Photo Link:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/V3ne42K6FFpTvruc7
In the Maputo airport on the way out of Mozambique to Uganda, I befriended this Israeli ex-military guy (I guess all Israelis are technically ex-military due to mandatory service but he was an actual soldier)…not sure how I wound up becoming friends with two ex-frontline soldiers while in Moz but whatever. Anyways, he lived in Kigali, Rwanda and was on the same flight to Addis Ababa with me for our first legs. My Chase credit card gives me a free Priority Pass, which gets you access to any PP airport lounge in the world – unfortunately, Addis does not have any PP lounges. However, this guy somehow just waltzed into the Business Class lounge in the Addis airport, and sweet talked his way into the both of us getting free entry, where we got good, free food and drinks for a couple of hours before our flights. Figured this was noteworthy enough to put here since this lounge typically charges like 50 USD for a 3 hour entry but we somehow got in for free. I unfortunately had to break my anti-Ethiopian Airlines pledge that I took after my Cairo-Cape Town flight since this was literally the only way to fly from Mozambique to Uganda.
Anyways, my flight landed in Entebbe at 12:30am, with the moonlit wings reflecting the stars. Entebbe is sort of like a twin city to Kampala, which is the biggest city in Uganda, so I spent a day in Kampala before taking the bus out to Kabale. Kampala is probably the only place I have been to since I left India in early March 2020, along with Cairo, that actually felt “normal”. I mean most people had masks on, but it was legit a bustling city that felt hectic and crowded and alive and I absolutely loved it. It’s also the 2nd city I’ve been to (after my brief time in Nairobi when I went for the Kenya safari with my sister 2.5 years ago) that conformed to my stereotypical expectations of an “African” city. South Africa was totally western, Windhoek was a glorified town, Livingstone was an actual town, and Maputo felt too colonial/European influenced. Whereas Kampala, while obviously similar to Indian cities in the organized chaos, street markets, and traffic, had a distinctly local feel and you could tell that there was minimal European influence. It felt great to be back in an alive city.
One very visible thing in Uganda was the constant presence of Musaveni’s face everywhere – he is the president and his re-election posters are plastered everywhere. In typical democratic fashion he has also severely restricted internet access, so I needed to use a VPN for the first time since my trip to China.
In Uganda, they refer to motorcycle taxis as boda-bodas – these are super fun to ride in and dirt cheap as well. I rode one to the bus stop and back to buy my bus ticket, and in the meantime dabbled in some Ugandan street food. Chapathis (an Indian bread that’s sort of like a healthier naan) are huge here and you also see samosas here and there as well. There was shockingly also a giant Hindu temple in the middle of Kampala, built in the sort of East Indian architectural style that you see in the state of Odisha. There’s definitely a weird/interesting phenomenon of Indians being a prominent minority influence wise in a lot of African countries – Uganda, South Africa, Kenya, Mozambique. Sort of brings to mind VS Naipaul’s book A Bend in the River. One cool local food here that I liked was this thing called a rolex, which is sort of like a chapathi and egg omelette burrito with meat and veggies inside. It’s surprisingly delicious.
I took an 8 hour bus ride the following day from Kampala to Kabale…African bus rides are something else. Literally every 30-40 minutes there is a pointless traffic police stop, and in addition to that, about once an hour they will stop and let these food vendors come in and hawk their stuff to you. The gorilla trek/safari/chimp trek that I organized with a lodge started on Sunday (with a pickup from Kabale), so I got to Kabale on Friday and spent a few days in this rustic lakeside lodge by Lake Bunyonyi. After my 8 hour bus ride, I had to take a 30 minute boda-boda ride (with my duffel bag and travel backpack!) to the lake dock, and then from there took a 45 minute canoe ride to the actual lodge.
The first day I just sort of hiked around the area surrounding the lake. Got some pretty nice views up top these medium-sized hills that gave a good overlook of the lake and the countless small floating islands in the lake. I also hung out with a bunch of locals in a “bar” in one of the numerous villages overlooking the lake, which was really just a mudbrick hut, and drank this local fermented Sorghum drink which was honestly quite terrible…I actually vomited later that day due to this drink and wasn’t even drunk, it was purely due to my stomach rejecting it.
To be honest, Lake Bunyonyi reminded me a ton of Lake Pokhara in Nepal or Lake Inle in Myanmar in particular. Just a picturesque lake surrounded by rolling green hills (except in Pokhara’s case you have the towering Himalayas in the far background). Uganda as a whole is probably the greenest country I have ever been to (or at least, up there with Sri Lanka)…many of the rolling green hills found near Lake Bunyonyi and elsewhere were also very reminiscent of the hill stations of India.
