Game Drives, Bike Rides & Police Bribes

Month 2: Still happy, still healthy, still breathing, visa extension granted – all positives.

For everyone that’s been asking, I’m glad to inform you that nothing else (that I know of) has laid eggs in my body and spawned out of my pores. In fact my body appears to have “Africanised”, I’m able to eat and drink all the dodgy local stuff, and my dust induced cough seems to have subsided. I’ve even aclimatised to the heat – the other morning our weather station recorded the lowest temperature this month. It was 22 degrees and I was bloody freezing! Spent the morning walking round in a beanie and a hoodie!

Mentally I’ve become desensitised to a few things that probably would have shocked the old Kev a bit. Had another two deaths this month. First was the small daughter of one of my trail cutters. I got told about her one morning, rushed her in to hospital, but she died a few hours later. Kind of depressing as I think she had a severe case of dysentery, which may have been cured had the family acted earlier. Problem is that no-one has any money to do anything about these types of things, so they’ll either leave it, or pay the local witch-doctor a chicken to dance about and blow some smoke. You can imagine how effective a cure that is…

A typical house in the local villages

Second death was a few days ago when someone’s mother died. It was weird. I went to the house and actually sat next to the dead body and talked to the family for a while. It wasn’t until I left that it actually registered I had been sitting next to a corpse.

Same goes with firearms. Especially back in Entebbe/Kampala, any shop worth robbing has an armed guard (the video shop for example). My friend was in the bank yesterday, and as I was waiting outside I started talking to one of the guards. Once again it wasn’t until I left that I even thought about the fact that the guy I was talking with about the local bar scene, was standing there holding a semi-automatic machine gun.

But anyway…enough about me…

Chimpanzee Rescue Squad!!!

I got a call one morning from my boss, who is a wildlife vet (how cool a job is that!). Someone in a village about 80kms from me had reported a chimpanzee that was caught in a trap. Peter (my boss) was coming up from Kampala but he needed the tranquilizer gun and medi-kits from my site. So I loaded up and went out to meet him.

Some dickhead had set a bear trap right near the edge of a village, they mean to catch bush pigs or duiker in these, but where they had put it I’m surprised a kid didn’t stand in it! The chimp had sprung the trap on its wrist, and by the time we arrived, had dragged it a wee way into a swamp. After finding and sedating the chimp it took three people, all physically straining, to actually get the trap back open!



Miraculously no bones were broken (about a third of all chimps found in these traps need amputation) there were just a few abrasions on each side of the wrist. Peter and his team cleaned out the wounds, checked the rest of the body (all OK), then gave her (it was a young female) a shot to wake her back up. We spent the next hour watching this chimp come out of a sleep, which kinda reminded me of getting up on a Sunday morning and finding an extremely drunk person waking up on the lounge sofa. The other day I ran into one of the guys who is a ranger up that way who told me that the chimp has joined back up with the local population and is even using the hand again. Nice

Dirt Bike 101

It recently came to my attention that our site has a dirt bike; it’s been on loan for a while and is now back. After a couple of days of looking at it, my inner child (who frequently hijacks my rational thought process), and peer pressure from some Swiss researchers, convinced me to have a go.

I did get my motorbike learner license in New Zealand, yet this consisted of me riding round some cones in a garage and proving I knew which lever worked the brake. So, after checking with someone how to change gears I jumped on and managed to get out onto the road without stalling. Unfortunately the road outside is on a slope and kinda narrow, and I didn’t have the confidence to slow down and turn around. The only option was to keep going so I ended up riding the 30kms into town instead. By the time I hit town I felt pretty confident on the bike. I had a few people to see; by the time I finished the clouds that had been building for the last week had gotten very dark and ominous. I had no money to stay in town and you don’t want to get stuck in the dark out here, so I didn’t have much choice but to head back.

This is Seamus the local rock lizard

No sooner do I get on the road, does the first proper rain in months decide to fall! When it rains here, it rains (the other day we had 60mm in 20 minutes!). Sometimes I wonder if god/buddah/yoda/whoever is messing with me, surely they could have waited til I got home?

It’s a simple equation: dirt road + rain = mud slide. It was not fun, it was long, it was cold, it was stressful, and my “I-am-a-super-awesome-dirt-bike-superstar” attitude quickly dissolved. But after slipping, sliding and stalling all the way, I somehow made it home “sans-crash”.

After this experience I’m deeply grateful to the New Zealand licensing authority, who tested my knowledge of “minimum parking distances from a school crossing” before they let me ride one of these things.

Murchison Falls

Last weekend under the guise of “market research” I took the work van and a few friends and drove further into the national park. About 40 minutes from where I am are the Murchison falls, reputedly one of the most spectacular falls in Africa, where the entire Victoria Nile crashes through a narrow cataract on its way to Lake Albert. The sheer volume of water moving through this thing every second is indeed worthy of a few superlatives (insert your own, I’m tired), and the sound of water on rock is deafening.
Some bright spark in the 19th century tried to build a dam across the top of the falls, which you can see in some of the photos. A great concept, but sometimes you just can’t mess with nature and it got washed away pretty promptly.

