You Gotta Love a Country that has a Grey-Crowned Crane On Its Flag

And I finally got to see one of them – four, actually, sitting in the same tree in a pasture behind the Rwenzori View Guest House in Fort Portal, Uganda. The guest house doesn’t come remotely close to having a view of Rwenzori, the country’s highest mountain, but it does serve lovely dinners family-style so you can find out how just how much more interesting your fellow travelers are than you.

Fort Portal was the first stop on the Great Circle Tour of Uganda that I just finished. I’ve got over 100 reasons to call it a success, here’s a bunch:

Crested Cranes, a three-month-old leopard cub, a male lion, chimpanzees, African Fishing Eagles, Long-Crested Eagles, a Spotted Thick-Knee, Spur-winged Plovers, giraffes, elephants, a Ross’s Turaco, a Southern Ground Hornbill, two hyenas, a jackal, a Nile Crocodile, Olive Baboons, Cape Buffalos, White Rhinos, Hartebeests, Kobs, Oribis, Waterbucks, Bushbucks, Nile Crocodiles, Nile Monitor Lizards, Colobus Monkeys, all kinds of Kingfishers, Bee-Eaters, and Flycatchers, Wagtails, Shrikes, Wheatears, Chats, a Hunter’s Sunbird (wow, color!), Weavers, and African (not English) Sparrows.

Things have been pretty phat for me at the Uganda Buddhist Center. Every morning, after I do some yoga, watch the sun rise over Lake Victoria, and meditate, one of the helpers brings me a thermos of hot water and some tea or coffee, which I usually take to a spot where I sit with my binoculars. Birds I’ve seen at UBC that I haven’t seen elsewhere include Golden-breasted Buntings, Red-cheeked Cordon-bleus, and Firefinches.

I did a four-day trip with one of those workers to his home village near Lake Kyoga (way off the tourist map, worth a separate entry), a short trip to Jinja (“Adrenaline Capital of East Africa” until they built a massive dam across the Nile), and a few day trips to Kampala and Entebbe, but that was pretty much it until I got a burr to see the other 95% of Uganda. I told the UBC workers that I’d be back in a week; I ended up spending 17 days on buses, in matutu van taxis, on the backs of boda-boda motorcycles, and on foot exploring up-country.

I discovered that the Have-To-Dos have lost their grip on me. My situation lets me take the long view of African travel, so I can resist the temptation to visit every “must-see” national park and wildlife preserve on the map. That’s a strong but mighty expensive lure. This is not news to experienced African travelers: wildlife tourism is expensive. Chimp viewing permit: $60 or $120/day, gorilla viewing permit: $300/day ($750/day in Rwanda!), National Park fee: $40 per 24 hours, plus vehicle fee, plus driver’s entrance fee. If you decide to stay at a lodge inside the park, there are some budget options, but many start at $125/night. Treble that for Serengeti Park in Tanzania.

Get your maps out. My first two destinations were Fort Portal and Masindi. Fort Portal is the starting-off point for three national parks and several wildlife preserves. If your thing is gorilla tracking, you’ll likely spend a night there. I was sitting on the fence about walking up steep jungle slopes to spend an hour or three looking at gorillas when I came up with a new mantra: “I’m saving my money for a Good Serengeti Experience.” So instead of visiting the parks, I spent most of my three days in Fort Portal just walking through nearby villages.

I ingested gallons of dust, but the rewards were talking to villagers who were more accustomed to seeing tourists in SUVs than trekking. I got to see prison laborers being rented out to work on large plantations—yep, just like Mississippi. I got the knack of talking with men and knowing the right moment to move on, just before they hit me up for money to rebuild their houses which burned down last week, or gas for their motorcycles, or whatever—yep, just like New Orleans.

I did one safari, to Murchison Falls National Park. I have this fantasy in which people leaving Uganda are required to show proof at passport control that they’ve visited Murchison Falls. I do believe it is the first time in my life I’ve ever gone on a tour that required me to travel with people I’d never slept with. I hit the mega lotto—my two safari mates were a Ph.D. student doing her dissertation research on HIV-positive children and her engineer husband. Liberals!

