Around The World in a 60s Daze...: The Dark Continent - Safari Part 1

Relaxing at Mweya Safari Lodge, Queen Elizabeth Park

Dear Family and Friends,

“Jambo.”

“Jambo, mambo?”

“Hatujambo”.

I’m not sure of the spelling, but that is about how all conversations start in East Africa. “Hello.” (How are you, really.) “I’m fine, how are you?” “I’m fine”.

Swahili is a language, and a culture, but not an ethnicity. The roots of Swahili (which means ‘of the coast’), both language and culture, lie in the fusion of Arab Islamic traders and Bantu natives, then layered with Indian, Asian and European influences. It began in East Africa beginning about the 11^th century and today is the dominant culture and language from Somalia to Mozambique.

In Swahili, ‘safari’ simply means ‘journey’. But it has always had a much more exotic meaning to me. It was Frank, ‘Bring ‘Em Back Alive’, Buck in khakis on an African savannah; or Denys Finch Hatton (Robert Redford), lover of Karen Blixen, in the movie Out of Africa. It was African adventure. Hell, it was Africa!

To many it came to mean hunting for Africa’s big game. Regal lions, horned rhinoceros, massive elephants, ferocious, unpredictable buffalo, elusive leopards, hippos, giraffes, zebras, and all the antelope were killed, primarily for trophy heads to be mounted on a wall. President Teddy Roosevelt went one better. He did not even pretend to want trophies. At the start of the last century, he had a special chair fitted on a train so he could pot shot those magnificent beasts as the train puffed along.

In the same way that he glamorized the blood sport of killing bulls as a macho rite of male passage, Earnest Hemingway popularized his passion for big game trophy hunting in his 1935 book, Green Hills of Africa. Thus, many Hollywood stars, and other celebrities, were to take up the chase, Clarke Gable, Stewart Granger, William Holden, Edward, Prince of Wales, and Aga Khan, amongst others, thought it would be fun.

Game Drive Viewing Prime Seats

After my encounter with the mountain gorillas in Rwanda, my safari continued on back into Uganda and on to Kenya and Tanzania. Over the next three weeks I visited several of the most renowned game parks in those three countries, Queen Elizabeth Park in Uganda, the Maasai Mara in Kenya, and the Serengeti (endless plain in Maasai), Ngorongoro Crater, and Lake Manyara in Tanzania.

We are all here to view African wildlife, but it is spotting the ‘Big Five’ that is the real quest, lions, elephants, leopards, buffalo, and rhinoceros (especially the particularly rare black rhino). And, of course, we also want to see zebra, giraffe, warthogs, hippos, all the antelope, wildebeest, and cheetah.

The Uganda/Kenya segment was with Dragoman Overland which had taken me to Rwanda to visit the Mountain Gorillas. The group consisted of Darren our driver, Vesh our cook, and a mixed bag of twenty of us travelers, Brits, Aussies, Yanks, Canucks, Irish, and Dutch.

Winston Churchill called Uganda ‘The Pearl of Africa’ and it is easy to see why. It is beautifully lush, with green rolling hills covered in fertile fields, and with verdant mountains as a backdrop. Uganda gained its independence from England in 1962, then had to endure the tyranny of Idi Amin Dada in the 1970’s ending with war with neighbouring Tanzania, then chaotic government under a series of incompetent or corrupt Presidents, until their current President Yoweri Museveni was installed in 1986. Stability has now been attained and Uganda is trying to recover all those lost years.

Our first stop in Uganda was the Queen Elizabeth Park situated on Lake Edward. It is most famous for the Kazinga Channel, said to have the largest concentration of hippopotamus in all Africa. We had a two hour boat tour down the channel and were treated to fabulous, up close viewings of hundreds of these weird (and dangerous) relatives of the horse, as well as many buffalo, and several mating herds of elephants that came down to the water to drink (there were several males in the groups, not seen other than during mating).

We had a spectacular campsite looking right down on the channel. Hippos will travel many miles from the water at night to forage, and the pathway for several of them in the channel seemed to lead right through our camp. Hippos eat grass by tearing it off with their lips. Their massive tusks are used for defense only, and they can open their mouths 170 degrees, the better to put a big chomp on you. We were warned many times to never get ourselves between a hippo and the water. Just after getting into my tent to go to bed, a number of these brutes wandered through, just meters from my tent. It is quite a feeling to have nothing but a thin sheet of canvas between yourself and several of the animals that kill the most humans each year in Africa. After the hippos passed through, the night sounds of the savannah, including the ‘whoop, whoop’ of nearby prowling hyena, lulled me to sleep. One does not get up to go the toilet casually. It would surely only be in case of a real emergency.

On our game drive the next morning we were very fortunate to get a great showing by two leopards, either juveniles or a mating pair, as they frolicked about 75 meters away. Along with black rhinos, these are the most difficult of the big five to spot. It was just starting to get light so I wasn’t able to get pictures but the show was great. Shortly before leaving the park we spotted our first lions, a pair. Hell, I was only two days into my three week safari and I had already ticked off four of the big five, not to mention the warthogs, baboons, waterbuck, antelope, and countless different birds.

After leaving Queen Elizabeth Park my Dragoman group skirted Kampala, the Capital (where we had begun our journey for Rwanda), and headed to Jinja on the shores of Lake Victoria. Kampala is a struggling city with generally terrible infrastructure. English is widely spoken in Uganda and one of the local daily newspaper showed a picture of a large truck nearly tipping over in one of the large pot holes on a major street. The pot hole pictured was just one of hundreds that could cause a truck to flop over. For any of you who might wonder what happens to all those used clothing and shoes that are donated for charities to give to the poor, I can tell you they are on sale in the markets and on the streets of Kampala. Several enterprising men can be seen walking the streets wearing several suit coats, one over the other. They have all the best labels.

Kampala is said to be the major city in the world for NGOs, and I can’t but agree. Although Rwanda has thousands of NGOs, there are more foreign agencies, groups, charities, and organizations represented in Kampala than one could imagine. They are offering assistance to, or running, schools, clinics, businesses, farms, everything imaginable. Hundreds of foreign nationals connected to these agencies are about. I do wish I could be certain of their positive influence but I can’t help but sense many are there for their own souls, not the wellbeing of the locals.

Jinja is an attractive little city reflecting the influence that a large Asian population had on the city. Idi Amin drove the Asians out and the city suffered considerably. Now the Ugandan government is trying to lure those folks back and the place is beginning to flourish again. Our campsite is at the Nile River Explorers Back Packers, another spectacular location, this one overlooking the headwaters of the Nile River, the longest river in the world.

There is no game viewing here, rather the appeal for travelers is the white water rafting on the Nile, generally argued to be some of the wildest white water in the world. I thought about going on the raft ride, but in the end, I along with two or three others opted not to; but most of our group did and from their stories it was one helluva ride. Chris, a young Aussie who is traveling with Dragoman from Spain to Victoria Falls, was to tell me he is not usually intimidated at all by things like adventure sports. But he believes he had a near death experience. His raft had gone through the rapids called simply the ‘Bad Place’. Of course they were all dumped out and for the longest few minutes of his life, Chris was tumbled up and under like he was in a washing machine. Chris was never short of an Anglo Saxon expletive and he wasn’t when he described his experience.

“Shit Merv, I thought I was going to die! It scared the shit right out of me!”

I’m glad I didn’t go.