UGANDA JOURNAL - MONTH TWO
I brought with me a little souvenir from my Nile trip: malaria. Despite being paranoid and always being covered up (only ever wearing boots, long socks, long pants, and long sleeve shirts, always sleeping under a mosquito net, and never being out around dawn or dusk) I did get a bunch of bites while there. Two weeks after being out there, the perfect incubation period for the illness, I came down with all the symptoms. (I'm actually a bit surprised this is the first time I've gotten it, given all the time I spent in Southeast Asia.) My friend Emily, whose had malaria twice, recognized the symptoms and recognized the timing of it, got an at-home test and meds from the pharmacy almost immediately, and had me taking them asap. Of course malaria has laid waste to uncountable numbers of people, and whole armies even in modern times; but 2018 isn't 1943, I was in a good place to have gotten sick (in the big city and with a friend), and was on good drugs quickly which meant it was not very severe, as far as such things go. So it was all over in five days. Still, it was no fun. I liken it to running an entire course of the worst flu you've ever had, but over and over every twelve hours or so, with a touch of added drama such that you can't comfortably leave the washroom...
Healthy again, and with Emily's parents visiting for two weeks, we executed our plan to hire a vehicle and driver and together visit the national parks of southwest Uganda. The Goodrich's are lovely, real salt of the Earth folks originally from Indiana. Her mother, Pam, who resembles a shorter, grey-haired version of her daughter, was a special-needs teacher and full-time mother of four. Bob, Emily's father, is a retired US Navy medical officer. I'm told privately (and with some amusement, as Emily only just recently learned of it) that upon retirement he was the highest ranking enlisted officer, Command master chief; which struck me as doubly impressive given how easy-going he comes across – more of a warm, guitar playing, Midwestern high school shop teacher, or something. These days, when not travelling to Africa to visit their daughter, they live far from the sea, near Williams, Arizona, just moments from the Grand Canyon, with three dogs on twenty acres powered by solar and wind...
We left early in the morning for a four hour drive. The first stop on our adventure was Leopard Rest Camp, just outside Lake Mburo National Park. The area, about 230 kms southwest of Kampala, was much more arid than swampy, humid Kampala. Stretches of wild grass and brushland surround Mburo and are used freely by local goat and cow herders. The native cow, and the most common, is the sub-Saharan Ankole – which is a really beautiful creature that tends to come in rich browns with spots of white and a set of the most magnificent, almost ridiculous, horns. It may sport the largest horns I've ever seen on an animal, with some of the biggest males leaving you wondering how they hold up their heads. I'm told Ankole cows produces very little milk and that great numbers are required to yield enough for sale, and that folks are trying to bring in European breeds to ramp up the dairy industry which is just new to Uganda. This effort is apparent from the new Indian-owned milk factory which stands like a blue obelisk overlooking the area upon one of the highest hills immediately outside the nearest village and greeting you at the turn-off to the park.
The approach to the park is a badly worn dirt track off a decent paved highway. Driving (weaving and jerking and bouncing and banging) about ten miles down the winding dirt road to the camp provided views of many goats and cows, a pair of crowned cranes (the national bird, and another almost ridiculous looking animal with a clownish face of white and red, with beady pale blue eyes and a streaky shock of gold flaring out in all directions from its head), and a whole mess of weaver birds. The weavers in the area build wild nest and make quite the visual and acoustic scene while doing it. Males (bright yellow with black heads) do the nest-building and do so to impress females (a much duller brown with stripes.) When finished weaving a nest, which is the size and shape of a sock with the hole facing downward, the male will hang upside down from the entrance, chirping madly and quivering his wings. This indicates to the females in the area that his handiwork is ready for inspection. These nests tend to be built in trees near or over water and out at the ends of the limbs making it still harder for predators to get at the eggs tucked inside. And their nests, often numbering in the dozens or maybe hundreds, can fill whole trees; resulting in a considerable racket and hive-like buzz of activity.
As we stopped to look at a tree covered with weaver nests some kids who'd been playing and looking for firewood over in the bushes ran up to the windows of the car. Most kids here are great. These dozen were pretty friendly and mostly just wanted to say hello. Some are more aggressive and rather than a smile or greeting or a wave, as is the norm, ask immediately for money and make it difficult to leave. Others will run up alongside the road as you near and do a wiggle dance while singing (what, I am not sure; though they seem delighted.) Still others will just scrunch up their little faces and yell “mzungu!” (Which, I read, once translated to something like “aimless traveller” but is now essentially the colloquialism for “white person” – and is exclaimed or mumbled wherever one goes, even in the city, making it almost an informal name.)
