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three-tiered pool
Tuesday, August 1 2017
location: Paraa Safari Lodge, Murchison Falls National Park, Uganda
We had another early morning today, this time for a boat ride. After breakfast, we were driven down to the ferry landing and rode in a boat with a driver/guide named James. The destination this time was the delta, where the Victoria Nile empties into the north end of Lake Albert before being drained by the Albert Nile (the mouth of which is fairly close to the Victoria Nile delta). Initially on this expedition, we saw multiple schools of hippos and a fair number of birds (but no crocodiles or land mammals, aside from a few water bucks).
We snapped pictures and looked through our binoculars like the experience-hungry tourists we were. As I've mentioned, I'd brought my Nikon Coolpix P510 camera, whose big lens and 42X zoom allowed me to get great photos of whatever I could see with my eyes. Both of the kids also had good cameras (they were some sort of Samsung model with touchscreens) with capable optical zooms, though they had less light-gathering power. It was hard for me to articulate the fraudulence of digital zoom in language they could understand, though I tried. I was surprised by what good shape my niece's camera was in, considering it was the same one she'd taken to the Galapagos a year and a half before. She hadn't cleared out any of those Galapagos pictures from her camera card, which, at 32 GB, wasn't giving her any compelling reason to.
For most of the long journey to the delta, we saw very little aside from a solitary shoebill. With so little of interest to see, the ride seemed to take a very long time. I could measure our progress both on my phone (I'd loaded the Google Maps map at the lodge and could track our position via GPS) and also by watching the distant escarpment west of Lake Albert gradually emerge from the haze. I knew we wouldn't be going quite that far. There were a couple of visible peaks along (and beyond) that escarpment that James said lay either at the border of or within the Democratic Republic of Congo.
We arrived in Lake Albert, looked around and didn't see all that much of interest, and then turned around and headed back. There was almost nothing of interest on the ride back except for a pair of crested cranes that flew over. I saw them through the binoculars and they looked like something drawn by Dr. Seuss. At some point we took a bathroom break at a convenient landing spot, and there in the bush somewhere I caught a glimpse of a bird so brightly vermilion that it scorched a note of surprise on my retina, which had accustomed itself to an endless feed of green.
It bears mentioning that the Nile is lined with a reed that I'd identified (mostly from exposure to world history texts in my youth) as payrus, the raw material for the first forms of paper. It turned out that the kind I was seeing along the north bank was not the kind used by the Egyptians for that purpose; instead they'd used the taller kind we could see growing along the south bank.
After that disappointing five-hour tour, we went to the lodge for yet another hearty buffet. We would be leaving immediately afterwards, and evidently the lodge staff didn't think today's lunch was part of our plan. They tried to confront me about it, but what did I know? "I was given to expect that we were eating lunch here," I proclaimed, shoving rice and curry into my face. Whoever's problem it was, it wasn't mine. My father-in-law, who had arranged everything, wasn't there yet, so there was nobody of authority in our contingent, but seeing me ignore the staff seemed to be good enough for the kids, who are still mostly into things like plain rice and pasta, although my niece does seem to like beans as well. But mostly she's into dessert.
While I'm on the subject of my niece, I should mention that the ten-year-old is fascinated with a game I have on my phone called Triplex. It's like Tetris in that one has to arrange shapes in a way that minimizes (or, in the case of Triplex, completely eliminates) voids between the shapes. But instead of the pieces falling, it's the player that does all the moving. When one has managed to completely tile the given rectangle with the provided shapes, it's on to the next puzzle. The rules are simple, but it's compellingly difficult.
After saying goodbye to Paraa, we drove to our next destination, which was on the other end (the eastern one) of Murchison Falls National Park. Much of the initial distance was covered on a dirt road through the park, one that treated us to yet more gorgeous vistas populated with antelope, giraffes, and even some elephants. The landscape was initially open brushland punctuated by the occasional flat-topped acacia. But eventually we reached a vast grassland almost devoid of trees. Beyond that, the grassland gradually started having trees, but they were all coconut palms. Robert (our driver) claimed that they'd been planted by the elephants, who eat the coconut fruits whole and then apparently pass the nuts in a germination-ready condition. I asked if the elephants ever derive any nutrients from within the coconut, but language difficulties and Robert's preferred narrative on the issue kept me from getting an answer.
Eventually the dirt road left the park and arrived at an asphalt one heading east-west. There was a village here with all the usual Ugandan village things: a butcher shop, dress shups, several steel door merchants, and bed manufacturers. There were also less formal shops that were little more than arrays of products laid out on a cloth adjacent to the street, similar to the way things are sold by students on the college green. What was interesting about this particular village was that it was entirely off-grid. There was no electricity coming from powerlines, so (to the extent people had electricity) it was arriving as batteries charged elsewhere, from generators, or from solar panels. Indeed, one of the most common products being sold in the temporary stores was solar panels and batteries. They looked like strange off-brand Chinese designs.
