Queen Elizabeth Park

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We assembled early Wednesday morning at a friend’s house with mimosas before the eight of us piled into the tour guide’s safari truck. We drove several hours before coming to the border crossing with Uganda and continued on a short cut to the outskirts of Queen Elizabeth Park.

We stayed at the Katara Lodge, which had several thatched roof cabins. The top half of the walls were made of screens and canvas, so you could roll them down and have an open air view of the valley below. One of the beds had wheelbarrow wheels, so we pushed it out onto the balcony one night and slept under the stars.

On Thursday, our solar power was not operating, so we got dressed with one flashlight and a cell phone before starting out on our early morning game drive. We paid our fees at a park entrance and popped the roof hatches off the safari truck. After a few hours, we had seen many DLAs (deer like animals), warthogs, and water buffalo wallowing in shiny mud pits. We got stuck pretty badly in the mud and had to get out of the car, while the men attempted to push it out. Luckily, another American was in the vicinity and used her towrope to pull us out of the muddy tracks. On the way back, we saw elephants near the roadside. While we were stopped, baboons came up to the car (within five feet) and one of them greeted us by urinating.

During our afternoon game drive, we saw around 20 elephants and had drinks at an older lodge, styled like a big game hunter lodge with huge tusks across the fireplace. In the evening, we returned to our lodge for a poolside Thanksgiving dinner (we brought our own turkey and pumpkin pie).

On Friday morning, we headed down into an isolated gorge for chimp trekking. While we were waiting for the other guide who had the gun, we heard the chimps waking calls, so we ran after them in pursuit. After crossing the hippo-ridden river, and running through the jungle, we finally located them. We got to see the males unsuccessfully hunt a colobus monkey and watched the troop for an hour. Jenn fell during an escape from the possibility of chimps urinating on her (apparently that was a rumor). The jungle was super humid, and we got pretty scraped up from thorny bushes and vines.

After getting cleaned up, we headed out for a river safari through a channel connecting two lakes. The boat had benches for 40 people with an upper deck for viewing. From the water we saw elephants, water buffalo, hippos, crocodiles, and lots of birds. Several villages are established within the park, but the guide said that they lose several residents each year due to crocodiles and lions. We got close enough to a hippo pod for one of them to surface near the boat and voice his objection. We also saw a baby hippo rise out of the water and continued to rise as its mother came up beneath it.

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