Lake Mburo was a chosen destination because of it's rare endemic birds, that birders from all over the planet come here just to see, and because it's home to great numbers of zebras which are found in few other places in the country. The area also has plenty of impala (which you've surely seen someplace: slender and jumpy, a little bit like deer) and waterbuck (a larger antelope vaguely resembling an elk.) Rarer, though around and throughout the park, are those few other beasts you have to keep your distance from: leopards, hyenas, and hippos (which we did not see any sign of while here.) Leopard Rest Camp sits up on a grassy hill among clusters of shrubs and trees and looks out over gorges and savannas, and a series of other rocky hilltops. The camp is made up of a dozen large army tents, pitched under thatched roofs on wooden stilts – doubtless for added rain and sun protection, but which seemed used more as an ideal and convenient source of building material for the resident weaver birds. In addition to the tents, there's a large open-air eating area, seating a dozen or so, with a bar (a pair of Coca-Cola coolers powered by solar, sitting behind a counter and holding some Ugandan beer, various Pepsi Co offerings, and the ever-present bottled water) all covered by the same thatched roofing as found over the tents (except that it swooped down at a steep angle from a peak of about twenty feet to about five feet off the ground so that you had to duck to enter.)
The day we arrived we went for a walk and saw small herds of impala and zebra and a pair of waterbuck right near the camp. All of them were really amazing to see wild. This was especially so because they were somewhat habituated to being around humans, with all the locals and their herds making use of the same land, meaning that, though they were easily spooked, we were likely getting closer to them than we might have in other areas. Having spotted a few animals on our walk we arranged to go on a bird walk the following morning with a guide. We headed out early and marched all over the area for several hours. Our guide, John, was a young guy, maybe twenty-five or thirty, and a real bird nerd. He was very enthusiastic, full of energy and information, and new all the birds common and scientific names. Of course he knew all the bird calls too and would light up when he heard something, and would then point and rush us over to see if we could spot one of the 350 species in the area (the Emerald-spotted Wood-Dove, Blue-breasted Bee-eater, Red-shouldered Cuckoo-shrike, Bare-faced Go-away-bird, the Red-faced Barbet, to name a few.) All of the birds seemed special to him and he referred to each as “our friend”. John was a lot of fun, and for his local knowledge and wealth of animal information I wished we could have invited him along on the rest of our trip.
From Lake Mburo we were then off to another lake, another 260 kms further southwest, almost to the border of Rwanda, to Lake Bunyonyi. Bunyonyi features on the country's 5,000 shilling note. It's a huge and handsome lake with several arms, a wildly winding shoreline, and dozens of islands. It sits at an elevation of 2,000m, with its deepest spot dropping 900m. The elevation makes it the coolest spot I've been to in this country, with average daily temperatures closer to 25C than the 35C common in Kampala. Almost the entire area surrounding the lake is terraced, mostly with staples like sorghum. Apparently everyone in the area makes a fermented sorghum flour beverage, called bushera, that tastes something like kombucha but with a milky grey-brown colour and a grainy texture. It comes in three versions: sweet, sour, and alcoholic. I tried some of the sour variety on a walk through one of the villages surrounding the lake; and, though I drink kombucha a lot, found it so sour and chalky that it was hard to swallow. So bushera, I would suggest, is an acquired taste... The terracing gives the terrain a neat quilted look, with patches of greens and browns running up and down all the many hills. The lake's islands are surrounded with marshes of papyrus. Many islands also host forests of planted eucalyptus and pine, which grow much quicker than native species and are much easier and better for use as building materials and transforming into the dugout canoes that most folks use to get around on. (These trees really give the place an Australian or North American feel.) The whole place is also overrun by amazing birds. Little metallic blue-headed, red-breasted sunbirds that suck nectar from flowers with their thin, curved beaks; funny white pelicans by the dozen resting in fig trees; brown, crested, long-tailed mousebirds plucking berries out of bushes; large, grey-bodied, orange-faced hawks stalking small birds from treetops and lizards in long grass; black and white kingfishers circling, hovering, and plunging into the lake...
