From one war zone to another

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Uganda is absolutely stunning, describing it wouldn't do it justice so I won't really try, it is very green and mountainous with banana and sugar plantations everywhere and I'll eventually post some pics so you can see for yourself. As we drove through the villages children were throwing themselves over the verges onto the road like lemmings to wave at us screaming "mazungu" (white person). Despite the 30 degree heat I am still Daz white and probably the whitest mazungu they have ever seen, a twelve hour truck journey doesn't really lend itself to getting a tan. Our 12 hour drive from Kampala to the start of the gorilla trek was the worse day of the trip so far, we were all like whinging kids asking if we were nearly there (fair enough after 8 hours) and could we stop for the toilet (= wee in the bush). I'm surprised they didn't throw us off the truck.

The gorillas had moved to the Democratic Republic of Congo (how considerate of them to set up camp in a former war zone) so we had to get visas and go through immigration. You'd expect crossing the border would be a full cavity search affair but it was pretty relaxed, the only thing separating the countries were two bamboo sticks (and 500 sharp shooters hiding in the bushes).

We had a briefing from a funny little man no more than 5 feet tall (he'd descended from Pigme's) called Daniel who was our guide for the gorilla trek. Given that he was in charge and we were all a little nervous about seeing guerillas rather than gorillas, he didn't really put our minds at rest with pearls of wisdom such as "today is not tomorrow" and "tomorrow you will not see lions" - and he finished every sentence of his broken english with "do you understand" - no actually we haven't a clue but we smiled and nodded politely.

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