The only complaint I have is that because of the timing, we got to the chimp-viewing part of the park after lunch and to the Ziwa Rhinoceros Sanctuary late in the morning, when animals know better than to work up a sweat looking for food. But it did allow me to get my picture taken standing in front of a dozing rhino, with about 30 yards between us. Each rhino pair (mother/child) has its own armed guard to protect it from poachers, and they see two-legged primates with telephoto lenses for noses all the time, so the fear factor was close to zero.

We did a 15-kilometer boat cruise to within a kilometer of the bottom of the falls. Along the way we saw at least 50 hippos, plus elephants, Nile Crocs, and at least 20 species of birds that you won’t find anywhere in North America. One clay wall was filed with hundreds of nest holes for different kinds of bee-eaters. Thankfully the boat driver occasionally shut off the engine so we could hear the birdsong and not freak out the mammals.

This was the Africa I imagined as a ten-year-old looking through 1950s issues of National Geographic, but with color added. I tried to ignore the question I’ve been asking myself for the last four months: “Why did I wait so long?” It’s a useless question, just a ploy to distract me from the here-and-now. Instead, I needed to look at the hippopotamus that had just surfaced and sneezed a few feet away from the boat.

Hippopotami are floating snorting miracles. The giraffes, the baby leopard, the lone hyena that crossed the road in front of us—all miracles. Murchison Falls is another one—a 25-foot gap through which 9/10 of the Nile River spills. So were the musicians busking in the parking lot of the ferry that crosses the Nile on the way back from game drives. The blind stringed harp player was especially miraculous. So was the African sky later that night.

My circle trip took me to Gulu, which has suffered more than many other parts of Uganda. Gulu was a local base for the Lord’s Resistance Army for many years, and the starting point for a bizarre insurrection led by a woman who claimed that spirits told her to rebel against the government. Thousands believed and followed her, thousands died. Gulu is now filled with Sudanese refugees—so tall, so black, so friendly—escaping their country’s peculiar brand of political/religious/racial weirdness. More walking, more villages, more dust.

I tried finding a way to travel independently to Kidepo National Park, a place I’ve heard lots of raves about. Kidepo is part of a large chunk of savannah and dry scrub country that crosses borders into South Sudan and Kenya. But that’s the rub—unless you’re on an organized safari, getting there requires sitting in the back of a lorry on some nasty roads, getting dropped off well outside the park, and taking your chances on getting inside. I was signed up to be the sixth person on a Kidepo safari at a bargain basement price of $125/day, but the other five (a group of friends) cancelled three days before departure. Grrrrr. Doing the same trip as me, myself and I with a guide would cost over $400/day, and I’m saving for a Good Serengeti Experience.

So I went to Mbale and the well-visited Sipi Falls, which demands another visit after the dry season ends. Gulu and Mbale are both experiencing growth spurts—construction everywhere you turn. But the people in Gulu are coming out of more than three decades of darkness, violence, and pain, so I could feel the optimism while walking down the unpaved streets. Mbale’s energy is much darker, the people there seem weary about everything going on around them. They live much closer to the center of power and corruption in Kampala, maybe that’s what feeds their pessimism.

Between Mbale and Kampala is Jinja, filled to the brim with foreigners and restaurants that cater to them. I had a stack of real pancakes at Ozzie’s, run by a 75-year-old Australian woman who also bakes brownies and apple pies. Had a hero sandwich at a place that would fit in just fine on Capitol Hill in Seattle. Had a burrito at the Source Café, surrounded by quality art for sale. There were lots of opportunities to burn off those calories doing off-trail biking, bungee jumping, horseback riding, jet boating, or whitewater kayaking that I did not take advantage of. On a previous trip I did a 10-kilometer walk from Jinja proper to where I thought I would see Bujagali Falls, a Ugandan icon. I walked through small villages whose residents were very surprised to see a muzungu. My reward for all the dust and sweat was a clear view of a half-mile-wide dam, barely three years old, sitting exactly where the falls used to be.

It was a great trip, ending just in time for the serious rainy season to begin. I’ve got seven more to go days at the Center, then I’ll be getting on a plane and flying to Zimbabwe for the Harare International Festival of the Arts. Looking at the schedule, it’s a lot closer to Bumbershoot than the Vancouver Folk Fest. Lots of theatre and dance, a string quartet doing a different program every day for six days, a Zimbabwean take on a Midsummer Night’s Dream. That’s a side of me I haven’t fed for over two years. It will be interesting to see how the mind reacts.