As it was my birthday, I decided to splash out and pay the $500 for a permit to see the mountain gorillas at Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. The fact that they had recently put up the price to $750 in Rwanda and that rebels had moved into the Virunga National Park in DRC, meant that Bwindi was my only viable option to see the gorillas. These mountain gorillas live in only two places in the world - the Bwindi NP and the National Park shared between DRC, Rwanda and Uganda comprised of the Virunga, Parc Des Volcanes and Mgahinga NPs. Bwindi is the only place in the world that gorillas and chimpanzees co-habit the same forest. I took the 8 hour bus journey from Kampala to Kabale. There I made inquiries about how to get to Ruhija, ... read more

I woke early at the Crow's Nest in Sipi Falls and managed to get a shared taxi back down to Mbale. I previously described the other modes of transport in Uganda thus far as cramped but this was ridiculous. There were already 8 adults and 4 children in the back of a station wagon, but I somehow squeezed in. All you can do is laugh really. In Mbale, I got a minibus to Jinja easy enough and set up my tent at the Nile River Explorers Camp. It was fairly quiet in Jinja despite it being the weekend. May is still their low season. I did end up going out with a couple of volunteers in Jinja for the weekend and crawled into my tent just before the biggest thunderstorm I think I have ever witnessed. ... read more

I escaped Nairobi on a fittingly disgusting morning and got a bus to Kisumu, where after about 8 hours, I arrived into some sunshine. I stayed in Kisumu with Christina, who I had met in Mombasa. As it was a Saturday, we went out that night and predictably enough, the Sunday was fairly unproductive. Of all the places I had been in Kenya up to now, this was the first where tourists would not regularly come. They seemed to be fairly used to the mzungus all the same. There was also a surprisingly big Indian community. Kisumu is situated right on Lake Victoria, my first contact with Africa's biggest lake. We went down for lunch by the lake one day, where there are a number of restaurants set up, with freshly caught tilapia on display. When ... read more

I had heard the bus to Lamu from Mombasa could be a bit of a nightmare, but mine was fairly straightforward and I arrived in Mokowe after less than 6 hours. The only way to get to Lamu from there is by boat and I took a speedboat, which took about 10 minutes. Lamu appears from behind a forest and immediately struck me as somewhere completely unique. I checked into a hotel and managd to dodge a few touts who harrassed me to go on a dhow trip with them the following day. I bumped into Michelle, an Irish girl, who I had met in Mombasa and had dinner with her, Anna a Spanish girl and two German couples. Lamu is fairly quiet, but I was happy to have an early night anyway. The last morning ... read more

I got some antibiotics once I got to Nairobi and began to feel a lot better. I booked a 3 day safari to Masai Mara National Park and got picked up from my hostel and brought to town, where I met the rest of my safari group. There were 8 of us in the truck although, 2 Japanese men left after the first day. It took about 4-5 hours to drive from Nairobi to Masai Mara NP. We first went straight to our camp, had some lunch and went on our first game drive. We got incredibly lucky on this drive as in the first hour or so we saw zebra, giraffe, topi, impala, elephants and finally some lions. We were also lucky enough to see a couple of lions 'mating'. It only lasted about 15 ... read more