2012: Gorillas in the Mud

Jinja camp overlooks the Nile and is focused on an adventure; offering rafting, quad biking, horseback riding, paragliding and more. It was a shame that we only had one full day at Jinja, as it meant we could only do one activity and I’d have loved to take the quad bikes out on the back roads of Uganda.

We had another early morning and had to remember how to take down our tents, as it had been a few days. It was a few hour’s drive to Lake Mburo, but on arrival, we were welcomed by a monkey at the gate watching us whilst lounging on a tree limb.

We only had a one and a half hour hike to reach the Gorilla family, but it was steep and very muddy and very humid. All my carefully prepared gear came off, and even the shirt I was wearing became unbuttoned and dripped with sweat.

After setup, we all went down to the dock for a swim. Lake Bunyoni is one of the deepest lakes in Africa, 6000 feet deep, which is a sizeable, though upside-down, mountain.

Another 6am departure to start the day, we collected up the other sixteen people who were joining our group and had a sausage based breakfast before I curled up on the truck, using my beanbag tripod for a pillow for an extra couple of hours sleep to get over the Safari induced hangover from the night before….

We set off at 6am, having gotten up at 5, glad that the beer intake had been limited. As the clothes hadn’t dried fully the evening before, some of us strung up our clothes inside the van using a long spool of string and they were still drying in the morning, leaving the van to look something like a launderette.

We were up at about 6:30 am, not realizing this was going to be considered a lie-in on this trip. Typically, I don’t remember my dreams, but for some reason, when camping, they are vivid and stick with me. Perhaps all this implies is my home needs better ventilation.

A final moment of African homesickness hit on my final beer when a power-cut plunged us all into darkness.