Upon arrival we took a long wooden boat to one of the larger islands near the lake's center. The accommodation there is mostly thatched cylindrical constructions, maybe ten feet in diameter, topped by a conical roof made up of bundles of thick reeds, stacked about a foot thick. The entrance to the hut is a low swooping archway, maybe eight feet across and with no door, facing the lake. Each of these is perched on its own deck, creating a level platform above the steep, reedy incline. Each hut is furnished with a bed covered by mosquito netting, as well as a dresser, table, and pair of chairs. Without these elements the huts would have felt very much like a giant bower bird's bower. While we did have a few days to relax there and experience much of what Bunyonyi has to offer (which was especially nice for Emily's parents who'd just travelled thirty hours on a plane to get to Uganda) the whole place seemed so calm and peaceful, and living so easy, that it was very hard to leave. (Oh, and I mustn't forget to mention that in one corner of the lake stands a magnificent European hotel with a terraced garden, a swimming pool, and a sprawling tiled veranda with a bar, tables, and clusters of couches covered in thatched roofs. They have an executive chef and a resident artist too. In the low season basic rooms let for $250 US per night. We had lunch there the day we left.)
We hit the road again, but with a change of vehicle and driver. Emma would be our guide for the rest of our adventure. He brought with him a sixty-year-old Land Rover, in army green with a white roof, and with it drove us up out of Bunyonyi into the mountains to the northwest, right along the border to the Democratic Republic of Congo. We were on our way to the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, home to half the world's mountain gorillas. The roads were winding and rough for the entire 70km. The turn-off to the park is high in the mountains and transitions from broken, pot-holed road and a narrow dirt track deeply cut by running water from the regular torrents. The route between the main road and the park entrance takes maybe an hour and winds wildly, up and down, and all around a series of steep volcanic slopes. The road clings to the side of the hill, giving tremendous views of surrounding villages and of abundant agriculture taking place. It’s a really beautiful and lush stretch of land with few roads and little sign of the twenty-first or even twentieth centuries – except that everyone, if you meet them, has one or two cell phones on their person. As with everywhere else, the roads are regularly lined with goats and kids and folks commuting by foot. The children here seem particularly delighted to see us and never fail to greet our passing vehicle with at least a wave. The other main traffic is logging trucks, which are always in a hurry and we have to slow to pass, given the state of the road. The whole experience reminds me a great deal of the Trans-Sumatran Highway which I travelled on (from a rural lake, north to a volcano in orangutan territory) seventeen years earlier. On approach to the forest there's a stark line where crops meet thick forest. There we passed through a a kind of checkpoint with a gate, guard booth, and the requisite guard toting an AK-47. Our driver handed him some papers, our permit, and we were quickly through.
Here the road became narrower and more of a roller coaster. All along the road there was a depth of tall ferns, not tree ferns but just slender, five foot tall frilly ferns. There were occasional signs of forest elephants: either their ample defecations or the wide trails pushed through the otherwise untouched ferns and brush separating the forest from the road. Leaping from trees, we saw a family of my now-favourite colobus monkeys (known as the mantled guereza). These creatures leap around in the trees like other monkeys but have an especially wonderful appearance. Their whole body is black, with short hair, except for a ring of extremely long poof of white hair that rings their back and finishes off their otherwise-black tail. And then the skin around their eyes, nose, and mouth is exposed and dark grey or black, but framed with short white hair everywhere below the brow, with the top of their head, above the brown, being short black hair forming two bumps (almost resembling diminished Micky Mouse ears, or something.) Adding to their charm, unlike other monkeys, they don't try and steal your lunch and aren't violent like a baboon can be when it feels threatened; instead they just keep their distance and lounge in treetops with their fluffy tails hanging down. Further along, by the side of the road, a pair of duikers were spotted. They're a kind of slender, dog-sized, forest antelope only found in central Africa. It was close to dinner when we arrived at Broadbill Forest Camp. We had English tea and then a meal of fresh bread, sauteed vegetables and rice, with a dessert of fresh fruit including the typical pineapple, watermelon, mango, and banana. Following dinner we went promptly to bed so that we would be in good shape for our debriefing before the scheduled morning gorilla trek. We slept in a large, green, heavy canvas tent under a thatched banana leaf covering. High in the mountains, considerably higher than Bunyonyi, at about 2,500m, it was cool and misty (probably around 10C) and felt a lot like the camping I grew up with.
