was the one towards Kabale, and that when we reached the pavement of the main highway, we should just turn left. That would head us towards Mbarara, and from there we knew more or less how to get back. As we wandered through small villages we stopped on several occasions and asked if we were going the right way. Some people looked at us in bewilderment, but whenever we found someone on a motorbike they would point the way we were going confidently and assure us we were going the right way.
We made it to the highway and then began the frustrating drive back. Somewhere along the way we found a straight stretch of road designed to calibrate speedometers. Whoppie! We clocked what was austensibly one km, then did some calculations. Surprise... our speedo was off — a lot. It turns out the gears driving it were apparently in miles per hour, but had a faceplate that said km per hour. So when it said 60 kph, we were actually doing 60 mph — 96 kph. No wonder I was having trouble. With that firmly in mind, I adjusted as best I could, but we eventually got stopped by yet another policeman. I managed to frustrate him by insisting any speed problem was our rental car and rental agency's problem. What was I supposed to do? The speedometer said 50 km / hr., and the rental agency didn't tell us it actually registered miles / hr.
We wanted to spend the night at Lake Mburo National Park again, so we turned off at an entrance different from the one we went in on our first visit. Once again there were no signs and no-one knew where we were. The route is an obscure one, seldom used, and we were soon lost. After much wandering around, during which we never actually entered the park, we ended up back at the highway. We drove on down a ways and then decided to stay at a tented camp near the park but not in it. We figured we needed to get to Entebbe and wouldn't have the relaxed, open-ended type of day we needed to go poking about looking for animals. We stayed at Eagle's Nest Tented Camp. It's perched on a hill overlooking Lake Mburo, and we were treated to a nice sunset.
The next day we made our way back to Entebbe. We spent our afternoon and evening at the Botanical Garden. We saw some cool birds but were disappointed in what seemed like an almost complete lack of places nearby to eat. We finally got hamburgers at a bar on the beach on Lake Victoria. The burgers were good, but I made the mistake of leaving my bottle of seven-up on the table while I went to take some pictures of kingfishers and bee-eaters. It was still there when I got back, but when I went to take a drink I got stung by a bee which had crawled inside. My lip was a bit sore for the next day or so.
There was a great diversity of birds down by the waters of Lake Victoria. Unfortunately, like much of the rest of the world which once harboured abundant wildlife and fish, growing population pressures are having devastating effects on Lake Victoria.
The airport at Entebbe was easy to find and get to, much to our relief. Dropping off the rental car went smoothly, now that we knew where the "office" of the rental car outfit was.
While sitting in the airport waiting for our flight we were approached by a couple of students who introduced themselves by saying something like "You look like adventuresome people, do you mind telling us what you're doing here?" We were a bit surprised and not sure what it was all about, thinking maybe we were going to get asked to donate to some cause, join a church, or who knows what. We told them where we were from and answered a few questions but didn't really volunteer much and they headed off. Some time later, another woman approached and introduced herself as Kimber McCay, a professor of anthropology at the University of Montana. The students who had approached us were part of a group she was leading. We had a nice chat and learned a little about what they were doing. I felt bad about not being more open with the students when they first approached us.
The next day we flew back to Tanzania via Kenya, eager to start our walking safari with our favorite Tanzanian guide company, Dorobo.
