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travel ukuleles
Wednesday, August 2 2017
location: Chobe Safari Lodge, Murchison Falls National Park, Uganda
Being in the habit of waking up early, I got out from beneath the mosquito net (that thing is just in the way; there were no mosquitoes in the tent). Gretchen was already up and elsewhere, so I thought maybe I'd head toward the main building (the one with the restaurant and tiered pools) via the scenic route, a path along the riverbank. The hippos were offshore among some rocks, snorting and blowing and making occasional groany noises. There were a number of shorebirds nearby (plovers and ibises mostly), and they weren't too concerned about me. More skeptical were the vervet monkeys, which kept well out of my way. Eventually I saw Gretchen in the distance, and she approached quietly (anything else would've unnecessarily disturbed the wildlife). She had something to show me up near one of the cabin/tents. But we didn't have to go far before I found an example of it right there in the path: hippopotamus tracks. It's a little hard to imagine hippos doing anything but milling around in a river doing nothing, but they have to eat, and when they do so it's largely on land.
Breakfast at Chobe was, like dinner, a cut above our experience at Paraa. Mostly this was a function of the lower population in the dining room, meaning the buffet was less pawed-over. But the things on offer were also more diverse and of higher quality. For example, the coffee at Chobe was the first exceptional coffee I'd had on this trip, and I could not stop drinking it. There was also an omelette bar for those who like to ingest eggy slime. That didn't describe many in our contingent, but it did describe grandma (the kids' maternal grandmother who had taken the place of my brother-in-law). Grandma has her habits, and they're set in stone. She loves to be around the kids, but she's never interested enough in the wildlife to put a pair of binoculars to her eyes. In the evening, she likes her vodka with water (which she drinks in moderation). And at meals, she always gets about three or four times the amount she will actually end up eating. Since she mostly likes to eat meat and eggs, this means creatures have to unnecessarily die to support her unexamined habits. At 75, she's perhaps too young to have received any of the frugality lessons of the Great Depression (lessons I learned indirectly through my parents), and it has apparently never occurred to her that there is anything wrong with scraping large chunks of dead animal directly into the trash.
Though much of this trip had been planned as a series of activities (as opposed to the relaxing vacations I prefer), today had been planned as a down day centered around the tiered pool. (As Gretchen pointed out, it makes sense that a big trip to Africa would be packed with numerous activities, since, if we'd just wanted a leisurely vacation, we could have gone some place a lot closer.) I hadn't taken all the days I'd be spending in Uganda as vacation days, so I felt obligated to do some work. So I set up with my laptop and worked on some tasks off the Taskinator. I still found myself lacking things I needed to do what I needed to do. The internet at Chobe was generally good enough to obtain those things, but this meant I couldn't do my work near the pool, where the WiFi was pretty terrible.
One change made to Facebook since I was last in the Old World (in October) is that the icon representing Notifications is different depending on where you are in the world. In the United States, the icon is of Planet Earth with the Americans in view. Here in East Africa, the globe has Europe and Africa in view. This was so unexpected that at first I thought I was seeing some sort of Chrome rendering glitch. But no.
At Paraa, Gretchen had jumped at the opportunity to get a massage, which was priced at only $45. Here at Chobe, the price was $35, so Gretchen scheduled one for this afternoon. The lower prices and higher quality of service seemed to indicate that Chobe is a bit hungrier for tourist dollars that Paraa; this probably has something to do with the fact that it off the beaten path.
Later this afternoon, there was a hour and a half wildlife walking tour scheduled, though I (like grandma) opted not to go. The kids didn't want to go either; they would've preferred to hang out at the pool all day, but their mother didn't want to impose on me to keep an eye on them (she probably didn't trust me either). I spent most of my time up in or near the lounge with the blaring CNN, continuing to do my remote web development for my employer on the other side of the planet.
[REDACTED]
The wildlife walking tour went an hour longer than planned, but eventually Gretchen returned and told me what she'd seen and learned. She'd seen a hippo skeleton left by a hippo caught in a hunter's snare (without access to the water, they quickly die in the sun). There was also a dramatic giraffe skeleton, also the victim of poaching. In the hike, they'd come upon a large herd of cape buffalo, against which the guide had an AK-47 on the chance they decided to charge. The most disturbing piece of info from the walk was the fate of all the plastic bottles containing the only form of water a tourist can drink. The guide said that they're all collected into bails and then taken out to a remote part of the bush and burned.
There was a pasta station at dinner tonight, but there seemed to be a line for it, and I didn't want to deal with that or any of the inevitable communication difficulties that come with asking for things in English of people who much prefer to converse in Luganda (which is, by the way, a tonal language). So I stuck to my usual mix of vegetables, curry, rice, potatoes, and oily hot peppers.
Later, as a storm raged outside, we all reconvened in the CNN lounge, where our nephew and niece entertained us with a song they'd been learning to play on ukulele. (They'd brought two little ukuleles with them to donate to the Abayudaya, a group of Ugandans in the northeast of the country who decided to become Jews after exposure to Christian missionaries.) Our poor little niece wasn't feeling well, and she had a sour look on her face as she played. "That's one happy-looking ukulele player!" I noted sarcastically. This was to be our last night together as a contingent; tomorrow Gretchen and I would be heading back south while the rest would continue with a longer trip that included a visit to the land of the Abayudaya, among other places.In keeping with as recent pattern, a powerful thunderstorm blew through during the ukulele performance, but it was mostly over by the time Gretchen and I wanted to head back to our cabin-tent. We decided to go there on foot despite the danger of hippos. Sadly, we didn't see any wild creatures on the walk back, though we did step in plenty of sticky red mud.
Swallows on a roof at Chobe. Click to enlarge.
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