Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Back in Uganda we went to Lake Mburo National Park where it pissed it down as we arrived - it of a b***** as we were in a very crude campsite with no shelters and no upgrades! Luckily the weather eased off and we managed to put our tents up on fairly decent ground. We then went for a 2-hour bush walk. This park is normally pretty decent for leopards but to be honest, we hardly saw anything - a few buck here and there and some zebra and that was about it sp pretty disappointing. That's the problem when you've seen so much - you get fussy and only want to stop for cats and kills!
We then drove to Jinja - the adrenalin capital of East Africa. It's actually the source of the River Nile which, at 6,650km (4,130 miles) long, is generally regarded as the longest river in the world. I decided to upgrade with Tracey to a fixed tent which was nice (mainly because you don't need to worry about putting the tent up and down!!). I had done pretty much all of the adrenalin stuff on offer except jet boating which I have been trying to do since NZ and it's the only thing left on my list. It was brilliant! The guy driving (Gavin) was a Kiwi and clearly loves the boat. It had a V8 engine and gobbled something stupid like 2 litres of fuel a minute! We zipped around the rapids bumping up and down and skimming the edges of rocks and cliffs (scary stuff!!). I was in the middle and every time we did a 360, I thought I would either push Marcus or Patrick out of the boat. I spent the whole hour screaming and giggling - it was great fun. At one point we were flagged down by a white guy in a kayak. He told us that a kid had fallen in the river and they were trying to find him. Of course, none of the Black guys could swim so couldn't jump in to try and find him. To be honest, my feeling was that the poor kid had probably already gone tumbling down the rapids and the big waterfall and there was little hope of finding him alive. So, horrible as it sounds, we carried on - there was seriously nothing we could have done. We got back to the jetty and Gavin was thanking us etc then suddenly said, 'Sod it, shall we go out again?' So, we went out for another 10 minutes - brilliant!
We left Jinja the following day and after a night stop in El Doret we finally made it back to Nairobi and the end of the trip. It was good to be back in a proper bed again but once again sad to be saying goodbye to some really good people, especially Marcus and Olly - our crew from the last 9 weeks or so. The end of another era and my travels in Africa.
- comments