Monday August 16, 2010 – Queen Elizabeth National Parks – the explosion craters and a night drive
Last night we ordered breakfast to be served at 8:00 – 2 nutella pancakes and 1 banana pancake. A big treat. Unfortunately Uganda restaurant timing strikes again – at 8:45 when there is no activity in the kitchen we ask Kenneth, to whom we gave the order, where our food was. He gets in a flap and assumes we had already breakfasted. There is a lot of loud discussion and hand waving in the kitchen and he assures us it will be done. So over the next 20 minutes we receive the hot water and tea things, and then the pancakes – obviously made and delivered one serving at a time but still served stone cold. Just can’t figure out the whole logic. Eventually breakfast is done and we pack up and head back to Fort Portal for a bit of shopping, a diesel fill-up, and a trip to the main post office for the remainder of our stamps. Turns out we overpaid last time – the letter rate was used instead of the postcard rate. Oh well, won’t break the bank and maybe they will get there faster! While waiting at the filling station a small political parade passed by – a half dozen bodas with men standing up behind the drivers and wearing on their heads cardboard boxes covered with posters of their political party, accompanied by a lot of singing and horn blowing. According to someone we met a few days later, it turned a bit nasty with the local headline stating “mayor of Fort Portal barely escapes lynching”. Something to do with providing inappropriate support to one of the candidates, which I would have thought wasn’t that unusual an occurrence. Either way, glad all we had was the parade.
So off to Queen Elizabeth park to meet up with Ludwig Siefert, a wildlife vet from Makerere who works on large predators in QENP and Lake Mburu. The road is delightful and paved all the way to the park, so we make excellent time. 80 km an hour feels like the speed of light. At the last small village before the park entrance I realize I should have topped up the diesel in Kasese, the previous town, but we pull into a conveniently placed filling station just before the entrance. After some time negotiating how much fuel I think the tank will hold (I keep saying fill it and they ask me how many litres) it dawns on me that the pumps are not actually operational and the guys are selling diesel out of 20 litre jerrycans, at a substantially higher price than in Kasese. So be it, They get out a 5 litre plastic container as a measure, put 10 litres into the tank, and then get me to move the vehicle to a slight decline whereupon 4 of the them rock it back and forth for a few minutes so more will fit. I really don’t think it works that way, but who am I to argue at this point. So we get another half of the 5 litre jug in the car, barter over how much is actually left in the jug, and come to an agreement on the final price and amount. We work it out by doing longhand multiplication on the dusty side of the vehicle. This is a kind of a joke as I am mathematically challenged to start with, so having to be the one who figures the correct price is a bit of a stretch. Then the issue of change comes up. Rarely does anyone have the correct “balance”, and various other vendors have to be brought in to make it work. The fuel transaction completed we then switch to the topic of whether either of my daughters would be interested in marrying one of them, and when I say they (meaning my daughters) are too young an older man is pulled over to see if he would be more suitable. When I say no they ask me if I want a Ugandan husband. I tell them I have a Canadian one and that’s all I need. The final conversation centres on whether I should just give some extra money to help people out, which I decline. All of this for 15 litres of diesel!
