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Uganda 2018

Uganda, ""the Pearl of Africa. Winston Churchill coined that term in his book "My African Journey". Uganda is lush and you see green everywhere you look. I was there in the rainy season so I am sure that helps to make it look so fresh and prosperous. The mountains stay green all year round but the rest dries out and turns brown during the very dry season from June to September.

The airport I flew into is a short drive to the town of Entebbe on the north shore of Lake Victoria. Across the lake on a clear day, I was told you may be able to see Rwanda but somehow I doubt it as it is a very big lake. The largest freshwater lake in Africa in fact and second largest in the world, it was named after Queen Victoria. Water flows from the Kangera River and out to the White Nile. The natives called it Lake Nayanza. Our own Lake Superior is the only fresh water lake that is larger than Lake Victoria. The differnce being no antibiotics needed after swimming in Lake Superior. Entebbe is the home of the botanical gardens and the Uganda Wildlife Education Centre. Ngambo island is just off the shore and is a sanctuary for abandoned and sick chimpanzees. There are many islands just off the shore from Entebbe, called Ssese islands. The largest ones have palm oil plantations on them. Tea plantations also abound here.

Ugandans are friendly and helpful. They depend on tourism to live. They are super helpful and friendly to the tourists. Many live below the poverty line and the country remains among the poorest in the world. Poor health care, education and nutrition contribute to the poverty but likely corrupt governments are a big cause. Child mortality rates are really high, around 13 %.

There are 22 tribes in Uganda, the most prominent one is called Buganda. they speak Iuganda as their main language but up in the mountains they speak other languages, Roshiga, Rotingo and many others.

Just arriving at our hotel , the Central Inn on church street waiting to be able to go into our room, I sat down in the lobby to people watch. This very tall black young man sat beside me and introduced himself to me as Peter. He was from Kenya. Peter Mwangi was attending an addictions conference at the hotel as he was training to be an addictions counsellor. He told me stories of his childhood living in the slums of Nairobi. Eye opening and heartbreaking commentary on ghetto life. He was dedicated to helping others out of the life of crime and addiction and out of the slums. He lived a life of addictions being the oldest son of about 9 children, a father long gone and a mother that could not cope. He was expected to help the family financially and emotionally and he felt overwhelmed and depressed so he started to self medicate with illicit drugs then ended up on the streets in the slums living a life of crime and drugs and loneliness. A christian organization was holding sports games close by and he attended and found that they were caring and compassionate and wanted to be like them. He learned about the hope they had in Jesus and gave over his life to God. I did not know at the time but I would keep in contact with Peter and help him with connections to addiction counsellors in Canada to help him set up his own hospital for many of the lost boys in the slums. He too set up sports games to get the youth to attend and hear the word of God. The stories Peter told are ones that would make your blood boil, the abuse, the horror. It is a miracle he is alive or his friends he spoke of.

I headed out in the morning of the first day in Uganda to check out the famous botanical gardens. I met a few locals and learned a lot about the flora and fauna , medicinal plants and birds of Uganda. Vervet and colobus monkeys entertained as we all served them ground nuts. A volunteer student named Bright Sisb was our Tour guide around the gardens. As a student of biology, he plans on exporting spices from his grandmother's land in a couple years. Great contact for Colleen, my travel companion, as her husband wants to start an import of spices business. He said nutmeg, vanilla and coffee were on the menu. Men with camo uniforms and large rifles wander the streets and the gardens. A bit intimidating and not at all comforting to me.

Humungous safari ant (termite) hills

Bright showed us how they use these creatures from the big hill homes to suture up wounds. When you pick them up, they open up their calliper like mouth parts and you put them on the closed wound where they clamp down and hold the laceration closed. I tried it on my shirt, seemed to be quite effective, actually really hard to remove.

Bright, our tour guide through the botanical gardens

The termite hills were found everywhere, peoples front gardens, sides o f the road, fields. There are three types in each hill, the Royals, the workers and the soldiers. The soldiers are the ones with the pincers used to close wounds.

