Drifting North Along Uganda's Albertine Rift (Retrospective, January 2023)

 Lipah, December 12, 2024

I am now officially almost 2 full years behind in this blog, but with the rainy season setting in here in Bali, maybe I will finally force myself to sit down and write! This blog post should be the first of several to round out our East African travels in 2022-23, and then there remains the small matter of our West African odyssey in 2023 to catch up on. Let's see how far I can get!

Our route up the Albertine Rift

A young white-bellied pangolin 

We left our rainy campsite at Buhoma Community Camp on the morning of December 30, 2022, bound for Queen Elizabeth National Park, but on the way out of the village we stopped off to see a project which we had just heard about, the Pangolin Rescue Centre established by a former ranger from Bwindi who wanted to see pangolins, among the most heavily trafficked wildlife on earth, conserved. It was a fun visit as we got to see two rescued pangolins being taken out to feed on vegetation. I had always thought of them as ponderous, slow-moving creatures, but they practically scampered across the landscape. It was great to see a grassroots conservation effort established by locals who understand the economic, social and cultural pressures that result in wildlife trafficking. At that time Moses and his team had rescued over 100 pangolins, and by now they're closer to 200. They make sure the pangolins are healthy and ready to return to the wild, then release them in the safety of Bwindi National Park. We drove off greatly cheered by a rare good news story in the world of conservation.

Baby pangolin

Moses Areneitwe and Terri in front of Stanley

Woodland kingfisher

Our destination that day was a place called Bullbush Camp, on the edge of Queen Elizabeth National Park. We had decided not to enter the southern (Ishasha) sector of the park, as Uganda's parks are relatively expensive (compared to those in southern Africa) and it didn't sound particularly spectacular. Instead we drove north along a dirt road, at first past tea plantations and then through bush as we approached the park boundary. Instead of turning left towards the national park, we turned right and found ourselves, after a bit of muddy 4x4 driving, at Bullbush, situated precariously on the bank of a raging river, the Ngungwe. There had been a lot of rain of late, and the river was busy eating away at the banks of the river, eroding the campsite before our eyes. We camped as far as we could away from the river and kept a wary eye on developments. 

Black-headed heron

Pretty butterfly

Bullbush tuned out to be an idyllic place to spend a couple of days, and we didn't fall into the rushing river in the middle of the night. We arrived mid-afternoon, set up our camper and went out birdwatching. The riverside with its reeds and big overhanging trees made an ideal habitat for kingfishers, herons, weavers and lots of other species. This area, along the edge of the Albertine Rift Valley (the western branch of the Great Rift that runs in an arc north of Lake Tanganyika through Lake Albert--hence the name), is a hotspot for bird biodiversity, and we recorded a number of species that were new to us. We returned to camp and had a fun evening, grilling up steaks, drinking wine and then sipping brandy as we sat out beside the fire. It was the first time in weeks (since Kigoma) that we had been in a really nice campsite, and we sat up late philosophizing until weariness drove us into Stanley to sleep.

I wish I knew more about butterflies!

Another butterfly

The next day, the last one of 2022, was a lazy, pleasant day in camp. We did a workout after breakfast, finding that the kitchen roof made a sturdy (if low) attachment point for our gymnastic rings. Then it was time for a delicious lunch of leftover steak, avocados, eggs and cheese on chapatis. After lunch I set off with my butterfly net and caught a number of colourful species. Photographing them was tricky, as they tended to flap furiously inside the glass jar I was using, so I put them into the freezer for a few minutes to cool them down and make them sluggish enough to take a photo before they flew off. We had a swim in the pool, then went out birding again, spotting crowned hornbills for the first time. I finished the afternoon doing some bird sketches, using illustrations from our bird guide. I can say that birds are tricky to capture accurately!

For New Year's Eve we sat around another roaring campfire eating a delicious chicken that Terri had spatchcocked and grilled over charcoal. As usual on New Year's Eve, I made lists of good and bad things about the year gone by (both personal and from a worldwide perspective), wrote a few haiku to try to capture the spirit of 2022 and made a few resulutions for 2023. A couple of the haiku might be worth repeating:

New Year's Eve barbecue, Bullbush Camp

                            NZ shivering                            

Alpine idyll with Mama

Stanley rides again

Long-delayed journey

Across half a continent

Slakes my wanderlust

We didn't make it even close to midnight, turning in around 10 pm. We spent time chatting to the only other overlanders in camp that evening, a family from Germany whose patriarch, Edgar, is a long-time overland hand who has driven through almost every country in Africa, and who stores his vehicle in Jinja, at the source of the Victoria Nile, between adventures. We traded a few stories from the road and promised to keep in touch over Facebook.

