Uganda

We were able to hop on an overnight bus coming through Rwanda from Congo and continue on directly to the capital of Kampala. 

Once the realities of overland African travel were reconciled with the flight we had booked out of Nairobi, Uganda, like Rwanda, ended up being a much shorter trip than we originally expected.  Alma’s friend accused us of “beeping” Rwanda.  A beep is when you call somebody and hang up after just one or two rings.  You could do it to signal arriving safely at a destination, call me back or thinking of someone… it all depends on the scenario.  Basically it’s because you don’t have enough money to actually make a call.  (Cameroonians do this all the time.)  Anyways, we thought the comparison to our Rwanda trip as a “beep” was pretty hilarious.  Since we also “beeped” Uganda we’ll just have to figure out a time to come back in the future. 

We decided to visit the Rhino Sanctuary since our rhino sighting in the Serengeti was pretty distant.  It’s sad because the whole reason why this sanctuary needs to exist is because of how extremely bad the rhino poaching has become.  The rhino horns are even more valuable than elephant tusks and they’re being poached at such an extreme rate that they’re seriously in danger of becoming extinct.  A ranger took us trekking through some swampy forests and we came upon a couple groups of rhinos just chilling out.  They were relatively unphased so we got to go right up close.  This was our first walking safari and it was definitely a whole different feel; we didn’t have to stick to the roads or twist ourselves out of car windows for a view.

The following day we went white water rafting on the Nile, this was my favourite thing so far.  First of all the Nile was just so big and calm.  While getting to know our fellow rafters, we discovered that the rafter I was sitting next to knows my sister from work in NYC, small world!  We went over five rapids and flipped over on two of them.  There were elaborate instructions about how you were supposed to try & hold on to both the raft and the paddle in the event of a flip.  The first time we flipped, I let go of the paddle straight away but clung to the raft.   Camp Counselor Kihn instinctively held on to her paddle but let go of the raft so she had to get picked up by the “rescue kayak.”  This involved a hilarious straddling of the front of the kayak but I missed the whole thing by the time I got pulled onto the upside down raft & discovered she was missing.  Getting back into the raft in general required way more arm strength than I possessed.  We were very impressed by our guide who would just grab our lifejackets one handed and heave us back in.  The rafting took all day, in between the rapids were big sections of calm water where we got to hop out and swim/ drift along with the current. 

After the rafting the company put everybody up in their Nile-side resort.  It was basically just a glorified backpackers, but it was next to the Nile with an awesome view so we hung out with all our new rafting buddies & then hopped on the night bus for Nairobi the following evening. 

Apparently Lonely Planet had just ranked Uganda as the number one up and coming tourist destination or something along those lines.  Everyone was expecting a tourism boom… and then the Ebola outbreak happened and according to our rafting guide just trip after trip of people canceled their entire vacations.  Two of our friends were actually in Uganda during the outbreak and didn’t even hear about it until their return to America!  …Neither Claire nor I got Ebola, phew.