After a later than anticipated departure from Entebbe (due to a morning visit to a clinic to get Andrew’s side pain checked- no worries though, seems only to be a pulled muscle), and a couple hours of navigating through Kampala traffic, we finally hit the open road of Uganda. The vegetation gradually transitioned from wetter, cultivate farmlands interspersed with Papyrus swamps to dry, scrubby grasslands with an occasional Euphorbia tree playing the role of cactus. A couple of hours passed before a sudden left turn onto a dirt road, and a few kilometers later we came to a halt. In case you’re ever wondering, if you are ever going along in the middle of nowhere and come to a large gate, with a fence extending as far as you can see in either direction, cleared for twenty feet on either side and armed men in uniforms, you’re either going to prison or Jurassic Park. We knew it wasn’t prison, so our senses went on high alert.
So we crept along for a few more kilometers of scrubby landscape, looking for large creatures in the grass and behind the thorn bushes. We hadn’t seen anything but guinea fowl and a few (tricky!) by the time we got to the hostel complex, but after a quick bite to eat we headed back with our guide, Kawesa, to look some more. After a brief safety discussion (we even got to sign a waiver- doesn’t happen much in Africa!) and a description of the sanctuary’s history and mission we were on our way. The four of us were prepared to walk up to a kilometer off trail, but ended up only having to go a couple of hundred grassy feet (watching out for snakes!) to get to a patch of exposed clay salt-lick where we saw our first....Rhinoceros! -A big, muddy male. And while we were taking his picture and the guide was telling us how lucky we were (as all good guides do), a big mama rhinoceros and a smaller (but still enormous) baby rhino showed up. They did a little snorting at each other and at us and the guide had to move us a bit farther back (“If I tell you please to move behind the tree, please to move behind the tree. Please to move behind that tree. PLEASE to move behind that tree!). The guys with guns were assigned to protect the rhinos, not the tourists, so we figured they might not be much help if one of the animals charged and we followed our guide’s instructions.
After we had our fill of rhino stalking and rhino photographing, we moved on to let another group have a chance to look. The other animals were too far away to go searching for, but we were satisfied with our close encounter and finished off the day with a slow evening drive looking for birds and monkeys and smaller mammals in the bushes. However, as we came back to the hostel, our way was blocked by another rhino just 100 yards from our destination and we were warned that they were wandering all around us in the dark!
This Fall, Jess (Abwooli) and Andrew (Araali) are living and working in Kibale National Park, in western Uganda. The hilly landscape is overlaid with a patchwork of communities, wild and wonderful, human and otherwise. To help understand how the park affects local livelihoods, we are working in four communities bordering the park to measure how land-use by farmers and crop-raiding by wildlife has changed over the past 20 years since Jess's advisor did her PhD here. This blog is meant as a way to help us document our thoughts and experiences, and hopefully will allow our friends, relatives, and colleagues to share our glimpses of this part of the world. Thanks for reading and let us know your thoughts!