The following morning we were up pre-dawn and stumbling around in the foresty darkness for breakfast. As with most days, eggs and fruit would fuel our day ahead. To start, Emma drove us out to a kind of base camp, a paramilitary-type situation where all trekking and research operations in the forest organize out of. In front of the main building we were joined by several other groups of gorilla-seekers and addressed by a fellow in full military uniform, including beret and oversized, shiny black boots. He explained in respectable English the run-down of what they do out there in the bush, what we would be up to today, and what was expected of us. He also explained that the fellows with the AK-47s who would be accompanying us were friendly and there for our safety. (Which makes one feel super safe.) Each group was then issued a guide – we got the oldest and greatest among them – who packed us all into a van and drove us down the road a few miles. We stopped suddenly along a random stretch of road and were prompted to get out. Our guide then radioed the trackers, who were already out with the gorillas, and got some general direction from them. (One of our trackers, I would later learn, worked for the Max Plank Institute in Germany, collecting location and dietary data on these particular gorillas, and essentially lived with them – spending about an hour with them most days and then returning in the evening to hunt down their sleeping location so that they could be found the following day.) Following our sixty-something, machete-wielding guide we all then plunged, single-file down a dark, wet, leafy drop from the road into the bush.
Much of the next hour was spent snaking down a seventy or eighty degree slope of decaying leaf matter and vines. The way was so steep and wet that I don't think there was anyone who didn't fall. I fell three or four times, despite feeling pretty at home in a wet, hilly, ferny forest. Occasionally little windows would open up in the otherwise dense forest and give a really beautiful view of the adjacent slope and it's gorgeous trees. This is really peak Congo jungle. (For a good sense of it check out BBC Earth - Africa, Episode 3 – Congo. And don't miss the making-of at the end...) There's somewhere in the vicinity of a thousand species of tree, and maybe around five hundred trees packed into every acre of this wilderness. The easiest to recognize are the mahogany, flowering dogwood, and strangler figs. I'm told the big ones here can shoot up sixty metres, or two hundred feet, in just a few decades. Throughout there were little tracks and clearings in the bush made by forest elephants – which I was glad to see and interested in, and which made our descent easier, but our guide was always nervous about, looking and listening for signs of their presence. It really would be messy, particularly given the terrain, if the group was charged. Apparently, being told to stand still and hope to not get trampled makes up entirety of the wild elephant defence strategy training course. (I don’t know when or even if the AK-47 ever gets used, except against Congolese rebels coming over the border.) Our guide stopped several times along the way to make a big, whooping, monkey-esque call for the trackers to respond to, allowing him and our little gaggle of wet walkers to get a bearing on. As we approached gorilla territory our near-rappelling became more horizontal. Soon we met up with the tracking crew in a small clearing and were all told to put down or pack away any walking sticks we were using and to slather on additional insect repelant.
We then followed the trackers up a little hill where we saw our first fuzzy black bundle. It was a young female, laying on her back under a bush and playing with her toes. She didn't seem to mind our presence at all. While some of us took pictures another walked through our group, over to a tree, and shot half way up it in a flash. The first one came along shortly after and we all made way for her along our little path. We were told that they will give a little kick from time to time as a kind of greeting or little test for visitors. None of us were kicked. When the one up the tree slid down and walked into the bush we followed. Soon we were all huddled near the base of a tree surrounded by dense bushes. Under the leaves several individuals could be seen, and off to one side, sitting in a leafy nook of trampled leaves was the big male, not less than four times the size of the others we'd seen to this point. 450 lbs of pure, vegan, pacifist muscle. (I recalled that gorillas live mostly on fruit with a supplement of leaves, shoots, and roots, and the occasional termite or centipede. When you see a Silverback in person that realization gives you pause. It's really something to consider and contrast with our conventional ideas about nutrition and muscle-building, given that we share almost identical DNA. This guy will go almost his entire life with very little protein or fat and still manage to achieve the mass of the largest bodybuilders and strongmen...) Needless to say, when he moved everyone else followed – and we stayed the hell out of the way. We spent maybe another forty minutes or so following them through the bush, down into a valley full of fern trees to a creek at its bottom. There they rested and ate and the Silverback went for a nap. They were quiet the whole time we were with them and never made any aggressive moves at all. It was as though they saw us as a small flock of birds that could do them no harm and were more of a curiosity than an annoyance. Personally, I couldn’t help but think of Dian Fossey the whole time we were out there: particularly because, without any doubt and almost single-handedly, she saved this species from extinction; but also because, before her, people considered these beasts inherently violent and dangerous – which felt so strange given that the individuals I experienced were more like a family of puppies (despite the obvious capacity of the largest male to destroy any of us in a furious instant if we became threatening.)
