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Published: July 19th 2014
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The next stop would be Murchison Falls, in Northern Uganda. It takes forever and a day to get anywhere in this country, thanks to some of the poorest roads I've ever seen (next to Saskatoon's, of course), so we would spend the night at the halfway point in Fort Portal. The following morning we would drive a few more hours to make it to Murchison in time for lunch with another boat cruise, this time on the Nile River, in the afternoon.
Now, while Murchison is a beautiful part of the country, it is also home to the tsetse fly which carries the potentially deadly parasite that causes African Sleeping Sickness in humans. They look almost exactly like a typical house fly, but have a nasty bite like a horse fly, which injects the parasite into the body. The travel clinics warned all of us at length about the importance of avoiding the flies through not wearing certain colours which might attract them, as insect repellant does not deter them. According to the travel clinic, if we get bit we need to go to the hospital right away, so we're talking serious stuff! Needless to say, we were
all on the look out for them and feeling a little paranoid.
Of course, Thea, who has had more than her fair share of illnesses since arriving in Africa, has a fly land on her, and she immediately starts to freak out. Assuming she has an inhumanly high pain tolerance, she states that she must have been bit but just couldn't feel it. Yeah. . . right. I've taken a parasitology course in my undergrad, and evidently almost all the parasites we studied live in Uganda (lucky us), so I know enough to know that Thea is just insane. We all try to explain repeatedly that she didn't get bit, but she doesn't believe us, so we let her be right and assume she'll be dead in a few weeks.
Shortly, after Thea's fly “attack” we start the cruise, and while we enjoyed it, it did pale in comparison to the first one we took. We're on a bigger boat, and the river was much wider, but also shallower, so we were not able to get as close to shore. We saw many of the same animals as before such as hippos, crocs, water
buffalo and other ungulates and a couple elephants on the shore. We also saw the jackson hartebeests for the first time here, but they were so tiny and off in the distance.
Halfway through the cruise there was the option for a one hour hike up to the top of the 45m tall Murchison Waterfalls, which of course we decided to do. Surprisingly, there were only two other people on the boat that opted for the hike rather than taking the boat back. To our pleasant surprise, other than the sweltering heat, the hike was actually quite nice and relaxing; not too strenuous at all. Plus the views of the falls and the water powerfully crashing through the 7m wide crevice, were breath-taking, and totally worth the 25% loss of body weight through perspiration.
Following the hike we would head to our near by hotel to relax for the night. On route, we had more run-ins with the dreaded tsetse fly. Silas would tell us when we were in an area where there was lots of them so we could roll up the windows, but we were too slow and let some into the
jeep. Sheer panic and utter chaos commenced! Screaming, flailing, and attempts of swatting them but they were just too fast for us. As Leandra was smashing one with a rolled up newspaper, she inhaled another into her open mouth! Lucky for her she spits it out before it bites. We didn't end up successfully killing a single one, but we managed to knock them all out of the jeep through the cracks in the windows before any of us got bit.
We all finally calm down, and notice Silas laughing at us. Apparently, he sees this all the time with tourists, but according to him African Sleeping Sickness is rare and takes a lot of bites to get the disease; he just didn't want us to get bit because it hurts. Oh well, better safe than sorry!
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