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Published: June 11th 2006
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Hippo
We were sat in the bar by the lake when this beast emerged from the depths to graze Hey everyone, once again I start this entry with an apology for how lax i've been in updating it, this should be a good entry though for myself and Mr Carrol finally did something properly African, we went to a national park.........
Lake Mburro is the park nearest to Rushere so we decided to head there and make a weekend of it. After bartering with a taxi driver to take us there and pick us up on the Sunday we headed off on what we hoped would be a pretty exciting weekend......
When we turned off onto the park the driver immediately jabbed me in the arm and pointed excitedly down the road (his english is as good as my ugandan expect for when it came to bartering for prices, then he was amazingly fluent), what he was pointing at was a zebra on the road. The zebra looked at us as we stopped a few metres away from it, then it crossed the road and more followed it, I told the driver he had to stop, why? (lets say it together) it's a zebra crossing! See instead of taking the photo opportunity I decided to wise crack and they'd gone
YES
In medical school they teach you to think horses not zebras when you hear hoof beats, course I only remembered Dr Benton saying that to Carter on ER before I could get the camera out.
The park HQ was pretty nice, I guess I expected shacks as this isn't the most modern of parks in Uganda, but the accomodation was very cheap and very nice considering. We booked a nature walk for the following morning and set off to the lake itself, we had to be escorted everywhere though by an armed ranger, why you ask? Is it because lions or a big cat will grab you? Nope, Africas biggest killer of humans is the humble Buffalo, once this animal gets your scent it will come for you, luckily it would be no match for our guides AK47, or so we hoped!
At the lake we sat down and looked out, quite a picturesque scene, however every so often a boat (I thought a boat) was making a weird noise, I went to investigate and was surprised to see three hippos arsing about in the water, I say arsing about cos all they seemed to be doing was sticking their heads under for a few seconds then surfacing making a noise and a smell (yes you can smell hippos surfacing, it ain't nice either, like dead fish). Having gestured and pointed at the hippos enough I noticed a monkey had just broke into the kitchen of the lake side bar, so I snapped a picture of it, just got it in time to before some kids from a local school started lobbing rocks at it whilst the teachers looked on with disinterest (whenever i've tried throwing stuff at animals my mother clipped me).
We spent the afternoon on the lake in a smallish motor boat, a guide took us round the lake to look for crocodiles, was very exciting when we actually saw some, big ones as well, really hostile looking animals, our guide told us of times when they've actually attacked the boat!
Also during our boat ride the guide took us to a rather deserted looking fishing village as he said he needed to speak to someone, it looked so damn dodgy, whilst the boat pulled to a stop and he exchanged heated words with a fisherman I was saying to dom 'these people look like they are gonna eat us'.
The night was a bit exciting as well, you see the toilets at the HQ are outside, so when we needed to go we went together to stave off any leopard attacks, when we'd finished dom shone his touch and we noticed there were ants everywhere, so we left quickly, however as we walked back dom yelped and slapped his calf, an ant must've been on his leg, since I hadn't been bit I laughed, he yelped again, then I yelped, and we hurried back in order to see how many of the horrors had climbed up our legs and to prevent them getting any higher!
As it turned out there weren't too many, but they were big damn ants, big black ones!
On the Saturday we got up early for a nature walk, this was really really good, our guide was called Andrew, and as we stalked through the bush in our search for animals he told us about the local wildlife.... and we saw lots of it, impallas, ugandan cobb, wild boars, water buck, bush buck, unfortunately nothing really dangerous until we encountered the buffalo! Massive animal and on it's lonesome, it picked up our scent and came towards us (about 50 metres away), andrew unslung his AK47 (I covered my ears) and he cocked the gun, the noise of the gun being cocked was enough to put the buffalo off and we were able to move on. The walk lasted about 3 hours but disapointingly we didn't encounter any zebras (and I felt stupid for not taking a picture of the zebras crossing at the start). However Andrew could tell we were disapointed and suggested we do another walk in the afternoon.
The afternoon walk had one goal, find the strippey horses. We treked for about an hour before we finally came across the zebras, it was awesome, from not being able to find any in the morning we were suddenly surrounded by upto 50 zebras in every direction. I got as many pictures as I could.......
And we left Lake Mburro happy men, our next park trip we are planning to go to Queen Elizabeth park, where they boast lions and elephants, aparently it's just like the lion king
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Michael Smith
Haway the Cosmo!
Sounds awesome G. Zebra Crossing?!? Have you been getting joke lessons off Sprigens?! WOrld Cup fevers struck me, are you managing to see the games or not? Mike