Traveling Over Christmas Holiday

I just took a two week holiday and traveled around Uganda with my parents. We spent the majority of our time seeing the landscape and looking at animals. This is a blog about all the animals and cool landscapes I saw on during my travels.

Lake Bunyoni

Lake Bunyoni is the one of the deepest and largest freshwater lakes in Uganda. It is about the size of one of the great lakes and is surrounded by high mountains on all sides and doted with little islands. Lake Bunyoni has one of Uganda’s largest bird populations and you can see a number or rare birds while staying there. While there I stayed on one of the Islands in the middle of the lake. This was the first time I had a chance to stay at a completely eco-friendly hotel. It was quiet interesting they had everything from eco-friendly toilets where all users had to sit to solar heated showers.

In addition to bird watching Lake Bunyoni is the only fresh water in Uganda that does not have bilharzia. Bilharzia is a type of snail that carries parasites that can be transited to humans through the skin. While easily treatable, I would not recommend swimming elsewhere in Uganda. Therefore, this was the first time I have been able to swim since I’ve been here.

Lake Bunyoni is also a three day weekend spot for Uganda’s wealthy citizens (all of whom reside in Kampala). It is about an eight hour drive from Kampala. You can also tell that many of the hotels cater to the very wealthy Indian population in Kampala because many of the menus boasted several Indian dishes.

Gorillas

After traveling to Lake Bunyoni we continued traveling southwest and crossed the Rwandan border. In Rwanda we went Gorilla tracking. In order to go tracking we had to bushwhack up Mt. Sabinyo (a dormant volcano). About an hour into a climb through bamboo forests and lush bushes, we reached the Gorillas. In all we spent about an hour with a family of thirteen gorillas, there was one dominant male silver back, six females, and six babies. One of the babies was only 3 months old and could not move on its own yet. In addition one of the females was six months pregnant, she was such a picky eater, she would lumber over to a patch of bamboo shoots, and then carefully pull one from the ground and peel it until she reached the sweet middle. Sometimes she would pick off small pieces that were not sweet enough. They were so human like, they would watch us and stair at us the way we were starring at them.

While we were in Rwanda I met the current local Peace Corps medical officer. The Peace Corps is restarting their program in Rwanda this year after having closed the program 14 years ago. As I talked to her about Rwanda I learned some interesting facts. Every month the government declares a public clean up day. The police walk around forcing everyone to clean up in front of their houses and stores. While this definitely over the top, Rwanda is not covered in trash the way Uganda is. In addition the roads are much better. However, I was in an area that receives tons of money from tourism.

Volcanoes

Next we traveled back over the border and spent the next two nights in Traveler’s Rest Hotel. This hotel was originally owned by the “father” of gorilla tourism, Walter Baumgartel. When the hotel was built the forest came right up to where the hotel grounds end. It was also the place where Dian Fossey stayed when she did her research on gorillas. This was such a great place to stay because of all the reading material they kept. They had every single national geographic with anything to do with Uganda in it, and shelves full of books on Ugandan wildlife, culture, and history.

While we stayed at the Traveler’s Rest Hotel we spent our days in Mgahinga National Park. While this park’s main attraction is gorilla and golden monkey tracking it also boast three large dormant volcanoes: Mt. Muhavura, Mt. Gahinga, and Mt. Sabinyo. The park shares these three volcanoes with the DRC and Rwanda. If you climb Sabinyo you can stand in all three without a visa. My father and I decided to climb Mt. Gahinga while my mother and brother went Golden Money Tracking. This was a really interesting hike. Mt. Gahinga has very different flora than I have every seen. The majority of the climb was spent in a virgin bamboo forest. While this was interesting, the most fascinating part was when we entered the alpine zone and there were no lichen covered rocks and small pine trees, but large trees covered in this moss called grandfather’s beard. The moss hung off the branches in long hairy strands. At the top we were able to walk around the swamp that had formed in the crater.

Game Park

We finished up our travel in Queen Elizabeth National Park. This is one of Uganda’s largest national parks covering almost 2000 square meters. The majority of the park is savannah and grassland, although, there are sections that have varied terrain. For example, the Kyambura gorge boasts a tropical rainforest that had a wide variety of animals including chimpanzees. Within the park is also the Kazinga Channel. This is the body of water linking Lake George and Lake Edward and is the home to thousands of hippos and pelicans.

Our time here was really fun. We got to see lions, hyenas, fighting buffalo, elephants, baboons, several types of antelope, hippos, pelicans, chimpanzees, and countless numbers of rare birds. I got to see my first owl; it was really cool it looked just like all the cartoon owls.

Kampala

We spent a day in Kampala buying souvenirs and various items. My favorite moment was at the souvenir market when my mom was bargaining with some woman and she kept saying “I just bought a set of these salad tongs over there for 5,000Ush that is the most I’ll pay” and I walked straight up and said “No mom, you bought those salad tongs for 6,000 Ush.” Another great moment was when my brother was trying to buy a wooden mask and he asked for a discount because it had a small crack in it and the woman replied “I’ll give it to you, but you know these antiques, they have been handled poorly in the past.”

Our fun ended with a night Kampala. There is a large Indian population here and we went to one of the best Indian restaurants in town, Hanndi. Not only did the place have creative dishes (definitely not the place to play it safe and get the chicken tikki marsala), but the atmosphere consisted of a nice mix of family restaurant and night on the town. I am definitely making Steve go there with me next time we are in Kampala.