Uganda Chapter 4: Wildlife, Bitches.

To see a complete set of photos from this day, click here and here.

So, in previous travel journals, reference has been made to the Ho Lin/Lisa Steval style of traveling. Which, in case you have forgotten, is basically to schedule an activity for every minute of every day. Generally, when we are traveling as a group, I skip every third or fourth activity to, well, sleep usually. But that was not to be on this trip. I skipped one nature walk, and it was on the last day. And so, on our first real day in Par'aa, we went activity heavy from start to finish.

We were out the door at 7am to start the first of many game drives on this trip. Some baboons greeted us on the road on the way into the park for the game drive:



And then we are off on our game drive! Happy girls in a happy world.



We see lots of wildlife, and it's magical. I mean, really magical. First, the sun rises over the Nile river.



Then we spot lots and lots of wild game. You can, of course, see all of the pictures here, but among the beautiful animals we see are:

Water Buffalo...


Giraffe...


Elephant...


Lion...


Warthog...


Antelope of many varieties...


We're exhausted, so we nap and have lunch, and then we're off for a boat ride up the Nile so that we can see Murchison Falls from the bottom. Before we leave for the boat ride though, a mama baboon and her little baby baboon come out to play. They're looking for shade, because it's, you know, Africa hot there, but it's kind of like the baboons are like Lisa and I. They have world lust.



And then our boat ride, on which we saw...

Hippos...


Croc...


And the falls from the bottom...


I've a lovely day.

That night, I'm in my room. And the mosquito netting is down. And I hear wings fluttering. Now, perhaps I should mention that the walk from our rooms to the lobby is pretty much like a video game in which, after dark, you dodge bats. So when I hear the fluttering in my room, I assume that there must be a bat in my room. I go and knock on Lisa's door.

Me
"I think something's in my room. Can you come sit in there for a while and tell me if you hear anything?"

Lisa
"I heard the same thing last night, and there was nothing in my room."

Me
"Humor me."

And so Lisa comes and sits in my room for twenty minutes, and we hear NOTHING the entire time she's in there. So she leaves, and I go to bed. And I wake up in the middle of the night and roll over onto my side.

Attached by his gross little feet to the outside of my mosquito netting DIRECTLY ACROSS FROM MY FACE is a nasty little bat. And I? I act like a GIRL. I jump up screaming and fight my way through the mosquito net and sprint out the door. Of course, if you've been paying attention, you know that sprinting out of the door means sprinting right into bat central outside. And the bats, I swear to GOD, start coming right for my head. And so I scream again (and it's a good thing I wasn't in actual trouble because nobody seems to have heard me scream) and run back into my room and into the bathroom and slam the door shut. LIKE A GIRL.

I finally collect myself enough to take a towel and chase the bat out, but suffice it to say that I did not get a ton of sleep that night. Which was unfortunate since the next day we had to get up at the crack of dawn to...

To see a complete set of photos from this day, click here and here.