What felt like too soon, our guide called our visit to an end and we left the gorillas to their creekside nappings and began the big climb out, stopping only for lunch in a clearing by a road near the top of the mountain. (Into and out of the forest, I don’t think I’ve ever sweated so much. This may have been the kind of thing a thoughtful person would train for.) Soon after our picnic a truck came for us and we were zipped back to the base-camp we started from. There our guide issued us all cute gorilla trekking certificates, which I hope to frame and acknowledge on my next resume, right above “Food Safe and Level One First Aid Certification”...
Emma met up with us there at the and drove us off to our next destination: Queen Elizabeth National Park. We slowly bumped and banged our way out of the Impenetrable, through countless tea and coffee plantations, and down into the flat, dry grasslands that lay approximately 250 kilometres the north. This part of Uganda really feels like the stereotype Africa we all know, with wide grasslands sprinkled with tall fig and acacia trees. The park itself is a truly magnificent expanse, covering almost 2,000sq kms, and is home to ten primate species, ninety-five species of mammal, and more than five hundred bird species (though not one giraffe or rhino: for them you have to go elsewhere.) We first stayed at a lovely camp down in a marshy area near a shallow winding creek. They have camping spots in a clearing in the forest, little brick rooms topped with thatched roofs like those in Bunyonyi, and larger wood plank huts on stilts. A wall-less sitting and dining area, covered in its own massive thatched roof, sits out in a clearing near the creek, along with a nice fire pit and patio with lounge chairs. We were greeted there by the manager and a troop of baboons on the grass beyond the patio when we arrived. We were told that the night before an elephant had stopped by there for a visit and that they had pictures of fresh leopard or lion prints from down along the creek. Aside from wild visitors, they served a lovely three-course dinner and nice cold drinks too. Again we retired early, but this time looking forward to our first morning game drive.
The following morning we were up early to fruit and eggs in the un-dining room (but, sadly, with no baboons or elephants.) Later, at the entrance to the park, we were met by a guard, Emma presented more papers, and then a jolly park ranger, Brenda, joined us in the vehicle – with, of course, the mandatory AK-47. Together we had a full day of touring the park and saw most of the expected animals, and even some much rarer sightings. There were vast herds of kob and topi, the common antelope, grazing and playing in open fields of grass. Buffalo and hippos shared larger pools of water and even holes of thick mud not much bigger than their bodies. (Anything to escape the abundant biting and blood-sucking insects that swarm them in great clouds.) We came across the occasional warthog and a few distant elephants. Between seeing all those critters it was a birding bonanza. Eagles and vultures were everywhere. Cranes and egrets, bee-eaters and oxpeckers, guinea fowl and ground-running, quail-like Frankolin soared and swooped and ran around everywhere. It was brilliant. Brenda was good at spotting stuff and had answers to all my questions too. The highlight, even though I’ve never cared much for big cats, was definitely our lion visit. (This was no mere sighting.) Brenda told us at the very start that seeing a lion or leopard – which seemed to be high on the typical park guest’s list of desired sightings – was unlikely, though possible “if you’re lucky and you’ve prayed.” Near the end of the day Brenda got a phone call from a local explaining that he’d seen a cat in the area. We stopped what we were doing, changed course, and raced around on a winding track, occasionally thick with mud or cut so deep by running water that we had to crawl across the breach at a sharp angle and hope not to bottom out. Up on a hill, high in a fig tree, a female lion was spotted resting out on a limb in the shade after her morning meal. These lions, Brenda explained, were famous for their ability and habit of climbing trees. Apparently this part of Uganda is the only place this behaviour exists. She looked very relaxed, though she panted heavily (like other cats, due to her lack of sweat glands), and we drove in, still on the dirt road, just below her. Brenda explained that we wouldn’t be a bother if we kept our noise to a minimum, only took pictures and didn’t talk. Keen not to disrupt her, we did just that and then slowly left after snapping a few shots. It was amazing, and a far closer encounter than anyone could have hoped for.
