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chemicals don't have to be poisonous
Sunday, July 30 2017
location: Amuka Safari Lodge, Ziwa Rhino Sanctuary, Uganda
There were eggs available at breakfast, something my egg aversion doesn't have to contend with (surrounded as I am by vegans, which includes Gretchen's parents). But there is nothing vegan "grandma," (my sister-in-law's mother), so I had to go back to the strategy I used to employ back when I was surrounded by egg gluttons who could think of no better way to pass the time than lingering for two hours over brunch: eye aversion.
We left the rhino sanctuary, heading northwest on increasingly marginal roads. It was pleasing to see that even if one is driving, say, 50 miles, sometimes the only choice for a road is a dusty red one. As dirt/gravel roads go, they're well-maintained. But there's a limit to how fast one can drive on them. Eventually we entered Murchison Falls National Park at a checkpoint that included a gift shop with grossly inflated prices. We all were made to sign the register by the guy with the AK-47 and then we snapped pictures of a group of baboons that happened through. From there, we drove to the top of a series of steep rapids in the Nile River (here heading due west) as it comes down to the elevation of Lake Albert (still 23 miles away). There are several Niles to keep track of above the confluence in Sudan of the White and Blue Niles. This Nile we were looking at here was the White Nile, and in this section connecting Lake Victoria (upstream) to Lake Albert (downstream) is called the Victoria Nile. The river is fairly narrow through the falls, forcing it to move extremely quickly and viciously, throwing up clouds of mist so dense that one is tempted to shield electronics. Grandma decided she did want to see these falls, though walking to them involved lots of steps and plenty of uneven ground, so for long stretches of the walk, she depended on her grandson being on one side and her daughter being on the other. I snapped pictures of the water and a couple lizards I saw (including one featuring huge patches of bright orange). At some point I noticed that my cellphone was not in my pocket, and I worried that it had fallen onto the ground as I got out of the van. So I hurried back to look for it. Eventually I had one of the drivers open the van, but I couldn't find the damn thing anywhere. Had it fallen out of my pocket as I walked around on the rocks near the falls? Eventually Robert found the damn thing; it had slipped into a compartment between the seats. "It's a cheap phone, but..." I said. "But not cheap in Uganda," Robert replied.
After driving down the escarpment and heading further west along the south bank of the Victoria Nile, we came to the place where a ferry could take us to the north bank. While waiting for that to happen, Gretchen's father and I looked out across the river (which was about a quarter mile wide) and saw the barrel-shaped bodies of distant hippopotamuses. Near the ferry launch was a large colorful metal globe on a spinnable axis. I noticed that it had dent near the place where the Chicxulub asteroid impacted the Yucatan Peninsula and wiped out the dinosaurs.
After the ferry ride, we driven to our destination nearby, the Paraa Safari Lodge. We were delighted to see a group of warhogs casually grazing on its lawn. They were bending their little wrists like backwards knees to better reach down to the grass, something Gretchen had seen before (though it was familiar to me; goats also do this). Paraa had a pool, which excited Gretchen and the kids. After checking in (but before going to our rooms), we sat down for yet another buffet lunch. As we'd found at the other two other buffets, there were lots of options for a vegan, starting with rice, curry, and cooked vegetables. With a little hot sauce and perhaps a few exotic African starches, one could assemble a delicious meal.
At this point in the trip, I'd realized I needed to download a large webroot in order to do some remote development I'd planned. So after getting squared away with our room, I took my laptop out to the pool area (the only place in the resort with WiFi) and tried to download files using Filezilla, my preferred (though imperfect) FTP client. But evidently I wasn't the only one in the resort trying to pull lots of stuff on the internet. I saw lots of white kids with tablets with probably deeply-ingrained YouTube habits, and they were going to keep trying to watch, no matter how choppy their feeds were proving to be. I eventually gave up on trying to download individual files from a webtree and instead zipped the whole thing up into a .gz file on the server and tried to download that. But the process kept timing out and restarting from zero. There were configurations changes I could make to FileZilla to deal with this, but the amount of babysitting required was eating up my afternoon and evening. It was precious downtime I would've preferred to spend some other way.
My increasingly foul mood was further fouled by the kratom tea I'd started drinking. Kratom seems to increase my irritability, particularly when I'm also on antibiotics (which I've had to take prophylactically against malaria). Another thing making me cranky was the pungent smell of insecticide in our room, which had been sprayed while we were out (despite the fact that we'd filled out a form saying we didn't want our room sprayed). Evidently people wanting their rooms not to be sprayed is so uncommon that the staff just spray the rooms without looking at such forms. The form had said the insecticide is "quite harmless to humans," but we live in a post-truth world and I wasn't convinced. Furthermore, fragrant chemicals don't have to be poisonous to be unpleasant.
[REDACTED]
The dinner buffet was similar to the lunch one, though I ate with a beer. Later, after a torrential downpour, I hung out near the dining room with my laptop trying again to download files. At around 10:00pm, the internet suddenly improved enormously. Evidently the brats with their tablets had all gone back to their rooms, far enough away from the WiFi to not clog the lodge's internet connection. I managed to get speeds as high as 90 KB/s. I was able to get what I'd set out to obtain hours before, something that would've been a trivial five minute thing even with crappy DSL-based internet back in Hurley.
Baboons at the checkpoint entrance to the park. Click to enlarge.
Baby baboons in the road. Click to enlarge.
The kids at Murchison Falls. The boy in blue is my nephew. Right of that is my niece and my sister-in-law.
Click to enlarge.
Colorful metal globe at the ferry south of the Nile. There's another one on the north bank.
Click to enlarge.
Warthogs (one bending low on her wrists in the manner unfamiliar to Gretchen) on the lawn of the Paraa Safari Lodge.
Click to enlarge.
A hunter's sunbird on the bushes outside our room.
Click to enlarge.
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