After Lake Bunyonyi, I got a canoe back to the mainland and then a boda-boda to the Kabale bus stop, where I met up with this German dude (who is a diehard FC Koln fan and despises Borrusia Dortmund because he grew up in Dortmund) who I had met in Livingstone, who joined me for this tour after Xu (the Canadian-Chinese guy I met in Hurghada and then again totally unplanned in Livingstone) recommended it to us. The lodge we stayed in just outside of Bwindi was quite nice – we got a good overlook of the rolling mountains/hills (1000 meters in elevation so mountain might be too strong of a word) covered in forests.
The official name of Bwindi is the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. And boy is it impenetrable. The two of us were joined by one other tourist – also a New Yorker! – so this was basically like a private Gorilla trek. Typically there are 100+ tourists split into 10 or so groups (so you need to book the permits months in advance), to give an idea of how much tourism has cratered since COVID. Bwindi has roughly 500 of the world’s 1000 remaining wild mountain gorillas (the other 500 are in Virunga, which straddles the Uganda/Rwanda/DRC border, while Bwindi is fully located in Uganda). Of these 500 wild gorillas in Bwindi, roughly 100 or so (like 12 groups in total) are habituated for tourists, which is basically a 2-3 year process of trackers following the gorillas 24/7 until they learn to not be scared of humans and instead just ignore them…a couple more groups are also habituated strictly for researchers as well. So the gorillas you get to see are totally wild, but because they are habituated you get to observe their natural behavior…if they weren’t habituated you would spend all day chasing after them as they keep running away from you.
One quick aside…with regards to wildlife, I think for me where I draw the line at not being interested is active human intervention (ie a zoo, or shark diving where they drop food to attract the sharks, or a rehab center for animals). Like those are cool I guess, but I just really enjoy seeing animals purely in the wild. If that involves some element of “gaming” like habituation or (in the case of my Kenya safari reserve) tracking endangered species populations within a park, I think it is fine, as the human behavior does not in any way impact the animal behavior (short of the animals “ignoring” humans, which is really what you want to see ideally).
Anyways, the gorilla group that we got assigned to track was called the Christmas group, since that was the name of the head of the group…he was a silverback who was born on Christmas day. We got super lucky and it was only a ~2 hour hike to get to the gorillas, and they were even located outside of Bwindi proper in a man-made “buffer zone” between the neighboring villages and the National Park. This was still a pretty decent hike of about a 400 meter elevation drop and then back up the hill to finish the hike (you start at a 2k meter high hill, descend to a 1.6k meter high valley, and then the National Park covers elevations between 1.6k-2.6k meters). The elevation meant that it was thankfully cooler while walking.
Our gorilla group had 6 gorillas. Honestly, it was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. Probably only a hair behind my Kenya safari experience in terms of wild life encounters. The official policy is 10 meters distance, but we got within a few feet of all the gorillas. They would sometimes walk straight towards us and expect us to move. It was just such a cool experience to sit and watch these creatures do their thing up close. One weird thing was just how quiet they were…the only noise was them munching on the leaves. But we saw a couple of gorillas groom each other, wrestle and “practice” mating, and the silverback even roared at us and beat his chest to show us who’s boss after we got too close. The trackers all carry AK-47s to fire in the air and scare gorillas away if there ever is any threat to human life.
The gorillas also aren’t too mobile, so while they moved around it was very easy to follow and track (much unlike the Chimps, which I’ll get to later). And due to their massive size, they can’t climb too high on the trees, so visibility was never really an issue for us. I would honestly 100% recommend Bwindi to pretty much anyone I know who is in moderately good shape now, given the reduced 400 USD permit and Uganda’s 120 hour COVID test requirement. It’s just such a cool experience, and the time flew by so quickly. One thing to note was that my group did not have any baby gorillas, so that is my excuse to do another gorilla trek in the future (in Virunga in the DRC hopefully! So I can also see the world’s largest lava lake there). A oddly weird thing about the gorillas for me were their ears…they look JUST like human ears and it was so bizarre to see that on another animal.
After our one hour allotment, I requested to walk in the actual park for a little and the guides were nice enough to allow that. I’ve mentioned in the past that I’ve never been that into forests (especially when compared to canyons/deserts/mountains, in terms of nature), but sweet baby Jesus was Bwindi amazing. It really does deserve the moniker “Impenetrable”. It’s a primeval forest which basically means that it’s tens of thousands of years old and developed/grew with minimal human impact. The forest truly felt untouched, and there were no paths to be seen, so we relied on our walking sticks (my first time using them and actually super useful!) and the guides macheting a path through the dense vegetation. I slipped down steep mud slopes countless times when attempting to climb up or go down them, and my shoes got soaked and covered in mud and most likely ruined (I only had sneakers as I did not pack my hiking boots). And this was just in over an hour of walking in the forest…I honestly pity the tourists who have to schlepp through this mountainous jungle for hours to see the gorillas. I definitely think that a proper wild jungle with no human path in sight is an amazing thing. It makes any of the woodland treks I’ve done in the US look like a literal walk in the park. I definitely think I would be interested in seeing similar nature in the Amazon and even in parts of India now.
