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Published: August 14th 2007
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OK, I know we have been really slack and left the blog hanging half way through the trip - Sorry - no excuses.
After we left the Gorilla's in Rwanda we headed back to Kosoro in Uganda for the night before the start of the return trip to Nairobi with a few stops along the way - at hopefully, a more leasurly pace!!! We had already covered a massive distance in the first 7 days and had an amazing experience with the Gorilla's on day 8.
Day 9 - Left Kosoro at 5.30am (finally getting used to the early starts) and travel to Queen Elizabeth National Park (about 9 hours later). We enjoyed a late afternoon cruise on the Kasinga Channel in the park which apparently has one of the worlds largest concentrations of Hippos along with many, many other animals.
We stayed the night inside the park and had regular animal visitors during the night scavenging for food and things. At one point in the night we heard hippos wandering around the tents, which made everyone nervous as they kill more people than any other animal in Africa. We shared breakfast in the morning with some pretty
ugly Warthogs who seemed very used to human visitors and at one stage were eating from my hand. On leaving the park we came across the biggest group of elephants we had seen so far, numbering at least 30+. One highlight of the Queen Elizabeth Park was the christening of the GDVU (Game Drive Viewing Unit) which was actually a big box sitting on the truck roof designed to hold all the camping gear when the truck was at full capacity, but as there was only 8 of us we convinced the drivers to let us climb up top to sit in the box and have a few afternoon beers as they drove us around - very pleasant - well until Rachel had to use the bathroom that is - you are not allowed to leave the vehicle while in a game park, although it got to the very uncomfortable point when Rachel was quite willing to risk an animal encounter, needless to say Rachel didn't have another beer in the GDVU!! After here we headed back to Kampala.
Day 11 - An option on the tour was to go white water rafting at a place called Jinga in
Uganda (about 1 hour east of Kampala) which is where the mighty inland sea of Lake Victoria empties out and becomes the mighty River Nile - a hell of a long way from its end in Egypt. The source of the Nile apparently has some of the best white water rafting in the world and as I had never never done it before, why not start with the best. Rachel had done it before in Lake Tahoe in California when she worked at a summer camp, and was not keen to do it again. However I convinced her to have another go and our whole group signed up for the rafting, we were going to have our own boat, which was a nice way to end the trip, we were asked by the guide if we wanted to go 'hard core' (the boats get purposely flipped in the rapids) but we said 'no thanks', although there are no guarantees and we practiced the procedures should this happen. The rafting course is about 35km's in length and took most of the day - with loads of flat water to relax in between the seriously big rapids (up to grade 5) and
even one set (grade 6) that even a boat full of professional guides wouldn't tackle. We had a great day and didn't flip once - a feat none of the other boats managed, we were grateful to our very sklled guide. There were some sore and sorry people at the BBQ in the evening.
Day 12 & 13 - We travelled back to Lake Nakuru to see the park that eluded us due to the 4wd bogging at the start of the trip, and spent a couple of nights having a few beers and touring the park by day. Lake Nakuru is famous for its Flamingo population which numbers into the millions and looks like a sea of pink and white along the shoreline of the lake. It also has a healthy population of rhino's and we saw many. We almost bumped into Ewan MacGegor and Charlie Borman who are in the middle of their epic motorbike ride from the top of Scotland to Capetown in South Africa - we actually only saw and had a chat to the support vehicles as they were somewhere else. They are filming a follow up series to the fantastic "Long Way Round"
with the new one "Long Way Down".
Back to Nairobi on day 14 for the end of the trip, followed by an amazing visit to our World Vision sponsored child the day before we returned to the UK for summer - that will be in the next blog.
We really had a good time on our Kenya / Uganda trip but had decided that we should quit organised overland truck tours while we were ahead - we had planned to do another one of these from Victoria Falls to Capetown on our return to Africa but realised we were pretty lucky being in a truck built for 21 and only 8 of us on it, and with a great group of people that all got along well, in comparison to other trucks we saw with larger numbers of people and considerably younger! So instead we are sticking with a shorter trip meeting up with Simon's family in Kenya, returning to Tanzania and from there making our way by train down to Malawi, from here we will head to Victoria Falls, farewell my family before Rach and I head to the Okavango Delta in Botswana. Then back to the
UK, where we are looking forward to 'settling down' a bit. Bye for now.
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