Adventures in East Africa

Uganda may not be the first country you associate with African Safari destinations, but its Queen Elizabeth National Park and environs offer a wealth of opportunities for the adventurous traveler to explore. Not only does the 2,000 square mile park boast the Maramagambo Forest, the wild and beautiful Kyambura Game Reserve populated with all the animals you want to see, it also shares borders with diverse and vitally important Parks, most in the neighboring countries.

Like many territories where geography supporting multiple ecosystems varies epically, Queen Elizabeth National Park spreads out over ancient volcanic grounds. Nearby are Kibale National Park, home to one of the Jane Goodall Institute’s Chimpanzee Reserves; the so-called Impenetrable Forest; the crater Lake Katwe, which at a luxurious 13% saline is the scene of constant harvesting, providing salt to all of Uganda and Kenya; and Bwindi National Park, protecting the Mountain Gorilla, now down to about 800 in the world.

Across the political borders, Parc national des Volcans in Rwanda is the site of Dian Fossey’s famous gorilla studies, where a conservation effort currently keeps prices on Gorilla Tours expensive and competitive, but helps to protect the oft-affable species. Just over the border, is Virungu National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, containing the remainder of Mountain Gorilla territory. Thus, the scope of this region, with far more destinations than I fit in my few weeks of travel, is grand.

My group and I drove by combi to Queen Elizabeth’s via Frog Lake in Kibale National Park. We spent one cool and clear morning in the lush forest, treasuring the sixty minutes that we were allowed to watch the primates ignore us. Outside Kibale, a few communities manage the wetlands that serve as Park border for Queen Elizabeth. Youths interested in botany and zoology, among other relevant disciplines, are trained to lead tourists on nature walks for a small fee. Our guide was bursting with data, and that’s the best kind of guide. The money raised helps conserve and protect the land (both for the species dependent upon the lush wetland environment, and to enforce the border as the end of the road for poachers), and its communities. Then it was on to adventure!

I’ll never forget the feeling of seeing my first wild elephant. Beyond the magnitude of the creature, knowing the gentility and compassion adults bestow on the young, and share among the herd, put me in warm and fuzzy spirits. Then, down the road, a combi was drawing too close to a bull protecting the smaller members of the herd. It’s one thing to expect a dinosaur-sized behemoth to charge a van. It’s quite another to expect one of the most tender, albeit puissant, mammals to gore a group of binocular-toting tourists for getting too close. And he wouldn’t even have eaten them.

He charges once, to let you know that you are really invading this personal bubble around his peeps. If you don’t back down, better know he won’t either. As he came close with the first charge, just a few dozen yards up the path, I realized that even as I perched on the roof of the combi, I was only at his eye level. So my point is, it’s a powerful experience. Later that day I saw my first hippopotamus, a species known for violence and goring tourists, and it just didn’t elicit that shudder I felt around being near a charging elephant. The hippos exuded a pompous (and reek) air that seriously detracted from their impressiveness.

While enjoying three days, far from civilization, with sunrise and sunset game drives, and little adventures in between, our posh tents prevented me from feeling like we were roughin it. Our little village, inside the Park near the Kazinga Channel, was peppered with army-style heavy-duty canvas tents pitched inside beautiful shelters. The shelters appeared to be shellacked bamboo, built as platforms with roofs that offered a few short walls on three sides. The front created a nice patio, and each patio had two wicker chairs. In the back, which you reached by walking into the tent, through the anteroom, and out the velcro flapdoor, was a private patio with a complete lavatory.

The experience was so open it felt divine- incorporating the moonlight or afternoon sun without interruption into bathing. For meals we met at the pavilion, sort of an open banquet hall complete with poofy chairs and a bar, catered by a few young men, whom I can only assume were cooks as well. In any case, the comestibles were like the lodgings: surprisingly fine.

We saw dozens of other species, some boring (like seeing deer in upstate New York), some grand, like pythons and bats and leopards. We missed a kill by a few hours (or a day, hard to judge with my only evidence being flies and vultures nearby a stealthy hyena), and later bushwhacked up a steep volcano to watch Mountain Gorillas in Rwanda. Hiring former poachers as sherpas, bringing armed guards with our group (their AK-47s were to protect the apes) made the experience a thrill even if we hadn’t found a playful family of gorillas!

These adventures are not only somewhat off the beaten path for African Safaris, they are conscientious destinations first and foremost.