We had a couple more days in our Bwindi lodge after the gorilla trek…the first day we hiked up some hills (a few hundred meters in elevation) to get some good panoramic viewpoints of the area…just more rolling lush green hills. And the second day we did a ~30km roundtrip walk to see Lake Mutanda, which was a really really scenic lake with three massive volcanoes out in the distance – these Volcanoes are in Rwanda across the border. While walking around this area, we were bombarded with little kids running up to us and yelling “Hello!” in an incredibly harmonious chrous, as well as calling us Muzingo, which means white person. Given the fact that I got sunburned in Mozambique and that I was playing soccer with a homemade fiber ball with village kids during my evenings in Bwindi, maybe I really am a Muzingo – though in my defense, I did not take any photos of this for my Tinder and Bumble profiles.
After Bwindi, we spent a couple of days doing a “regular” safari at Queen Elizabeth National Park. To be honest this was a very subpar safari – this park has no zebras or giraffes which was a bit jarring given how common they are in other parks, and we had the unfortunate luck of not seeing any lions during our two days of driving there despite them being relatively common, so all we saw were various types of impala/antelopes and a lot of elephants. However, on the final day, we did a boat safari here which more than made up for the mediocre game drives. Saw literally hundreds of hippos, including a few of them opening their mouth all the way up…I was shocked to find out that they don’t make any noise when they do this. We also saw a croc up close and only a couple of feet away from our boat, two elephants playfighting with their tusks, and an eagle fly away while holding a freshly caught fish. Overall, since I’m mostly a cat and rhino guy (though to be honest the hippos were pretty cool), I would definitely place this behind Etosha in terms of my safari experience. But the boat part was awesome and I would definitely love to do one of the Botswana river safaris in the future now given how cool this one was.
We ended our trip by doing a Chimpanzee trek in the Kalinzu Forest Reserve, which was right next to Queen Elizabeth National Park. Like gorillas, chimps need to be habituated over a period of a couple of years before they learn to ignore humans. That’s basically where the similarities end. It was filled with human pathways so nowhere near as wild as Bwindi, but park was still really cool due to the constant chirping of the birds and noises of the various monkey species, not to mention the constant noise that the chimps would make – they are a LOUD animal. They move around way more than gorillas and are much much higher in the trees, so it’s hard to see them too clearly because of the distance and the amount of vegetation that is between you and them. So it was hard to get photos that were anywhere near s good as my gorilla pics. Regardless, it was a super cool experience, though not as cool as the gorilla trek purely due to the proximity. This trip actually really makes me want to go back to Indonesia to see the orangutans in Borneo.
After this trek, my German friend Daniel got dropped off at Kabale to see Lake Bunyonyi while I got dropped off at a different town to catch the bus back to Kampala. Overall, Uganda might be up there with Namibia and Kenya as my favorite African countries. It was just an overall incredible experience here. In particular I really enjoy the ad-hoc nature of travel in Africa – nothing is really planned in advance, and everything is informally done via WhatsApp and just talking. In a way it reminds me of India (and I wonder if Central and South America are like this too), but it’s just a much more fun way to travel than the formal nature that you get in western countries. My South African yacht friend Henro also helped me expand my Africa playlist…previously my only African artists on it were Brenda Fassie, Oliver Mtukudzi, Youssou N’Dour and Ladysmith Black Mombazo, but he introduced me to a bunch of other artists…my favorites being Mango Groove (Special Star is a great song!) and Johnny Clegg. Also related to Africa is this fantastic piece that he sent me: https://granta.com/how-to-write-about-africa/.
More and more I am realizing that now might be the last great time to travel, especially in places like sub Saharan Africa…there are a TON of budget lodges and such that I can’t see staying in business that much longer, so I think it’s vital to take advantage of the situation now while I can. And besides, this is yet another location where COVID has made the travel more enjoyable due to me having the sights to myself basically. And the night sky during this trip has been fantastic. Not as cool as the one cloudless night in Namibia or in Kenya, but probably on par with Ladakh – you can clearly see all the stars if not the actual Milky Way band. Not to overly generalize here, but I will honestly miss sub-Saharan Africa, but am hoping to be back in June with my little sister to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. I’ll be spending a couple of more days in Kampala to get COVID tested and just hang out before flying off to Jordan…the 4 year old inside of me is pumped to finally see Petra – The Last Crusade is the best Indiana Jones movie and that’s a hill I will always die on. Hoping to also get my Nitrox certification for scuba diving (this basically makes it safer to/allows you to do 3-4 dives a day instead of 2) and do a couple of fun dives there as well.