Month: October 2019

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Elephant charging our vehicle

Today we started our safaris in the Serengeti. We got to sleep in, till 6, woohoo, and then started our game drive at 7:30. Serengeti means open plains which is very much evident. Slowly undulating plains sparsely filled with trees and shrubs dominate this landscape. Right off the bat we saw some Cape Buffalo running and found two lions cuddling in the bush. There was a female and a male, a rare sighting to see them that closer together. After that we ran across a juvenile male lion hanging out on top of a termite mound making the local Impala and warthogs nervous. We then came across a bull elephant who wasn’t terribly happy with us and charged. That was exciting/scary/amazing! Throughout the day we saw lone hyena males, looking so cute, many many Giraffe, all giving us the stink eye, gazelles of various types in the thousands, birds like crazy, vervet monkeys, baboons, zebra, mongoose, 30 or 40 hippos sleeping in a giant mud puddle together, jackals and of course the cats. We saw 13 lions in various stages of napping. Nine of them had just killed a zebra and were in a food coma. One leopard we watched cross the plain and then climb a tree. And the coolest was a cheetah that had just killed an Impala. It was feasting as fast as it could while also keeping a lookout for other predators. Lions, leopards, and hyenas will steal a cheetah’s food but a cheetah will only eat what it had just killed. All in all, a spectacular day, we really loved it. Tomorrow we’re going to drive to the other side of the Serengeti in the hopes of seeing the great migration. We hadn’t planned on seeing it here but because of climate change it had come earlier and from a different direction. Finishing our day, we sit reading on our porch, watching the baboons, Impala, and giraffe go by.

The day after we saw the chimps, it was time to leave Uganda for Tanzania. We got up early, as usual, for our flight from Kasese aerodrome to Entebbe. The air service to these far flung airstrips we’ve been going to is sort of like a shared air taxi service. There’s not really a schedule or a route until the day before when they work out what bookings they have, so it’s all a bit haphazard, though it does sound like its actually reliable. They exclusively use Cessna Carravans in an 11 passenger + 2 pilot configuration. Today we found out that they would take us from Kasese to Kihihi (basically the opposite direction of Entebbe) where they’d drop us off for about an hour while they went to Kisoro and came back to get us. Then we flew from Kihihi to Entebbe.Once there we took a whirlwind tour of the airport guided along by an employee of our next airline, which was sort of a private charter airline using a similar ad-hoc route system. Out and back in again, through security and immigration and customs and such. Then we walked out across the tarmac to our next Cessna Carravan.This time we flew from Entebbe to Kibale, Rwanda. From there, we went to Mwanza, Tanzania for immigration and customs into Tanzania. This was a shocking amount of paperwork for Ebola checking and some additional paperwork for something even though we already had our visas filled out and paid for ahead of time. Though everyone was actually very friendly and chatty.After we were all cleared for immigration (there were just four of us on the plane) we went on the drop off the other two at Kogatende airstrip in the north part of Serengeti park, just this side of Kenya. Finally we were on our way to our airstrip, arriving about 5 pm. We were met by our ranger and taken to our rather amazing “tent” at “camp.” The safari vehicle even came equipped with beers. On our way we saw a small family of jackal cubs right by the road, and a lion!After a week without reliable power and internet, this place was a revelation.

Our day visiting the chimpanzees started very early in the morning. We had to be at Kibale park at 6:30 in the morning, so that meant waking up at 4:30.

Like the gorillas, we also setup a “habituation” trek for the chimps as well, which meant that we could spend much more time with them. After the gorilla habituation, we weren’t quite sure what to expect, but everyone assured us that this was on much easier terrain.

Indeed, we got incredibly lucky with the chimps and found a family within about 10 minutes after setting off. We hung out watching them snack and climb around in the trees for about an hour. There were babies swinging around and roughhousing and adults climbing around and snacking. Sadly it was impossible to get any pictures on Jack’s phone because the chimpanzees were too far away. If it wasn’t clear, these are all cell phone photos on the blog. The proper photos are too big to upload from here.

It started raining so we hung out for a bit longer, then moved on to find another group, which we did after about 15 minutes of hiking. Unfortunately chimps don’t really like the rain any more than people do, so they don’t move around as much or come near the ground in the rain. The rain continued for another couple hours and we observed a few different groups over that time, but mostly they weren’t too active. Given the conditions we did quite well though and saw around 25 individuals and observed lots of great chimp behavior.

Roughly all at the same time, the photographers in the group had our lenses all fog up, so we couldn’t really take any more photos. We had about an hour left of our time with the chimps, but given that it was still raining and our cameras were useless, everyone decided to call it good for the day. Naturally, the rain stopped by the time we got to the park entrance. The sun drew out hundreds of baboons to the road, so we got to watch a lot of babooning around on our drive back.

The chimp habituation trek can take the entire day, depending on how quickly you find them. Since we finished around noon, we actually had the rest of the day to relax. We had a couple of beers while admiring the view of a small crater lake from our lodge.

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Elephants swimming

After gorilla day, we left Chameleon Hill early to catch our puddle jumper to Mweya airstrip in Queen Elizabeth Park. We were both still quite sore (AKA, broken) from all the hiking yesterday so we were looking forward to a day without a lot of hiking around.

Our plane came in for a landing at the airstrip, only to pull up and abort a few hundred feet off the ground. Some water buffalo had wandered onto the runway. After buzzing the runway and taking a go around, they wandered off and we could land.

Then we did a short game drive through the park near the airstrip. It wasn’t really an ideal time of day since most of the critters were hiding from the sun, so we didn’t see much more than some warthogs, but it was a nice way to spend time before lunch.

We had lunch at a hotel by the park, and were surrounded by at least a hundred bright yellow little Weaver birds patiently waiting, and sometimes not so patiently waiting, for us to drop a crumb on the ground.

Afterwards we took a cruise on a channel between Lake Edward and Lake George. That was pretty terrific bang for the buck wildlife viewing. We saw lots of water birds, water buffalo, elephants, hippos, Nile crocodiles, monitor lizards, and various other wildlife coming down to the water. As a bonus, our phones briefly thought we were in the Democratic Republic of Congo as we must have picked up a cell tower from across the lake.

Then it was off to our actual hotel a couple hours away.