An olive baboon gang loitering along the road through QENP

2023 dawned sunny and warm. We spent the morning packing up in a leisurely manner while chatting further with Edgar and his family before dragging ourselves away to continue our northward journey. The dirt road that transits the southern part of Queen Elizabeth National Park was in terrible condition, and it was a slow, tedious grind between potholes and mud wallows. It was enlivened, however, by encounters with baboons, birds and a greater profusion of colourful butterflies than I have ever seen anywhere. We stopped several times to try to capture the hallucinatory loveliness of the lepidopteral clouds that filled the road. 

A few of the many thousands of butterflies along the road 

White-throated bee-eater

On the bird front we spotted new species of mousebird and bishop, and saw a bateleur feeding on the carcass of an unfortunate tortoise. A couple of elephants and a giant forest hog with its baby completed the wildlife interest in the trip. Around 2:30 we finally turned onto a paved road close to QENP headquarters and spent a couple of hours on annoying admin, finding out about chimpanzee tracking at the Kyambura Gorge (our main objective for the next day), searching for beer in the little town and then paying for our 24-hour admission ticket at the park gate. We set up camp at Mweya campground, with Defassa waterbuck wandering the grounds, paid a park employee to get us firewood and to start a roaring fire, and settled in for what we hoped would be a peaceful, beautiful night. We were camped just above a narrow river that flowed into Lake Edward from the much smaller Lake George; these waters would eventually drain into the Semliki River, Lake Albert and eventually the Albert Nile. The sky was completely clear for the first time in weeks, and we sat watching 4 of the 5 naked-eye planets glittering in the sky (Mercury was lost in the mist on the horizon) until nervousness about hippos coming out of the river to graze drove us indoors. Hyenas could be heard whooping in the darkness as we drifted off to sleep.

Baby baboon

Black-and-white casqued hornbill

Sadly those peaceful dreams didn't happen, as we were kept awake much of the night by thumping music drifting across the river from the village outside the park boundaries. This proved to be a recurring issue in Uganda, but this was perhaps the worst instance. We woke up groggy, had a quick breakfast, left most of our camping gear in the cooking shelter and set off for an early-morning game drive. It was definitely underwhelming, with a few elephants, some birds, an emaciated buffalo, a bushbuck and a few waterbuck. We bailed out after a while, returned to camp for a very early lunch and then drove past a pretty crater lake across the main road into the eastern part of the park, the Kisenyi sector. This was slightly more interesting, with Uganda cob, waterbuck and rumours of lions from other tourists (we didn't see any). Finally we headed to the Fig Tree Lodge for our chimpanzee-tracking reservation at 1:30. 

Defassa waterbuck

On safari in QENP

Black-headed gonolek

Monitor lizard

Pretty crater lake, QENP

Black and white colobus monkey, Kyambura Gorge

At only US$50 per head this is the cheapest chimp-tracking experience in Uganda; it's more expensive than the US$20 we paid per person in Burundi, but much less than the US$200 that is charged at Kibale, the most popular spot in Uganda for chimp encounters. We were a tiny group (just the two of us and a Jordanian tourist named Manal) with a veteran chimpanzee tracker named Charles who had been trained by none other than Jane Goodall. We spent two hours searching fruitlessly down in the shadowy, cool confines of the Kyambura Gorge. We saw lots of impressive trees, black-and-white colobus monkeys, 4 great blue turacos but no chimps. 

A young adult chimpanzee, Kyambura Gorge

A baby chimp clings to his mother

Just as we were resigning ourselves to failure, Charles cocked his head, listening for something we couldn't make out, and then strode confidently through the bush. We were rewarded with the sight of a big male chimp, then a mother and baby, a rather stroppy adolescent and two more chimps that stayed a bit further away. We spent half an hour lying on the forest floor staring up almost directly overhead at the chimps. The adolescent amused himself by throwing small hard fruit at us (his aim was pretty accurate), while most of the rest essentially ignored us. I find chimps a bit unsettling, as their eyes and arms and hands are so human-like, and yet they are utterly alien in a lot of other ways. There aren't many chimpanzees left in the wild (about 100,000 in the entire continent), so I was glad to see them thriving in this particular spot. It's a very isolated population, as there isn't a lot of good habitat outside the gorge, so they are confined to a fairly compact area a few kilometres in length and less than a kilometre in width. We returned from tracking with big silly grins and drove off happy with our adventure.

