Imagine a children’s picture-book version of the Garden of Eden, and you can begin to picture how every inch of Uganda hops, flutters and crawls with life. The countryside is a lustrous, velvety green. It teems with birds, deer, buffaloes, warthogs and hippos — and, of course, insects.
In this Eden, it is also easy to be bitten by another kind of bug. For the first-time visitor, the vibrancy of Uganda’s culture makes the most immediate impact. On my first night, sitting in a bar in downtown Entebbe, I sipped Waragi — Uganda’s sweet banana gin — and listened to African pop. People swayed, clapped and welcomed us with good-natured indifference. The vibe was that of an obscure Greek island, one neglected by package tourists — and the more interesting for it.
I had come to Uganda hoping to see lions, hippos and elephants in the wild. But above all, I was here to see gorillas. Tucked away in the south-western corner of the country, close to the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, is the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, home to half the world’s remaining mountain gorillas.
Anyone who arrives here by air lands at Entebbe on the shores of Lake Victoria — a day’s drive north of Bwindi. So reaching the Impenetrable Forest means spending 10 hours in the back of a 4×4 rattling over a combination of tarmac and dirt roads. After that comes a three-hour ride around hairpin bends up the side of a rift valley. We passed the mirage-like, burnt-out shell of the Air France jet hijacked in 1976 and famously raided by Mossad. (Apparently, a businessman planned to turn it into a restaurant.) Then the ground rose, and terraced mountain-side farms spread out, covered in emerald tea leaves and brightly dressed tea pickers. The villages on the fringes of the jungle seemed untouched by modernity.
Bwindi is home to a select handful of “habituated” gorillas who are accustomed to human contact. After a little more than an hour’s trekking, we came across a blackback — an adolescent male — who was sitting on the outskirts of a family group chewing tree bark that would make him tipsy. He imperiously ignored the six tourists, their cameras clicking away, and the guide who clustered barely four metres away.
Tiptoeing around the family, we spied the silverback, the dominant male, enjoying a siesta at the centre of his clan. He was enormous; his back looked the size of a three-seater couch, his paws many times the size of a human hand. He ignored us, too.
Apparently this is typical of the males, for whom eye contact is often a prelude to a bust-up. But the females and youngsters showed no such reserve. The females stared at us and one of the young apes seemed to be capering around in the branches for our benefit until with a crack as loud as a gunshot, he came whizzing to the ground on the end of a broken branch and scampered into the bushes.
We were accommodated at Bwindi’s Gorilla Forest Camp — a name that conjures up images of tents amid the rainforest, perhaps with silverbacks prowling around the tent pegs. But the canvas pavilions turned out to contain double beds, baths, modern lavatories and hot showers. There is little that can beat the sensation of soaking in a hot tub, glass of banana gin in hand, while gazing out at the rainforest wreathed in mist.
Reluctantly, we left the rainforest and headed for the lower ground of the Queen Elizabeth National Park, home to lions, hippos and large numbers of antelope. During the short drive there, we spotted an elephant and stopped to watch him, then realised we were in the middle of the herd. They crossed the road in front of our Toyota Land Cruiser, babies stumbling behind their mothers, trumpeting and squirting themselves with dust by the roadside.
It was at the national park that I had one of the most frightening experiences. Lions are not normally threatening to groups of humans, we were told, but no one had told that to the lionesses we came across in the park. They had recently killed, and one was still eating.
They had cubs with them, emitting squeaky miaows and tottering about like big kittens. Lionesses with cubs do not like the presence of strangers, and they could smell us inside the car. When we put our heads out of the sunroof to take pictures, they could see us clearly, too. One of the mother cats began to trot towards us, gathering speed as if she was about to break into a charge. Then she roared; a deep, throaty roar that exposed gleaming teeth and sent adrenaline flooding through our systems.
The Land Cruiser, with windows that could be smashed fairly easily by a lion’s paw, did not feel like protection. As she roared, one of the other lions threw herself in front of the car. Repeating this story back home in London makes you sound like a laughable coward, but my companions and I were terrified. Afterwards, we shakily agreed that it had been the best experience of the trip.
Rough or smooth, encounters with Uganda’s wildlife are only possible now that the country has recovered from Idi Amin’s brutal regime.
From Page 17
As well as being a tragedy for the people, the Amin era also had a disastrous impact on its animals as his soldiers machine-gunned down wildlife for their meat, ivory and skins. This period was so widely publicised that many of us still have an impression of Uganda as a fearful place, a stigma reflected in the limited scale of its tourist industry.
But with the exception of a rebellion in the far north — well away from tourist areas — it is now a stable and safe place to visit. However, it is always worth getting fresh updates from the embassy before travelling.
In 1999 eight tourists were kidnapped and murdered by Rwandan rebels while on a gorilla trekking trip in Bwindi. The rebels have been “plucked out” of the jungle, a senior local official told me, miming pulling out blades of grass with his fingers. Nevertheless, we were accompanied by armed but unobtrusive guards when we went trekking.
Seeing animals in the wild was the point of this trip, but at the Ngamba Island sanctuary, we had our first and last encounter with animals in semi-captivity. The sanctuary, established in 1998 and run by Australian former zookeeper Debby Cox, provides a safe haven for chimpanzees confiscated from circuses and hotels, or made orphans by poachers.
Because the rainforest-covered island only produces enough food for one chimp to live wild, the females here have been given implants to sterilise them and the apes get extra rations from their human carers. The chimps retain their independence, turning up on cue to be fed and then stealing back into the jungle as soon as feeding time is over.
I asked Cox whether tourism is beneficial here, and she hesitated. What Uganda needed to avoid was the “Kenya debacle”, she said. What she hoped for were small numbers of environmentally conscious tourists willing to support conservation projects, and making sure some of their spend finds its way into local pockets. — Â