Out of Africa

By the time this article hits the mailboxes it will be February 20th. It already feels like spring is here, although I’ve been fooled before. I’ve been looking at that ten day forecast, and I just don’t see anything that says otherwise so far, but as we all know here in Mississippi we could be dancing in ice by next week! I know this is supposed to be a gardening article, but I’m just not finished with my Uganda trip yet. I am trying to at least incorporate some about the flora and fauna and the agricultural practices that my mom and I experienced while on this life-changing journey.

I left off last week at a place that we had seen the gorillas and were now headed farther north, where it seemed a little more arid, and the landscape was changing to show that. We made it to our next lodge after an afternoon safari, where we were able to see lots of elephants, impalas, zebras, and water buffalo. We had a long travel day down some dirt roads, probably six hours of travel, so by the time we made it to the lodge, we were ready to get a little rest because we had an early start the next morning.

The grounds at this lodge were spectacular with what look like 40-year-old agaves, aloe veras that were blooming like crazy, and the biggest monstera plant I’ve ever seen. As we were having dinner that night at the lodge, we were looking out over the sunset when Mom mentioned that this looked just like the sunset from the movie Out Of Africa. We had both been humming the same song, thinking it was the same theme song to that movie when we realized that that was the theme song from Chariots Of The Gods. Since we had just gotten our Internet capabilities back, I was able to Google that and I made a video of the sunset with the Out Of Africa theme song in it. All we needed was a bi-plane with Robert Redford zooming across the sky with Meryl Streep, and we would’ve had it made!

I spent that night, like the night before, on a platform over the Rift Valley in a bed covered in mosquito netting, listening to the hunting hyenas. It was a wild experience. The next morning we had a wonderful breakfast and some wonderful coffee and were in the Jeep by 6:30 in the morning. I could tell our driver had something on his mind as we were driving through the dry Rift Valley. At one point he came to a screeching halt and turned the Jeep around as fast as he could and started hauling towards something. About 30 minutes later I could see where some other Safari jeeps had gathered. We had pulled up just in time to catch a huge male lion with his two females. He was obviously not happy about something because right about when we pulled up he was whipping one of the females into shape. There was dust flying, and there was some roaring going on. I was lucky enough to catch that on video. We stayed in that spot for about an hour trying to get some great pictures of this scene. The male lion had apparently been caught in a snare by some poachers fairly recently. His back leg was tender, and he wasn’t putting it down on the ground. That is not a good thing because the next opposing male lion will come in and probably run him off from his harem. Like I said, conservation in Uganda is extremely important, and this lion had a collar on with a tracker. That is how they keep up with the movements and learn more about the ways of these giant cats.

As I was taking hundreds of pictures of these lions, I looked all around me and could see the four-legged animals around wouldn’t come anywhere close to that area. They were just out of range, snorting and stomping their hooves. It was a real ruckus as the baboons were having their share of fun making sure all the animals around knew that they were in danger.

At this point, I could see in some of the other Safari jeeps that there were some serious photographers down there with lenses that were a mile long. I can’t imagine some of the pictures they must’ve gotten. When we had had enough, we started down a gravel road where we bumped into a huge family of elephants that we viewed for a while until Emmanuel got another call. I couldn’t speak their language, but somewhere in the sentence I heard the words ‘toilet paper’. When he hung up, I asked him if he needed some toilet paper and he looked at me and he said, “Are you listening in on my conversations?” I said “no, but I heard the word toilet paper so it made me wonder.” I guess there’s not a word for that in their language. He laughed and said that the phone call was from a friend who had left some toilet paper dangling from some thorns on the side of the road and that when we got to the toilet paper to look directly to the 12 o’clock position on the other side of the road there would be three giant euphoria trees.

In one of those trees, apparently there was a leopard so we were moving quite quickly towards that area. Right in the middle of nowhere, we spotted a little piece of paper blowing in the wind hooked on a thorny bush so the Jeep stopped and we began viewing those three trees to our right, trying to find a leopard. The camouflage that these cats were gifted with is unbelievable. We each had binoculars and we were looking in all three trees, high and low and could not believe there would be a leopard in there hiding that well as we were searching that hard. Finally, Emmanuel said, “ I got it! I see a spot.” He said, “Look in the farthest left tree towards the bottom and focus on that area until your eyes begin to clear.” Sure enough there was a full grown leopard who had just picked up his head to look over one of the branches to see us to make sure we were staying a good distance. Once I could see the outline it became more obvious, but it was unbelievable how the cat‘s body

had contoured to the shape of the branches. I got some unbelievable pictures of that leopard and Mom got to watch it through her binoculars.

It was right about then that I looked up at Emmanuel and saw that he was looking through some binoculars that must’ve been from 1842. One of the lenses was dangling out and his eyes were about to pop out of his head. I remembered when he allowed that phone call home, and he used these words: “After all, a brother wouldn’t charge a brother for a phone call home, now would he?“ I handed my binoculars to Emmanuel and said, “Look through these and tell me what you see.” I heard a sigh of relief as mine aren’t the highest-dollar binoculars you can get but they were definitely better than the ones a Danish couple had left with him back in the early 2000s. I said, “Consider those yours, after all, a brother wouldn’t charge a brother for a good set of eyeballs, now would he?“ He was so happy to have that new set of binoculars. He never handed them back for us to look through them again. I get it. There was no way he was going to find a pair down there anywhere close to that quality, and it’s important for his job to be able to spot things when he needs to.

Later on that day, when it was time to stop for some lunch, we pulled into some kind of hell hole where we sat down to eat a box lunch that had been fixed for us before we left the lodge that morning. I say it was a hell hole because the only thing in the distance was a large crater lake created by a volcano. That was now where people collect salt. Other than the uranium mines that I hear about in the Congo, I think mining for salt must be one of the worst jobs a human could be forced into, yet I saw hundreds of people, men, women, and children, collecting salt and hauling it out of this muddy pit. A little over to my right, where the water got deeper, there were thousands of flamingos that apparently eat on some kind of crawfish that turns their feathers pink. We finished our lunch, bought a few salty souvenirs, and moved on towards a huge hotel that was apparently built for the queen when she came over to visit the country that they had “colonized".

Continue the trip with Allen and his Mom in next week's addition!