Safari!

After arriving back from Goshem village on Saturday, we set off again for safari on Wednesday with us three gappers and Innocent . Thank you to my Dad who gave money for this trip for my eighteenth birthday! Since my birthday was back in April, I was very excited as I had been anticipating it for a long time.

We decided to do the safari trip at Murchison Falls National Park, which is in the north of the country at the northern end of the Albertine Rift Valley. It is Uganda’s largest and oldest conservation area with 75 animal species.

Our journey to get there was rather eventful. It started off with me standing out the top of the opening roof window of the van we hired, trying not to fall down over the bumps down the hill and waving back at the rather amused children looking on. Halfway through, one of our tyres came off so we had to go to a garage to get it fixed, which meant we were too late to get into the park on Wednesday as planned so we found a hotel called Global Village to spend the night at.

Eventually, we got into the park on Thursday morning and were treated to seeing elephants and giraffes within ten minutes of entering on our way to Red Chilli campsite! To get to the campsite, we had to cross the River Nile on a ferry and saw some hippos bathing in the water along the way.

On the ferry crossing

Red Chilli

Looking out over the bush

Camping

 After setting up our tents and enjoyed lunch there (I was very pleased to have mozzarella in my wrap because cheese isn’t common here), we set out on a Game Drive with a park guide. Our guide helped us to spot the different animals in the bush as we had to stay on the road and some of them were quite far away. We were lucky enough to see giraffes, elephants, buffalo, warthogs, monkeys, hartebeest, oribi and various types of birds. It was so fantastic to see the animals in their natural habitats. The highlight was seeing a herd of elephants and ten giraffes at once, one of which decided to stop inside of our van.

On Friday, Kate went on a three hour ‘water safari cruise’ up the River Nile up to Murchsion Falls waterfall, which was the highlight of my trip. I love boat rides anywhere so be able to spot wildlife on one was amazing. The cruise moved along the river banks, where we were able to see hippos basking in the water and elephants playing in at the shallow water's edge, as well as giraffes, crocodiles and beautiful rainbow birds. Murchison Falls itself was beautiful and massive even from a distance. We came back on the boat as the sun was starting to set and went back to the campsite to spend the evening talking and reading.

 Later we were joined by warthogs wandering around the campsite as it is an unfenced area and we were sure we heard a hippo outside our tent at night, which there were posters about on the notice board. Since I'm now writing this, we survived!

Coming up to Murchison Falls

We were able to get closer to the waterfall by driving to the top on Saturday afternoon. The falls is where the Nile river cascades through a narrow gorge before moving into a wide river. At 43 meters, it’s the tallest waterfall I’ve ever seen and it really was spectacular. It falls down at great power so when we came down from the upper viewing station, we were quite wet from the spray. We were also lucky enough to see a rainbow over the waterfall created by the water’s refraction.

Safari was a wonderful experience with great memories!

Game drive

Breakfast at Red Chilli