to kidepo and back
on Random Uganda (Uganda), 01/Feb/2010 07:56, 34 days ago
headed home after a long day at the mud bathview from 'Pride Rock'lyin' in the grasshiding behind a treeghost lionTo Kidepo and BackIn search of cheetahs.January 26th(roadtrip 16-21 Jan)After the van overheated, and after Jack poured roughly a quarter of our drinking water into the radiator, we had lunch at the Kope Café in Gulu, stretched our legs a bit, and then headed off into uncharted territory (at least for me, and everyone else in our Matoke Tours pop-top safari van, including, as it turned out, Jack, the ‘experienced guide’ Matoke Tours had promised us). We were headed to the northeastern tip of Uganda that borders on Kenya and Sudan and holds the Kidepo Valley national park—Uganda’s most remote and least visited park.Gulu is as far as the tarmac goes. We turned off the pavement and headed northeast to Kitgum and somewhere on the dusty red-dirt road we passed the imaginary line that VSO uses to demarcate the safe Uganda from the unsafe one. Having seen how painfully random the angel of death can be here, I have trouble assessing the relative risks of one geographic zone against another. I guess, given that I’m back in Kampala and I got to see an amazing park, the risk-reward analysis was the right one… or, as I’ve always maintained, it’s better to be lucky than smart.Kitgum looks, to me, a lot like Soroti (without the rock): a sprawl of single level brick and plaster shops, interspersed with round mud and thatch huts, an IDP (internally displaced person—a refugee camp for the village people made homeless by the fighting between the UPDF and the LRA) camp or two just beginning to empty. The MOH (ministry of health) hospital sits crumbling inside a barb-wire maze, broken windows and rust stained plaster walls with murals about how flies transmitshigella from feces to food. A new sign announced that Baylor is going to be building a new pediatric wing. The outpatient department (OPD) had a large sleeping area for the kids who used to do the night commute.The people of Kitgum just stare at us. (granted, we are coated orange with dust and look like we’re sporting bad fake tans) The kids don’t even break into the universal, ‘Hey Mazungu, How’re you?’ Maybe it’s just my imagination, but looking into the eyes of the people, you get the feeling that something bad has happened here. Many bad things. Maybe not even past tense.We check into the New Loyima guest house next to the UWA (Uganda Wildlife Authority—the agency that maintains the parks and collects the park fees) office. Initially Roger and I were booked into the same room, with one small bed, which would have been pretty uncomfortable and, according to rule 4 of the rules posted on the wall, ‘strickly prohibited.’ Fortunately the management relented and gave us each our own room. I was so happy not to be sharing a bed with Roger that I gave him the room with the toilet.The next morning we found the sign on the outskirts of town pointing‘Kidepo Valley National Park 134km’ and headed into Karamoja—Uganda’s wild wild east. The road took us through rolling hills and plains and a minor mountain pass (a perfect place for the ambush that never happened). Some of the fields were verdant green, some sun-dried yellow, and some still smoldering from fires set to clear them. Dust, smoke and mist hung in a filmy layer in the valleys. Girls in flower print dresses hacked at dried grass with pangas (machetes), tied the grass into conical bundles the girth of your average rugby player, and carried the bundles, balanced on heads,back to their villages.Villagers put new thatch on their roofs in Rom, or Orom, presumably while heeding the nearby sign warning them not to pick up grenades or step on landmines. I try to calculate the number of thatch bundles the girls would need to carry for one roof. My geo-spatial mathematic skills fail me as we bump off along the roadway—at least nineteen or twenty.The women in the karamoja, as do women all over Uganda, carry their babes on their backs in a wrap, but, as I haven’t seen yet, they also use a half of a dried gourd to shade the baby’s face. Depending on the size of the gourd, it either looks like they have a giant beetle on their back, or a baby wearing an ill-fitting bike helmet.The UWA ranger manning the gate seems happy to see us. He doesn’t get many visitors. We unload in a cloud of dust and take in the park as Jack gets out to chat and take care of our entrance fees (Ugandan National Parks have fairly steep entrance fees—25-50$/day for foreigners—one likes to hope that some of the money goes to protecting the animals of theparks and supporting the local tribes that were kicked off the land). To the north of us stretches Kidepo valley, some 1400 square kilometer of lush green river