Back online again

Long time no write; it's been a busy week. The highlights: an afternoon spent watching tens of thousands of flamingoes at Lake Nakuru (truly unbelievable; from afar the shores of the lake looked like they had been smeared with bright pink lipstick) along with water buffalo, a rhino and a number of different types of gazelles. From there, we bounced along through rural Kenya -- including golden wheat fields that wouldn't have looked much out of place in Saskatchewan -- to Samburu National Park, an arid grass and scrublands area that is home to a number of unique Kenyan animals. They call them the Samburu Five: the reticulated giraffe (with darker and more prominent splotches than other sub-species), the oryx (also found on the dunes of Namibia, remarkably able to live without water), the Somali ostrich (has a blue neck rather than pink), Grevy's zebra (way cooler than the common zebra, with thin psychedelic stripes) and the gerenuk (a long-necked gazelle that looks like a cross between a giraffe and an antelope. Way cool).

We saw all of them, and in hindsight it was a pretty remarkable trip. At the time, though, it felt pretty disappointing. We had come hoping to see elephants and some of the big cats -- lions, cheetahs and leopards -- but even after many hours spent bouncing around the grasslands, we came up entirely empty. Adding to the frustration was the fact that upon our return to the lodge, we heard from others who had seen them. Somehow, we had just been unlucky. The season added to the troubles: the arid landscape usually concentrates the animals around the local river, which runs right next to the lodge we were staying at. But with the rains, water suddenly became plentiful and the animals dispersed, making them nearly impossible to find. We are, however, planning a trip to either the Serengeti or the Masia Mara (the Kenyan version of the Serengeti), where animals are far more plentiful. That should happen nearer the end of the trip.

We did, however, see elephants. Our last night on safari we stayed at a mountain lodge in Mt Kenya National Park. It is situated right on the edge of a watering hole, a natural animal magnet high in the mountain forest -- and all of the rooms face right out onto it. When we arrived, we were disappointed to see only a few gazelles (they get old after a while, since there's so many of them) there. But as evening came, we got to see a massive rush of 60-odd water buffalo snorting and churning up the mud as they travelled through. That was pretty cool. We fell asleep to the sounds of crickets and tree hyraxes (see if you can find their noise somewhere on the Internet -- it's the weirdest thing ever) -- but then were suddenly awoken by a load trumpeting. We stumbled out of bed to find a half-dozen elephants at the watering hole. We scrambled down to a water-side viewing bunker and stayed there for a good 30 minutes not more than 15 feet from the wild elephants. It was spectacular.

The safaris are on hiatus for now, though. I'm writing from Uganda, where we arrived today after a road trip to end all road trips. We boarded a bus last night in Nairobi just after midnight and pulled into Kampala this morning at 2 p.m. -- a full 14 hours of slamming into potholes the size of meteor craters and being woken from the few moments of sleep we were able to manage by moments of sheer terror that our bus would disintegrate. For good parts of the journey our bus -- the big tall touring kind -- was swaying like a drunken giraffe, and I was nervous it would flip on its side. We, thankfully, avoided any incidents. But that's more than I can say for the other people we saw on the journey. In just that one trip we managed to see two fender-benders and one pedestrian get hit by a mini-bus. So much excitement.

Kampala is a city of a million car horns, all honking in quick succession. They're impossible to escape, but not that annoying. Being here feels like being set free. In Nairobi -- and Kenya in general -- we were constantly harassed and put through elaborate guilt trips by trinket vendors whose best marketing strategy was to go for the throat and basically accuse us of letting them go hungry if we didn't buy their wares. I'm not making that up -- they had dozens of pre-prepared lines that they fired in quick succession when we balked, and many of them were aimed at shaming us into parting with our money. It usually worked, at least on the shaming part -- and often on the money part, too. It's hard not to feel guilty when you're bombing around the countryside in a safari van (which was our mode of transportation on our safaris) looking at women stooped under heavy loads, walking long distances to market up steep hills covered in rusting tin houses smaller than most car garages in North America.

Nonetheless, Kampala seems free of the hard sell and it's refreshing. We're looking forward to spending a bit of time here, then going to explore the mouth of the Nile at a place called Jinja. We're contemplating a whitewater rafting trip there, but are a little leery after one of my best friends did the same a while back and ended up with an infection that could well have ended in amputation. An afternoon of thrills sounds fun, but I'd love to have my leg for life. Something tells me the adrenaline will win in the end, though.