My driver was named Willy. He was a crazy driver but I think they all are in Uganda. There are so many potholes they drive around that it is hard to determine which side of the road they actually drive on. It is the left. It is exhausting just watching our driver take the rutted and muddy narrow mountain roads on the way to Bwindi to see the gorillas. Willy took the hair pin turns in the rain on those muddy, narrow mountain roads at an alarming speed. You can see the edges of the road careening down the mountainside in rivers of mud. We once were driving so fast and got very stuck in a mud puddle, not going anywhere. No worries Willy just sat and waited. For what we wondered. But in no time at all, 5 guys with shovels, hoes and machetes just showed up. They dug and pushed and pulled us out all for 10,000 Ugandan shillings as a tip for all 5. It was about $1.50 CDN. Boda boda are the motorcycles that carry EVERYTHING including tourists and the small mini buses everywhere are called Mutata.

Driving in the crowded towns causes even more adrenal fatigue. At any one time you can, if you dare, look out the windshield and see cars headed quickly in all directions at the same time. It seems like several are on their way into your front seat at any moment. Seat belts are not even available.

On the way we stopped at the tourist spot on the equator. We watched as the water swirled in small fountains in opposite directions only 3 feet away from each other on either side of the 0 latitude line. . We stood with one foot on either side of the equator and even got a certificate to prove I was there. The equator goes through 13 countries, 7 of them in Africa.

Willy for all his driving faults, always made sure we were well taken care of and would let us know if people were trustworthy or not.

The main reason for the visit to Uganda changed from a missions trip to help a local veterinarian with a side trip to see the gorillas to the Gorilla visit being the main focus. Unfortunately the missions trip was cancelled for really crazy reasons, but such is life.

Bwindi impenetrable national park is the official name of the area we were headed to. One needs to get a permit to go Gorilla Trekking and they go fast at the beginning of the year so I jumped on the permit bandwagon in January to get a spot. Apparently it is cheaper to trek in Uganda than in Rwanda but it is still not that cheap. Then there is trekking in the Congo, not going there. When I was climbing the mountains and you could actually see the DR Congo, they were having an ebola outbreak in the Congo. The park has been a UNESCO world heritage site since 1994 due to its great ecological biodiversity. I was told that Uganda has the largest numbers of the endangered mountain gorilla species in the world. Uganda's economy is dependent on visitors travelling to see the mountain gorillas.

So we were briefed by Medi, our guide, at the main building on arrival about the rules around the gorillas then headed out on our trek. I think there were about 8 of us in the group and about 5 staff, two with guns and the others were trackers who raced around to track down the gorillas. Trekking up and down the very lush , well vegetated mountain sides in the heat was hard work but worth it. I was glad I wasn't there in the hot summer days. It was cool for the locals who were wearing their coats. They even said it is too hot in the summer time so I likely would have wilted away. We searched for hours, some of the gorilla trackers went off in different directions keeping in contact with us via walky talkies to give us directions to find a family of Gorillas. We finally came upon a family of them playing and eating and resting. We were at about 2300 meters and the rules said we could stay with this family of gorillas for one hour. I was within 7 meters of a massive silver back, dominant male as he ate his breakfast. They said he weighed about 260 kg. He did not seem too concerned about us taking pictures and staring at him. Two guys with the large rifles sat down and just watched us. They did not seem to be too worried. Later one told me the guns were to protect us from the forest elephants, not the gorilla's. No elephant in his right mind would be on that steep a mountainside.

Silverback

The park has 35 known gorilla groups although only 17 groups have been habituated for research and open for tourism.

Later we went on a chimpanzee trek as well. We had to run to keep up with these fast moving monkeys and I wasn't able to get many pictures that were not all blurred. Such a difference between the gorillas and the chimps.

Hearing the Chimps was never hard, just finding them close enough for a photo.

Constantly on the move.