valley, golden grasslands and purple hills. To the northeast hangs Mount Morungole just in front of the Kenyan border and to the northwest, shivering slightly in the haze, the slightly larger Mount Lutoke and the Sudan. The Kidepo and the Narus rivers only run a few days every year, but leave behind enough in the way of mud and watering holes to support a diverse animal population (even a few hardy crocs). Kidepo is the only national park in Uganda with the cheetah and the ostrich; the only park with the aardwolf, the bat eared fox and the caracal; and the only park where you can find zebras, giraffes and elephants together.Kidepo was established in 1964 in the early hours of the first Obote administration (there weren’t 2 Obotes, just one guy who managed to get elected despotic dictator at two different points in Uganda’s short history—two points separated by the Amin administration and a couple of other botched presidencies…). The Ik people were forced from their land in an act that resulted in mass starvation and death for the tribe. I whisper a small prayer of thanks to the Ik for their sacrifice that has left this pristine valley for us to wander in.Our campsite lies on a grassy knoll fronted by a large rock outcropping on which to sit and watch the gentle meandering of the elephants and water buffalo in the valley below. The Lion King fans in our camp promptly christen the campsite Pride Rock. In one of the two shelters in the campsite we find lion hair and the smell of cat pee. We will be the only campers in Kidepo during our three-night stay. At night, sitting by a dying fire under the glowing swath of the milky-way, we will be serenaded by the distant roar of lions triangulating in the dark.Like little kids giddy with visions of Christmas presents, we unload the van’s roof rack so we can pop the top and start safari-ing in earnest. I had a dream in kitgum of a cheetah flashing across the grassland, startling a herd of zebra into flight. It was, unfortunately only a dream. There may be a cheetah in kidepo, but he didn’t find it in his heart to sprint across open ground in front us. And even the zebras were a little hard to find (Cara says there were only 6 zebras in the park, I counted 12-13, I have one picture that shows nine of them, and I’m pretty sure I never got all of them into one picture, I guess I’m going to have to do a stripe countto win this argument).To protect us from the wild animals, UWA assigned us a ranger whose name we couldn’t pronounce. Roger called him Ethel. Jack called him Neville. I chose Nevus. Nevus carried an AK-47, which we can only hope had an empty banana clip. Mostly he dozed in the front seat of the van or stared methodically into the ditch. When we did spot game, he would nod his head and impart some profound bit of zoological wisdom, ‘that’s a giraffe, it has a long neck.'The highlight of the Nevus experience came when he took us out on a‘game walk,’ of which 90% of the route was covered by dried grass six feet or higher. In other words, we walked for several hours without being able to see anything other than grass and the muddy clothes of the camper in front of us. And, had there been lions or tigers or bears in the grass, they could have pretty much picked us off one by one. At one point, with his uncanny woodcraft skills, Nevus walked us almost onto the back of a sleeping water buffalo (given there are no hippos in kidepo, the buffalo would statistically be the most dangerous animal in the park, and the main reasonthat nevus was even given a rifle). Unfortunately, the dark olive color of his uniform made it impossible to tell whether he peed himself or not. The look on his face would suggest so.During our 3 days in kidepo we saw only one other safari vehicle out in the park. Once. (It was the tricked out Land Rover from the posh fly-in Apoko lodge--$350 per person per night, with not nearly the view of pride rock) This would be a big contrast from Queen Elizabeth park where it wouldn’t be uncommon for 6 or 7 safari vehicles to converge on a lion kill, or, I’m told, the Serengeti, where 15 or 20 Land Rovers might gather for a leopard sighting. But being out there alone meant we had to rely solely on our own spotting abilities, and, as I mentioned, Nevus wasn’t much help.Jack had an eagle eye, but he also had to concentrate on keeping the van on the road and the passengers on the roof from flying into the ditches. So our first two days we saw lots of elephants and buffalo and oribis (super fast tiny antelopes slightly taller than a golden retriever), but, except for a few side-striped jackals hanging around park headquarters, we struck out in the predator department.We had been warned that there would be no beverages in Kidepo. So we were overjoyed to find that the canteen at park headquarters would sell us cold beer (a steal at 2000 shillings). One evening, while we were sitting around the parking lot savoring a cold Nile Special and an orange savanna sunset, a van marked Blessed Safaris pulled up and unloaded an obese man of European descent and of at least six decades and a young Ugandan woman whose legal age of consent could certainly have been questioned from where we sat. They checked into one of the bandas (huts) at park HQ and we never saw them out in the park. The markings on the side of van advertised:‘safaris, gorilla tracking, camping, rwenzori hiking, and wedding arrangements.’ We were thinking of adding sex tourism onto their list of specialties, but there was not one magic marker among us. Maybe this trip came under the wedding arrangement category.With the dawn of the 3rd day, we pointed the van north and headed into the far reaches of the park in search of our cheetah. According to Nevus, who may or may not have once seen a cheetah, this was where the cheetahs prowled. The ostriches too. Nevus said we might see ostriches if we got there by nine… or noon… or something like that.Roger, a serious birder, wasn’t interested in spotting the cheetah. He was after bigger game: the karamoja apalis. A warbler found only in this little isolated part of the world. We, being helpful safari companions, offered to help him look for it. ‘Just what does a karamoja apalis look like?’ We asked.‘It looks just like the grey apalis except that it is a slightly lighter grey and it has a patch of white on the wings.’‘Okayyy.’The karamoja apalis is only four or five inches long. Much harder to spot than a cheetah.We left lush grasslands of the Narus valley and climbed up into a sandy scrub terrain. The grass was shorter and sparser and it looked like the perfect track for a cheetah to hit 70kph on. But it was not to be. We did spot a few stray ostriches strutting through the brush, but the big flock (do ostriches have flocks?) was hot-footing it into the Sudanese distance. The termites packed the sand into surrealistic seven foot funnel topped castles. The sandy expanse also proved to be prime tsetse fly habitat (the female tsetse fly prefers a loose sandy soil to lay her single egg into). The tsetse fly is a voracious blood-sucker that has adapted to the decrease in the game population by learning to chase safari vehicles. Unlike the mosquito which stealthily sneaks a sip of blood, the tsetse fly slams its proboscis through clothing and skin in a painful bite. The tsetse fly also brings the possibility of an added bonus: African trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness). Jack assured us that the tsetse flies in Uganda are‘disease free’ as he drove the van at breakneck speed trying to blow the flies out of the vehicle, all the while slapping at a fly that had gone up his pant leg. Given that Uganda has had at least two outbreaks of sleeping sickness in the past decade, and that trypanosomiasis is one of those diseases where the illness and the treatment both carry high mortality and morbidity, I wasn’t feeling like taking any chances as I hunkered in the back protecting myself from attack.We drove all the way to Sudan looking for the elusive cheetah. To no avail.But we did get to see the Kanatarok hot spings—a pint-sized burble of sulfuric hot water leading to a long swatch of green grass in an otherwise dry expanse. And, with the permission of the small contingent of UPDF soldiers guarding the frontier, we made a brief foray into the Sudan. Unfortunately, there were no Sudanese immigration officials at the border to stamp our passports.And, as we wove our weary way back to pride rock, Jack stopped the van and quietly pointed out the three male lions lying under a tree. One by one, the boys strutted just out of camera range and lay down in the tall grass occasionally raising a regally maned head to check on our progress. I am told it is very rare for 3 adult male lions to hang out together—which begs the question, could this be a gay pride?Later, after our evening game drive and another cold beer and warm sunset, on the road back to camp, we saw one, then two of the big males on the prowl. At one point one of our lions crouched in the grass about 20 meters from the van and roared. I don’t have words to describe it. I swear it shook the van. It was a grunt/roar/snarl rolled into one that boomed across the grass and echoed in the hills. And then across the darkness, one of the other lions answered back. I could just imagine being an oribi shaking in the grass, he hears a lionon one side, then the other, he bolts for clear territory—into the waiting jaws of the third lion.Sitting on top of the van in a savanna lit only by stars listening to our lions roar, it was nothing less than the safari making moment.for more kidepo pictures click here