Our first crossing of the Equator in Uganda

We had a fair distance to cover, and we made it to Turaco Campsite at the foot of the Rwenzori Mountains just at dusk. On the drive we realized that the northern sector of QENP beside the highway was where the largest concentrations of game were located, and cursed our lack of local intelligence. Along the way we crossed the Equator for the first time in Stanley and posed for some quick photos before continuing. Terri whipped up a hearty meal of chilli before we slept the sleep of the dead.

Camping at Turaco Community Camp, Rwenzori Mountains

The Rwenzori Mountains are a fabled place, immortalized as the Mountains of the Moon after an account by a Greek traveller named Diogenes. The great Roman-era geographer Claudius Ptolemy reported that Diogenes had travelled inland for 25 days from an unidentified port on the East African coast named Rhapta, and had there discovered snow-capped mountains which were the source of the Nile, which flowed from them into a series of large lakes. The lakes certainly tally with the geography of the Albertine Rift, but 25 days of travelling wouldn't bring a traveller on foot anywhere near the Rwenzori Mountains. Nevertheless Henry Morton Stanley (after whom we named our vehicle), the first European to report seeing the Rwenzoris in 1889, thought that they might match Diogenes' description and the name stuck. (I think it's more likely that Diogenes, if he made this trip at all, went somewhere inland from the Red Sea into the mountains of Ethiopia, which would match the length of the journey, although there are no glaciers or snow caps on the Ethiopian mountains today.) 

Red-tailed monkey

Distant Rwenzori peaks

We ended up spending three nights at Turaco. I would have loved to have hiked up into the Rwenzoris, as they are a legendary trekking location, but the Ugandan government has made it a big-budget item, with a price tag of US$ 1250 for a 6-day circuit of the central peaks, or US$ 1350 if you want to summit the highest peak, Margherita. (The first big climbing expedition to these mountains by Europeans was mounted in 1906 by Luigi de Savoia, the Duke of Abruzzi, who also led the first expedition to the Karakoram Mountains in 1909; the main route up K2 today goes up the Abruzzi Spur. Margherita peak is named after the then Queen of Italy, while another Rwenzori summit is called Luigi de Savoia, after the mountaineer himself.)  The glaciers and icecaps of the Rwenzoris are in full retreat, as they are on other East African peaks such as Mt. Kenya and Kilimanjaro, and more or less everywhere in the world, and they may vanish entirely within this century.

Instead of trekking, we ended up doing a couple of short day hikes outside the park boundaries, trying to catch a glimpse of the central peaks between the clouds. On the first day we struck out, but on the second morning we managed to see some summits (probably not Margherita itself, judging from photographs we saw) for about one minute before the clouds closed in again. European expeditions before Stanley apparently never saw the summits because of the clouds, and we could understand why. We also caught sight of birds (a few white-eyes) and a new monkey species which seemed to be the grey-cheeked mangabey. Uganda has a very rich biodiversity, with the country covering the Afro-Alpine peaks along the western border, along with East African forest and savannah and even small bits of the Congo Basin forest, and this resulted in us seeing lots of new monkey species in particular. The rest of the time we relaxed in camp, chatting a bit to a couple of German volunteers, did some running and yoga and tried to catch up on laundry, photos and video editing.

Lovely wildflower

Rushing Rwenzori torrent

Sunbird

Our next stop was a community campsite in the Crater Lake area just east of the city of Fort Portal. It was a pleasant day of driving, with Terri picking our way down the dirt track from the mountains to the tarmac highway where I took the wheel. Fort Portal proved to be a bustling, cheerful city, and we stocked up on meat and other groceries in an Indian-run grocery store before heading out of town to Lake Nkuruba, which would be home for the next 4 nights.

Fabulous sign at Lake Nkuruba campsite

Lake Nkuruba Community Campground proved to be a fun place to relax and unwind for a few days. It's located just above a small, steep-sided crater lake, one of several that dot the landscape outside Fort Portal. It's used as a base by tour groups who are headed to see chimpanzees at the nearby Kibale Forest. We weren't there for that reason, but it made for some interesting discussions with other travellers passing through. We were the only overlanders most nights; the majority of tourists were on tours around Uganda arranged through tour agencies in Kampala. The early departures of chimp-watching tourists made sleeping in a bit challenging, but overall it was a good place to stay.

Black and white colubus

The main attractions were the birds and the monkeys. The dense forests around the lake were a perfect playground for three species of monkeys: red-tailed, black and white colobus and vervets. The latter species were their usual mischievous thieving selves, but made for good photos as the mothers walked around with their babies clinging on underneath for dear life. The red-tailed monkeys were shyer, but engaged in amazing gravity-defying leaps from tree to tree that always left me with my heart in my mouth in case they fell. The black-and-white colobus were the stars of the show, though, with their antics, racing full-speed across open ground to get to the next tree, grooming and fighting up high in the canopy, and falling asleep in the trees just around the campsite. The first night they set up for the night right above Stanley, to our delight, and we got lots of photos of them from close range. Unfortunately they spent the night doing what monkeys do, relieving themselves copiously and frequently onto the thin aluminum roof of our camper. The thumping and splashing kept waking us up, and we spent a couple of hours the next morning cleaning off the roof thoroughly, trying not to think about Ebola virus transmission (there had been an outbreak in this corner of Uganda for several months).