The paved road had two lanes and its surface was in better shape than one typically finds for such long stretches in the United States. This probably had something to do with how little it was being used. It was a conduit mostly for pedestrians and people on motorcycles. There were the occasional big trucks, always overloaded with whatever human passengers could fit, but they didn't add up to much.
Our destination was the Chobe Safari Lodge, which lay several miles west down a rough road from the eastmost corner of the park. The checkpoint on that road had recently been moved out near the asphalt road to keep highwaymen from setting up on the entrance road and ambushing tourists. Along the way, there was wildlife to see: giraffes and baboons mostly. At the lodge itself, there dozens of vervet monkeys, some of which were doing things in public that humans normally wouldn't. I happened to notice that the scrotal pouches on these guys were sky blue.
Wow, Chobe was a cut above Paraa. It overlooked gentle rapids and several islands in the Nile, and it even had its own school of hippos. Chobe had not one but three pools, each arranged on a terrace with a waterfall connecting them. It was possible to jump from one terrace down to the next, the sort of thing a ten year old and a thirteen year old are going to find totally awesome. There was WiFi, but it didn't seem congested. This probably had something to do with how uncrowded Chobe was.
Our contingent had been assigned three (or was it four?) separate cabins out some distance from the big central building (we were driven there on a golf cart, perhaps my first golf cart ride ever). The cabins were actually tents, complete with lockable zippers, though the back parts containing the bathrooms and showers were more permanent structures, and each unit sat on a decidedly permanent foundation. Given how awkward the zipper mechanism was, it was difficult to see the justification for using tent technology. Also, the smell inside took some getting used to. It was some combination of old animal hides (from the fancy furniture) and years of spraying with different insecticides.
I wore my bathing suit back to the pool and even got into the water, my first actual in-pool experience of this trip. Though I'm not normally one to jump any distance into water, somehow I allowed the kids to convince me to join them and Gretchen as they leapt from one pool terrace into the one below. Though the water I was jumping into was six feet deep, my impact always carried me all the way to the bottom, forcing me to sit (or even lie) momentarily on the bottom before clawing my way back to air.
Gretchen, our sister-in-law, and her kids all ordered drinks at the handy poolside bar. I went simple, ordering a gin & tonic, though Gretchen ordered a bloody mary and our sister-in-law ordered a margarita. Gretchen found the bloody mary undrinkably sweet, and I confirmed its undrinkabilty with a sip. Evidently in Uganda the tomato juice contains enormous amounts of sugar. Our little niece also took sips of our beverages to see what she thought of them. This is a normal part of the human childhood experience, though I was a little surprise that a child raised under such relentless supervision even had the inclination to do such a thing.
Up in the main building was a bar with a lounge area around it and a huge screen locked onto CNN. Donald J. Trump was still leader of the most powerful nation on earth, and he seemed to be continuing through on his plan to help Vladimir Putin retroactively win the Cold War. The other had gone back to the room and I was doing work for the remote workplace. At some point I went to the bar to get another gin and tonic. The woman at the bar quoted a priced that sounded like 39,000 Ugandan shillings. It was all monopoly money to me, so I handed her 40,000, not really processing that this was the equivalent of $11.11, which would be a very expensive drink in this part of Africa. The woman just smiled at me in a way that suggested she might be deeply in my debt. But I was suspicious and soon determined that the drink should've only cost 9,000 ($2.50). I gave her 10,000 and told her to keep the change.
I should mention that throughout Uganda, even in relatively nice places like Chobe, it was common to smell body odor on even the best-dressed of employees. This was a function partly of the tropical climate (though it tended not to be all that hot at such high elevations), but also of the materials used to make the clothes (cheap non-wicking manmade fibers) and a culture where deodorant and antiperspirant aren't considered essential to work in the service industry.
Dinner at Chobe was similar to the way it had been in other places. There was a buffet with rice and an Indian curry, various African starches and groundnut sauce (peanut butter). But the food here was a cut above, and there even hot peppers in oil for adding zing (for those, like me, who appreciate that sort of thing).
A powerful thunderstorm kept us from immediately going back to our room. When Gretchen and I finally did, we requested a golf cart taxi for the short ride. We'd been warned that after dark the hippos come up out of the Nile to graze the grounds. And nobody wants to get mauled by a hippo!
Hippos in the Nile. Click to enlarge.
Giraffes on the drive from Paraa.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?170801 feedback
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