We stop at a pair of slightly tacky cement arches to take the requisite “we’re on the equator” picture, and then it’s into the park and up to the Queen’s pavilion, where we are looking forward to the snack bar. The small rondavel and viewpoint was built for Queen Elizabeth’s most recent visit to the park, and is really well sited although not much of an architectural marvel. Good news is that all our paperwork for the park is accepted, so I pay a one time fee as a researcher and the girls get the student discount. Bad news is all the snack bar has on offer is tea, sodas, and some unexciting cookies. Looks like we misjudged lunch a bit. Avocado on crackers it is. We are located up on a hill overlooking Lake George to the east, and a large volcanic crater, now completely vegetated to the west. Sarah spots a pair of elephants feeding in the bush down below. It’s quite a scenic spot, unfortunately with the dry (read dusty) season in full force one can’t see as far as one would normally be able to. The majestic and sometimes snowcapped Ruwenzori Mountains were just a blur in the distance on our drive down. Lunch and formalities completed we set of on the Explosion Craters route to the Myewa Peninsula, where we will be staying. The drive is quite spectacular – it travels along the ridges between volcanic craters. The bottoms of all of these are grassy, and the sides are heavily forested. Their circular outlines are totally clear, and it’s easy to see them for the volcanoes they were. The downside is that the roads are quite atrocious, so it’s really slow going, and hot, and we are in tsetse country which we didn’t discover until we stopped at a viewpoint and left the door open, and filled the car with flies. Which have bitten us in unfortunate location like my elbows and toes. We will all be scratching bites for days and days as they take ages to go away, especially in the heat. So we are now on tsetse watch and are squashing them (which takes quite a bit of force as they are resistant beggars) whenever they are spotted. Eventually we reach the major viewpoint – the Baboon Cliffs, which would be a magnificent place for a picnic – up high on a crater edge with a great view out over the crater centre, and with a cluster of large rocks to sit on next to the edge. And mercifully no tsetses here. We don’t have a picnic but eat an orange, manage to convince Sarah to get out of the car for a stretch – she is pretty settled in the back seat and doesn’t seem to think there is an advantage in getting out and moving about, and then pile back in for a rough ride the rest of the way along the route to the main entrance gate of the northern part of QENP.
From the gate its about ½ hour through scrub and burnt grassland to the narrow neck of the Mweya peninsula, where the tourist facilities are. There is a fancy lodge, a petrol station (!), and a visitor’s centre looking out over Lake Albert. We get in touch with James, Siefert’s research assistance, who meets us at the visitor’s centre and takes us a few 100 metres to the Mweya Hostel where he has reserved rooms for us. The hostel consists of two rectangular buildings with double rooms, and toilets/showers, and then an open restaurant/bar area. We get two rooms with single beds and nets, check out the showers – with in line electric heater that take the chill off the water and actually bring it up to warm with time, and the toilets – the one next to our rooms is a squat, but fortunately the other building has proper toilets, much to Sarah’s and my relief. Vastly overpriced for what is being provided, but really the only game in town and a minute’s walk from the research accommodation where Siefert and his groups are staying. There are resident warthogs, including a very small piglet, and all sorts of birds sitting in the trees and begging scraps in the restaurant. James is taking Siefert’s 3 Danish students out on a drive but we pass on joining them and prefer to shower and unpack, planning to meet for dinner at a canteen down the road at 8:00 before an evening drive to call hyenas on the airstrip. Not going to be early tonight!
Pre-warned that it’s a good idea to order up dinner an hour in advance, we turn up early at the canteen, whose water-front location isn’t really apparent at night, request our food, order our beers, and settle down to wait for the others. And discover that my phone is missing. Last seen when I met James at the visitor’s centre. Oops. So I backtrack here and there and find nothing, and end up hoping it is lost somewhere in the car (again) and will turn up. Eventually the Danes, and then Siefert show up, we get our dinners about 9:00 (they are busy with a large British school group and that seems to have thrown everything off). But we are entertained watching the bats fly into the restaurant to eat the lake flies that are gathering in clouds around the electric lights. Then the power goes off so we finish our dinner by candlelight before dropping our vehicle at the hostel and piling into Siefert’s 4x4. Two of the Danes are on the roof with James, the three of us pile in the back seat, and we head off with spotlights at the ready and a tape of upset lions and maniacal hyenas which we play periodically to see whether we get any visitors. I think they also have a bunch of fish up on the roof to use as extra bait. We don’t actually attract any hyenas, but we hear lions way off in the distance and it’s always nice to be out at night – one never knows what might be seen. Sarah does a magnificent job of making it way past her bedtime and behaving perfectly – it’s almost 11 when we are dropped off, with a 6:45 pickup time in the AM to go out and track some lions.
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