Flycatcher

Cinnamon-chested bee-eater

There were plenty of birds around as well to keep us amused, and we also went for a hike one day out to the Top Of The World viewpoint. The view was pleasant although a bit underwhelming, but it felt good to get our legs swinging after a couple of days of photo editing and video editing. (Back when we were motivated to keep churning out content; we are so much lazier these days!) 

A tangle of vervet monkeys busy grooming (I count 4)

Vervet mother and baby, Lake Nkuruba

Top Of The World viewpoint

After three productive, relaxing days (with a couple of fabulous steaks grilled over the coals of an open fire; Terri was getting it down to an art form), we set off on January 9th for a long day of travel. We started out in Fort Portal for a bank run, groceries and getting my phone screen repaired after its soaking in Burundi. From there we headed east, past the entrance to Kibale Forest, to Kihingami Wetlands where there is a school to train aspiring wildlife guides. We hired a guide and a guiding student to take us into the woods to see what birds we could find. They were pretty good, spotting a number of new species including the black bee-eater and an amazing find, the standard-winged nightjar, first spotted by Terri on the edge of a patch of forest. This bird, usually nocturnal, is drab-coloured, but when it flies it has two big pennants (the "standards"), broad feathers on very long, thin feather stalks that follow behind the nightjar like a pair of smaller trailing birds. We love nightjars, but because of their nocturnal habits, we have hardly ever seen them. This was a new species for us, and it got us very excited. We returned to the car excited for our next destination, another birding site at Semuliki National Park.

Standard-winged nightjar, Kihingami Wetland

Birding in Kihingami Wetland

With our birding guides at Kihingami

We backtracked to Fort Portal and then drove down, down, down the escarpment from the Ugandan plateau into the tropical lowlands of the Albertine Rift Valley along the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. We turned the corner of the ridge and trundled south towards a border crossing with DRC. Before reaching the border we turned off into the Bumaga campsite run by the Uganda Wildlife Authority on the edge of the national park. It was noticeably hotter here than up on the plateau, and it made for a sweaty late afternoon as we cooked more delicious steaks over a campfire. We set up for a day of birdwatching the next day with a birding guide named Alex and sat outside around the campfire watching fireflies flicker in the darkness, drinking wine and watching the ISS hurtle overhead through a sky full of stars. 

Semuliki National Park (before the rain)

The Ugandan obsession with thumping music in the middle of the night interrupted our night's sleep again, with loud, insistent bass starting at 2:30 am from the village a kilometre or two down the road. We got up groggily at 6:00 am and by 7:15 we were each on the back of a boda-boda (motorcycle taxi) zipping down the road to the park gate, where we paid, and then on to the trailhead some 6 km further along. We set off with Alex and with Gloria, the mandatory UWA guide with her rifle. We heard a lot of birds, but as usual in dense primary forest the limited light and short lines of sight meant that we saw less than we heard, although we did see a few species of forest hornbill. The highlight was Terri spotting a de Brazza's monkey sitting in a tree far, far across a flooded forest. Neither of the guides spotted it, but Terri had been determined to see a de Brazza's monkey since this was going to be the only place in Uganda with a reasonable chance of encountering that species, and spent long minutes scanning every tree before suddenly letting out a yelp of excitement. It was too far away for a photo, but just seeing it was enough. Like many of the birds, it's a species of the lowland Congo Basin forests, and this is the only spot in Uganda where this immense biome protrudes into the country, making Semuliki a very popular spot among birdwatchers unwilling to go into DRC itself.

Yet another striking butterfly

Not long after our de Brazza encounter, a few raindrops started to fall, and within minutes we were being soaked by a tropical downpour. We bailed out on birdwatching, put on our raingear and walked briskly back to the park gate. Another boda-boda ride and we were back at Stanley, soaking but happy to have seen what we had seen. Now it was time to pack up Stanley and set off northward, following the course of the Albertine Rift towards Murchison Falls, where we will pick up the narrative next time; I have detained you too long already.

I hope that you have enjoyed the pictures and the stories, and that you are inspired to go off exploring somewhere yourself. Until the next blog post, happy travels (or happy travel dreams!).