One and a half days to get to a swamp in Uganda

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Uganda day 1
One and a half days to get to a swamp

I am in the 60th country I have been to so nearly a third of the way to a full house!
Getting here was a bit fraught at times but nothing like travelling with Qatar airways thankfully. The flight leaving Birmingham was about an hour late leaving with no explanation as to why. Then we spent 26 very long minutes traversing round Istanbul airport before the plane finally came to a standstill. This left us with forty minutes until our next flight was due to take off.
We rushed off the plane, ran up some stairs and an escalator, ran to the dpertures board and….our next flight was running 75 minutes late…which was useful. On previous transfers at Istanbul we’ve had to go through security again but we didn’t even have to do that this time so we had time for a wander round the enormous airport.
The next flight was to Entebbe via Kigali and legroom was minimal to say the least. With screaming kids and a ridiculously placed foot rest, sleep was minimal even for the plane snooze queen. With an hour’s stop in Kigali we arrived in Entebbe very tired at about 5:15.
If you’ve ever seen Zootopia you will have seen the guy who was on passport control. One of the funniest scenes in movie history wasn’t quite so funny to the many people queueing behind us. His name badge said Tom but it should have said Sloth.
Didan was waiting to meet us and we were soon heading out of the airport . I have been conversing with Didan since October so it was nice to finally meet him at last. We stopped for breakfast and discussed our itinerary, also adding some extra stuff along the way….as if it wasn’t going to be hectic and fun enough already!
So what do you do when you’ve basically missed a night’s sleep and are very tired? Yep, you get in a car and drive a few hundred kilometres to the other side of the country. It would’t be us if we didn’t!
We met up with our driver for the trip and jumped into our vehicle for the next 9 days. Which wouldn’t start. So they bump-started it and a bit later we stopped to have the oil checked……so Zedeus (I forgot to tell you his name!) had to switch the engine off.
So they bump-started it….
And a while later Zed asked us when we wanted lunch. ‘Whenever’ is fine so he phned up and booked us in somewhere and we managed to get across that I am vegan and Claire is vegetarian. And then we picked up one guy who we thought was going to fix the car and he was replaced by another guy and then we drove that guy quite a few miles to where we finally got to eat lunch. We’d said whenever but were starving by this time thanks to the faulty car.
As we sat down to eat, the mechanic set to work with the handful of spanners he’d brought with him. And then he went off get a part and Zed was getting a bit nervous but mr mechanic fitted the new part and everything was sorted. Now all mr mechanic has to do is get back!
Our lunch was huge with a plate of salad, a bowl of spiced veg, a plate of rice, a plate of spaghetti and a huge chunk of matoke. The latter is mashed green bananas which was really nice and I think I’ll be having it a few more times….
Driving in Kampala only looks like being even remotely enjoyable at 5am when there is no traffic. As the day goes on it’s pretty much a free for all as everybody tries to squeeze into the same space. Out on the open road there’s all sorts of overtaking, undertaking, dodging potholes and driving on the wrong side of the road going on. But, as everybody is doing it, it seems to work…..for now….
There are a number of police roadblocks but they apparently very rarely stop tourist cars. They did throw down a tyre-bursting thing in front ofus at one point but soon retracted it.
The road we are on has many towns and villages along the way, all of them hives of activity. Having seen the butchers shops and the raw meat hanging out in the sun I don’t think I would have partaken even if I was still a carnivore. For me I would have needed to go straight to hospital and wait for the inevitable.
What have I missed so far? Vegan meals on planes are okay and at least we had something for every meal. At lunch there were some fantastically bright yellow weaver birds skitting round a tree so we took our first camera pictures of the trip. This tour is with Mambo Gorilla Safaris and is a private tour yee-hah! I found them through safaribookngs.com and the private tour with medium standard accommodation (that’s 5-star for us) is vey well priced. They had excellent reviews and hopefully one as good will be coming from us too…. Private means less people to wind me up so these blogs may be a bit different than normal….we’ll see….
The race was on to still do an activity on the first day…..
We stopped off for a quick photo of a tea plantation and got asked for money by two guys passing on a motorbike. The race continued….
We stopped again to photograph a few baboons.
The race continued….
At 17:40, after nearly 1 1/2 days travelling we arrived. At a swamp.
And Zed managed to find us a guide to take us both into and out of the swamp. His name was Mattheus and he said we might see 6 types of primates and up to 250 species of birds in Bigodi swamp…..well wetlands…..one and a half days to get to some wetlands sounds sensible….unless I’d separated it and made it ‘wet lands’ but I didn’t so here we are….or there we were…..in a swamp.
And it was a swamp in places, although it’s apparently comparatively dry at the moment. Some mud and some rickety planks were successfully navigated as night fell. Oh, forgot to mention. We pulled up in the car, Zed stopped the engine then tried to restart it. It wouldn’t start. We left him to it.
So, we saw black-faced vervet monkeys, red-tailed monkeys and red colobus monkeys so not too bad and we saw animals on our first day! We saw some crowned bird thing as well that can mimmick about 70 other birds’ calls. It’s called a Mike Yarwood bird*
*This is a blatant lie. It was some sort of chat.
We met Zed by the road and he was looking a bit smug as he’d fixed the car himself and even showed off by switching the engine off and getting it going again.
It wasn’t a long drive to our accommodation for the night which is Kibali Lodge. Once we’d sat down and meals etc explained to us we were taken to our room which was quite a long walk away. They’d asked us if we wanted to pay $40 each to do a nighttime walk and maybe see some snakes. It was a definite NO from Claire! On the way to the room she was a bit jumpy whenever she saw a tree root.
We unpacked a couple of things then meandered back up for our dinner. Zed was very tired too as he hadn’t slept at all last night and we were a bit shattered obviously but we all stayed awake through a lovely three course meal. The fresh avacado was a particular highlight.
Luckily we don’t have to be up until 5:40 in the morning….

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