Letting a little Loose: Three Days of Safari!

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Near the Kazinga Channel between Lakes Edward and George, our tent cabins were just inside the Park. When we arrived, gleeful with our 'posh' tents, and aching to explore after a day in the van, the waterbuck we saw by the side of the road were incredible, wild animals. By the end of the day, they were boring, fare for the more interesting predators that I just hoped would appear and gore one of them. Yes, I can say that because I haven't watched a goring up close. But honestly, that's the only thing I missed!

The next three days were spent with game drives in the morning and afternoon or evening. In the middle hours activities were planned, which included a boat ride, a hike to a bat cave (next entry), and a stroll around the surrounding Park.

When we drove onto the two-rut roads of the Park's Game Trails, the top of the van was popped, and I was standing on a seat cushion, peering through my binoculars, looking for lions. I saw an elephant, just mosying through the tall grasses. The animals are huge. Beautiful, awesome, intelligent... HUGE.

The next day, during a pre-twilight drive, a large family of elephants began crossing the road. The large bulls and females guarded the young and weak, keeping themselves between the tourists and their charges. A tourist combi (read: van with adjustable roof for animal viewing) was gradually approaching the line, and a bull noticed. The bull was at least a foot taller than the toyota combi, meaning that it's softball-sized eye would have been level with mine, peaking over the roof, but it trumpeted and went for the approaching van. Trunk swinging, heavy trunks of legs springing back and onto the earth with tons of force, the bull made his warning charge. This is unmistakable: you know when you have offended an elephant, and every driver at Queen Elizabeth knows that the bull can and will demolish your vehicle if you continue to push after the first charge. The brake lights appeared, and the bull relaxed. I have on video the charge of the neighboring van, and the trumpet-soundings of warning. Despite my fanstasy of being inside the van that gets toppled by an angered elephant, I was relieved that nothing transpired. These animals are dinosaurs, they are huge, and they are powerful, and we should let them be.

That first game drive was full of awe and speculation. We saw the Uganda colts and warthogs (honestly, one of the most ugly animals on the planet. I say this out of respect, because it is with great dedication that evolution created the bony beast. With alert dogs' ears, delicate legs, and tusks, tusks that stick out like weapons but are visible under taught skin, up the cheeks to the skull where they appear to be trying to escape, inside, overall, the bulk of a small labrador.

But I digress. The cape buffalo with their symbiotic bird-friends, who we know, after that afternoon, can piss for over a minute, were lethargic in mud pits, their horns (antlers? bone -appendages?) painted in matted gray from the drying mud, catching traces of the setting sun. Everything was beautiful. The waterbuck were everywhere, herds of docile deer-like creatures in small valleys among the greenest grasses, with the large males guarding the herds from thirty meters away, spread out and watching the grasses. I guess it was the lack of predators from that point that inspired me to wish for a lion, but I wanted the cliche national geographic  hunt.

As we turned to head back for dinner, I was in awe of the scenery, which I tried desperately to catch with my camera, as a red-hot sun lit up its sphere of the sky and descended upon a pastoral that seemed both Japanese Folkloric and African Serengeti. The trunks of trees were thin, but the foliage spread out like arms, filling in an ovular space with their dry reaches, and the tops were flattened, I imagined, by the oppression of the heat that it basked under. Mountains rolled out in the distance with harsh peaks and smooth contours, and the grasses were tall and frangible. Where there was chlorophyll still in the grasses, the yellows were dyed in the sunlight, and a gorgeous mix of light and life colored the scene around us.

All of a sudden, a hush rush of wind pulled at us as we passed a tree surrounded by bushes, and the long and thick abdomen of a python propelled itself into the brambles. The rich deep green of the snake had a glimmer to it, and the power of the thing pulled the space and grass around it until it disappeared into the whispering bush. OK, so words fail me, but I'm just trying to get across that this thing was a massive constrictor, and it did not want to be spotted.

To be at this place, and to be without worry, seemed criminal, and because I am never free from introspection, it drove me to explore the next day.

The second day we took a rather touristy boat ride up the Channel, which brought us close to hippopotami, water buffalo, and more elephants, but was designed with bird-watchers in mind, who were very happy. I tried to capture the hippopotami, which fascinate me because they look so docile (especially if you were raised on Disney's Fantasia images of the beasts), but are actually the perpetrators of more tourist fatalities than any other species encountered in this region. What's more, hippos are herbivores, known to venture into ominivorism, so deaths must be triggered by perceived trespasses or the aggressive nature of the species.

We also saw some large crocodile, sunning themselves at the water's edge, looking perfectly deadly and oh so dangerous. I remembered a bit of trivia I learned about alligators, that they have the power to propel themselves out of the water with their muscular tails, up to the height of their tails. If this was true for the crocs, had the boat's captain been as interested in the reptiles as the birds, then I imagined a crocodile wrestling itself onto the lower decks by all the missionaries. Perhaps it is my nature to dramatize an already thrilling afternoon, but there you have it, and I was just tired of listening to ex-pats talk about the 'woes of the natives.' At the end of our tour, the boat headed a bit inland, so that the tourists could take pictures of the fishermen and their longboats. The sloppy transition from birds to people felt a little odd.

After that afternoon, spying a bit on the matched-shirt groups discussing the pitiful conditions they were there to relieve, I went with a couple of friends for a walk around the village just down the road from our camp. About a half kilometer down the road, which was new, dug up and matted down fudge-rich soil, a small village contained the houses of the local families. The men were out fishing or working at the Park, and the women sat at their stoops, watching the children and visiting. From a distance, the children spotted us, and yelled "mzungu!" while running down a short slope toward us. Others stayed behind, shy of the strangers. They approached us and asked their English questions, while their timid peers watched a few feet away.

Feeling more like an outsider than before, I kept walking, making mental notes of the houses- some concrete with cold, smooth lines, most mud-thatch with a frame of thin boughs covered in the gray matted earth. After we had followed all the trails in our vicinity, and walked down to the lake, a bit too close for comfort to a floating, apparently lonely, hippo, we walked back for dinner.

The next day, we spotted a jaguar in the grasses on our drive, its tail aloft like a telescope. A kilometer or so down the trail, I was sitting on the back edge of the combi, and flies noticably starting buzzing around us. It made me remark on the absence of insects thus far, before realizing that these few clues, what with a hyena guarding a area blocked by shrubbery up ahead, and vultures circling above, meant one thing: carrion. This was a kill spot, and we missed it. It was intriguing, believe me, to identify this in myself- I always hide my eyes when a kill happens on national geographic. But here, maybe I wanted nature to prove herself to me, which is honestly pitiful.