Finally one stopped to rest an I was able to get a decent photo

Lake Bunyonyi where I learned the fate of unwed mothers in Uganda

On a hot summer day after our Gorilla trek we decided to go on a tour of a local lake, Lake Bunyonyi where I met Sunday Tonny, the director of Nyabinombe community project, a project that took care of the poor children in the area by selling crafts from their tiny craft huts to the tourists. He also gave tours by dugout canoe around the lake. He told stories that are hard to hear. He started to say that he had no money to pay the bride price for a wife so he stayed single and he was at that time too old to get married, he was 30. The bride price was usually paid in livestock. He said that today the bride price is usually about 10 cows and 5 goats. More cows if the bride was pretty and educated with a good temperament. Who decides that I wonder? Men of money take many wives. Marrying off a virgin daughter was the only way to get a bride price. He said he may try to get a wife from Akampene, or in english, Punishment Island, as no bride price was needed. He went on to say in his very soft but broken english that unwed pregnant girls brought shame to their families and robbed the family of much needed wealth so were either thrown off a cliff where none survived or rowed out to this island in the middle of the lake and left to starve to death. No mention of what happened to the man that impregnated her either by rape or otherwise. The stories made your head spin as you look around at the beauty of the lake and the islands listening to horrific stories of cruelty. We paddled up to a little hut where the crafts were on display for purchase. This is the way they made money to feed the poor that camped on their property. Paddling back from the craft hut back to where we launched the canoe, Sunday told of some of the fisherman that lived on the lake , how they would go to the island and take a wife, being without finances to buy one. Thanks to them, many of the girls on punishment island were saved from death of starvation. Even though the practice of punishing unwed mothers has for years been deemed illegal, Sunday says it still happens now and then.

This lake was formed from a river when a volcano erupted and obstructed the flow, they call it a crater lake. It is the third deepest lake in the world, the first is in Russia and the second in Tanzania. It is 900 meters at the deepest point. We paddled around in dug out canoes.

Another boat ride in Uganda on Lake Victoria garnered more horrific stories this time about the genocide in Rwanda. Entebbe is a town on a peninsula in Lake Victoria of Central Uganda . Lido beach was close by and a busy place. The capital city of Kampala was just south of there also on the shores of Lake Victoria. Locals talk of Queen Elizabeth II being in Entebbe with her husband when she learned of her fathers death and that she would become Queen, way back in 1952. The Rwandan genocide between the Tutsi's and the Hutus militia is another piece of history touching this area as the massacre happened just next door back in 1994. It was estimated that 10,000 bodies from the massacres were dumped into the water as the Hutus believed they were sending the deceased Tutsis back to Ethiopia where they believed they came from and the bodies moved with the current down the Kangera River into Lake Victoria on the way to Uganda instead of Ethiopia creating an acute health hazard. It is quite a distance from the shores in Rwanda to Entebbe but it seems the fish were eating the bodies and the fishermen were finding toes and finger bones etc in the fish they caught. Wild animals and dogs were scavenging the dead bodies as well. A cholera epidemic was in the making but he Health Ministry of Uganda was educating villagers to boil all drinking water and to cook all fish thoroughly. The fishermen today still open the fish guts looking for body parts from that gruesome time.

Awesome accomodations at Bush Lodge In Queen Elizabeth Park

Our budget accommodations were beautiful. The best part was the outdoor shower.

We were picked up and dropped off here each night. They fed us well.

Boat cruises or safaris daily from the lodge and a visit to the pigmy village were awesome.

The surrounding areas around the national parks are occupied by the Batwa people who originally lived in the park forest but later they were forced to leave the national park and the government settled them around the park. The Batwa are the shortest people (pygmies) in the world, they are fruit gatherers, hunters in the forest. Their traditional lifestyle is so amazing that they put on a little show for a few dollars to demonstrate how they used to live. They danced and sang, showed us how they hunted with bow and arrow and started a fire by rubbing sticks together. They they took those flaming grasses inside their grass hut. Living on the edge I guess. During our visit to their tribe, it started to pour and the rain game down in torrents. They took us to the pigmy school house and we took shelter in one of the classrooms. There were windows but no glass and the sound of the rain was very loud but the children danced and sang and got us dancing too. I laugh everytime I watch the videos from that day. I had a blast.

Pigmy Tribes

Rubbing sticks together to make a fire. They made it look easy

The ladies looked older before their time.

The men put on their head dress before they took us on a tour to see how they used bow and arrow to catch their dinner.

Queen Elizabeth Park Boat Safari

What a blast, so many birds, so many hippos! We boated around George Lake to Kasinga channel and out to Lake Edward. Then we turned around before it was DR Congo.