The Excitement of a Sunrise Game Drive

When Gordon instructed us to meet him in the lobby of the Fabulous Eurospa, packed and ready to move onward at 5:30 AM the following morning, we were compelled to ask ourselves, "What could induce us to leave a place with a Fitness Center and shiatsu massage?"



We consulted our Revised Itinerary and learned that we were being enticed by, "the excitement of a sunrise game drive and the enchantment of the Kibale Forest."

So, 5:16 AM, we were packed and ready to go.



Before dawn, we said good morning to the baby elephants.



Then we greeted the sunrise.



Then we drove around and looked at wild animals and learned from Gordon about their habits and habitat.




Then we drove through the Western Uganda hill country past banana, coffee, tea, pineapple, avocado and sugar cane plantations. Gordon offered us the option of spending that night at another Eurostyle hotel with internet or at the guest house of a Ugandan owned plantation and guess what we chose?











After a tasty Ugandan lunch of local fresh water tilapia and chips




We went off in search of chimpanzees.



We were warned by Gordon and the park ranger that we might hike for hours through treacherous terrain and never see even one chimp (have I heard this before somewhere?). We walked for about 15 minutes on a trail similar to the unpaved paths by Cedar Lake near downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota (but with far fewer mosquitoes!) before we started spotting chimps just everywhere.





















I got so tired of taking chimp pictures that I started taking pictures of humans with better cameras than my cheap little one.



And then my camera battery died and I was able to just enjoy myself hanging out with the chimps.

The dark haired young man shooting photo's in the previous shot is from Peru ( my other favorite blogging spot). He took a photo of Isaac with a chimp and let me transfer it from his mini disk.



Isaac is the one in the foreground. The chimp is in the tree.

I must admit, though, later in the day when Isaac and I were walking around the plantation and a woman and her children stopped to talk to us in a happy and animated manner in a language we couldn't understand, I had such an overwhelming desire to tell you about it that my brain turned back on and I remembered that my cell phone is a camera and I snapped away. I am pretty sure from the hand gestures that they were telling us about the fertile volcanic soil, the blessed rain, the abundant crops and the healthy children of Uganda (and not some local version of Yankee Go Home!).

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Location:Mweya National Park to Kibale Forest, Uganda