https://zarrf.smugmug.com/Travel/Uganda/i-HrB5HP7/A
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.