The next day we drove across the park to a new camp from where we would make an evening and then another morning game drive and take a boat down the Kazinga Channel, connecting lakes Edward and George. The camp was a very dusty, dry plot up on a cliff overlooking some water. Again we stayed in large, green army tents fitted with beds. Somehow hippos would climb the cliffs in the evening, march into the camp, and feast on the grasses surrounding the site – and for this reason, we were told, that camp was patrolled at night by dudes with (you guessed it) AK-47s. In fact, the staff serves dinner on tables out in an open area between their main operation buildings, and one night we were joined, seemingly to everyone’s delight (!?), by a hippo the size of a car, who was just mowing away almost as if she was unaware we were there.
The following game drives allowed us to see much more of what we’d already seen, but also afforded us many more and better viewings of elephants (which I was very much hoping for) and, at a great distance, a sighting of a pride of five lions crouching together in hunting mode. Emma was desperate to spot a leopard, though we never did find one.
The boat trip was quite different from the all the driving around and gave a more intimate view of hippos, buffalo, and elephants, as well as some spectacular bird sightings. It could have been extraordinarily hot and unpleasant being on the boat for two hours but we lucked out and some clouds rolled in. We got to see spoonbills – those almost ridiculous looking stork-like birds with long pink legs, a white body, red face and grey, spoon-shaped bill – which I’d been wanting to see since I arrived in Uganda. They were just wading in the water between the buffalo near the shore, methodically working their way around each one, sifting through the muddy waters for food. You could almost hear them saying “Excuse me. Pardon me. Coming through.”
After the boat ride, while leaving Queen Elizabeth for the last time, we got the best show by a family of baboons. They were just in a patch of dirt and grass by the side of the road and very close to our vehicle. We came around a bend and there were maybe twenty-five just lounging around and grooming one another. We stopped the truck and just watched them for about ten minutes. The little ones were doing cart wheels and generally running amok and getting into trouble, while the rest took turns picking parasites out of each others' fur. It doesn’t sound like much but they were remarkably entertaining.
We took off the next morning for the final stop on our journey: a hike through the Kalinzu Forest looking for chimpanzees. Climbing out of the plains around Queen Elizabeth Park and back into the mountains we passed a number of salt lakes and crater lakes, of which there are a great number in the area. (If you look on Google Maps you can see dozens in just a small area, making it resemble a green lunar landscape.) By the time we arrived at our destination it was raining, but we were all keen after our terrific experience with the gorillas. To our collective relief, unlike the gorilla trek this place was relatively flat. Otherwise it was very similar to Bwindi. Once in the bush, the first thing I noticed was the great variety and abundance of mushrooms. It was hard to ignore all of the pink and red and blue and green and yellow busting out of the endless soggy remains of leaves and trees. In all my years of paying attention to fungi, and having spent time in rainforests on three other continents, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it. And I wished I’d brought specimen jars with me, as the forest was, except very occasionally, almost too wet and dark for photos. I managed to slow down our guide and my fellow travellers to the point of annoyance trying to get as many pictures as I could. Had I known it was anything like this I would have forgone the chimp trekking and organized my own fungus foray: it was that great. Pretty soon into our hike we saw a group of chimp beds, clusters of branches and leaves packed into a kind of nest, in a tree near our path. That was neat, and a good sign. We met up with the tracker about half an hour into the forest and soon spotted our first chimp high in a tree. They were very much unlike their gorillas cousins. These hairy folks felt much less calm and predictable. They were running around up in the trees, screaming and yelling at one another, harping to fellow chimps in the far distance. They would also careen down tree trunks and land with great calamitous branch thrashing before rushing up the next tree. When they weren’t dashing about and leaping between trees they were very high up in the canopy, plucking and then juicing fruit in their mouths, then spitting out large wads of pulp to the ground. It was wild. In addition to the chimps and the mushrooms, there were all kinds of exotic ferns, fruits, and flowers. There were tiny orchids all over the place, funny foamy-looking orange buds containing large black seeds, and these deep red, tennis ball-like blossoms, that opened like a lotus flower, which our guide called “ground flowers” but that didn’t exactly seem like a flower. I wanted to spend a lot more time there in that forest, but we had a seven hour drive back to Kampala and so we had to leave it all behind if we were going to get in before dark. So after a few more mushroom pictures we climbed out of the forest and across an adjacent tea plantation to the road, where we would meet up with Emma and our ride.
So ended our little adventure.