Now and again whilst traveling you come across things that are just impossible to do justice with a few photographs (unless your name is Marcus Tillson of course!), but here are a few anyway…




Game Drive

After the falls we stayed the night at a backpackers and got up at “I’m-to-hungover-to-be-up-this-early” AM to get the ferry across the Nile to the game reserve. This has to be one of the coolest things I have done in my life. You take your car on the ferry, and then have a couple thousand square kilometers to drive wherever you want.

Going early in the morning ended up being a good idea, as you get this amazing morning light from the sunrise, and of course all the wildlife is a bit more active too. As you begin the drive you see an abundance of antelope: Hartebeest, Waterbuck, Ugandan Kob, Bushbuck and Oribi – if anyone’s interested.



There are also a good number of buffalo and warthogs around too.

After a bit we came across our first elephant, standing nonchalantly next to the road. People have been killed in the park by charging elephants so if you see one you just have to stop and wait it out. It took a good 40 minutes of eating and scratching its bum on a tree before it moved on, but as I’ve said before – seeing something like this in its natural environment is amazing, and doesn’t even compare to seeing one in a zoo.

Driving down to the delta next to the lake we saw quite a few of giraffes, and then in the lake a massive herd of hippos. We also saw some crocodiles in a river (no photos sorry, I was driving). Funnily enough, somewhere in the middle of the lake is an invisible line which marks the Uganda/Congo border. On a clear day you can see the Blue Mountains of the Congo. Also interesting is that the other shore of the lake is LRA rebel territory.

The 'ippo is 'appy!

That's Congo on the other side. No sign of Kony...

Whilst stoked with the day it was a tad disappointing that we didn’t see any lions or leopards. Apparently in the dry season they keep themselves well hidden, I suppose this means I’ll just have to go up there again!

Why not hang out with your wang out?

The reason for some animal scarcity is that the park, while amazing, is still recovering from un-restricted hunting in the 60’s and 70’s and heavy poaching in the 80’s. Where you may now see 4-5 elephants, you used to see hundreds. But now with proper protection from the Wildlife Authority, numbers are coming back slowly.

I also found it cool that not even one hour away I work in a tropical rainforest with chimps and monkeys, yet up here is a completely different savannah environment with a totally different sub-set of animals. Good diversity Uganda!

When the van breaks I get the Land Cruiser - Im trying to help it on its way...

Pineapple Bribes

I was driving back down to Entebbe the other day when a traffic cop waved for me to pull over. The traffic cops here are a bit of a joke as apart from the odd motorcycle they don’t have any vehicles. So if you are speeding past, they wave you down and you don’t stop, there’s really not much they can do about it.

Anyway, I was in a good mood, so foolishly I stopped the van. It was a “routine stop” but it all got a little complicated when it came to the matter of identification. Id left my international license in the other truck. As mentioned earlier, my New Zealand License is for a car and a learner motorbike. So while having a full car license, I also have the word “Learner” emblazoned above my ID photo. As far as the cop and most Ugandans are concerned, New Zealand could well be a former soviet state – my point being that; here having a NZ license is about as effective as holding a weight-watchers meeting at McDonalds.

To complicate matters, my visa (in my British passport!) is a tourist visa, and I was driving a van with NGO (Non Government Organisation) license plates, meaning that this was obviously a work vehicle, and I’m not meant to be working.

I tried to explain all this best I could. The cop was pretty relaxed about it all, but told me he’d need to take my details and then Id have to take my international license and work permit (which I said I had) to the central police station in Kampala. I was informed that there would also be a fee that I would have to pay. I suddenly clicked where all this was going, so I asked if the fee was payable to him. He gave me this look that quite clearly said “How obvious do I need to make this? Just give me some money and you can go!”

Fortunately most of my cash was in my bag so I pulled out my wallet and gave him the 15,000 shillings (about US$7) I had in there. This clearly wasn’t quite up to the accepted amount for a no-license bribe so he asked me what else I had. Next to me on the front seat was some fruit Id just brought and a packet of cigarettes. He told me that if I gave him the smokes and the pineapple then I could be on my way.

Now this is when things turned serious. Id spent a good while selecting that pineapple; it was near perfect and had a scheduled appointment with my belly later that evening. I tried to negotiate with a few mangoes and an avocado – but the cop had also realised the power of the pineapple, so finally I reluctantly parted with it. I did eventually buy another pineapple, but it just wasn’t the same.

The moral of the story: Don’t stop for the cops. Always hide the pineapple.

That’s all for this month, in next month’s edition – well who knows, I’m sure something will happen between now and then!

Kwa Heri!