The Rwenzori Mountains

The Rwenzori Mountains are really beautiful and the safari was amazing! We set off from Kampala on Friday morning about half past eight and it took us about eight hours to get there with a couple of stops. There were the other nine volunteers, myself, Immaculate and Joyce who are the development workers employed by Hope 4 Children and the two drivers, Denis and Josh.

I had met some of the volunteers before who are/were all UK university students and who had each raised £2,500 in order to volunteer for a couple of months in Uganda. They are all great fun and from a variety of backgrounds: one lives in Kinshasha in DRC where her father works for Dept. of International Development; another has lived in Tanzania; another was Somali; one was from Australia and another from New Mexico!! So we had some interesting discussions over bottles of Nile beer as you can imagine!

We stayed in Simba Safari Camp which has only been open for six months. There was solar power for lights and hot water in the lodges but not in the dining/bar area where we ate by hurricane lamp on Saturday due to a power failure!

I wondered how the visit to the Queen Elizabeth National Park would compare to my visit to Murchison Falls and to be fair the land safari wasn’t as good – there weren’t the number of animals and there were no giraffe and not as many types of antelope. However we did see a lioness with her three cubs watching from behind a mound of earth – they will probably be just a blob of brown on the photo!!

But the water safari was wonderful! We sailed along the Kazinga Channel which links Lake Edward and Lake George. There was an incredible number of hippos quite close to the boat – some on the shore and some in the water and some with herds of water buffalo; there was a small herd of elephant playing and splashing in the shallows and chasing off a lone buffalo and a couple of young crocodiles.

There are eleven fishing villages along the channel and each gets a share of the proceeds from the trips to encourage conservation. On the edge of one village was a spit of sand reaching into the channel which was full of birds and a bit further along an elephant coming down to drink! There are over 600 species of bird within the national park and most are very distinctive and/or colourful and some are quite large. I took lots of photos as you can imagine and also tried to record a movie on the camera – so fingers crossed.

We crossed the equator many times as we went from the camp to the National Park and at one point were only 37 Km from the Congo border. Before leaving to return we drove to a high vantage point to see the Great Rift Valley spread out below us where we had spent the last 36 hours. The photos will not do it justice – it was incredible!

I had thought I might visit Fort Portal and see the Mountains and crater lakes this time so this was a great trip for me. The Rwenzori Mountains are amazing and some are supposed to be snow-capped – the wind blowing off those shrouded in mist certainly felt cold enough for snow. The crater lakes are used to obtain salt and the salt pans were clearly seen from where we were standing at a height above them. Altogether amazing or awesome as my American friends would say!

I was half way through cooking my courgette omelette on Thursday night when the gas cylinder ran out! I contacted one of the local boda drivers who strapped the empty cylinder on the back of his bike and went off to get another one. Not so easy!! Not to worry as I was going away for the weekend but I asked him to keep a lookout for one. As Africa’s telecommunication industry has skipped land lines and gone straight to mobiles, there are no ‘yellow pages’ to refer to!

When I got back there was a message to say he’d found some small ones, so off he went again only to return as they wouldn’t take a large cylinder in exchange for a small one! I’ll have to contact Dawn and see what she wants me to do about this! Meanwhile Janet kindly fills my flask in the evening so I can have a cup of tea in the morning!

Reading continues to develop. Today I borrowed 100 reading scheme books from the library to use with P2 classes at school and hopefully arranged for Ray of Hope school children to visit the library next week. This is the school where I set up the reading scheme last time I was here and which was continued and developed by Dawn when I returned home.

A ‘funny’ from the local paper to end on: A man lay on his death bed surrounded by his wife and four children. Three of the children were tall and good-looking; the youngest however was short and quite ugly – the runt of the family. ‘Tell me wife,’ said the man, ‘are you sure the youngest child is really mine?’ ‘Yes dear’, she replied. He smiled and died a happy man. ‘Thank goodness he didn’t ask about the other three’, she thought to herself .. …. and smiled!

Keep smiling! Ugandans are always smiling and it’s catching!