Fort Portal, Uganda - Day 172 - Boots on the Loose

“The Fort” as they call Fort Portal. Though quite different from the Fort I grew up in. Town didn’t have a lot to offer beyond a dirt strip through the center (in my opinion… girls seemed to like it more though). “The Visitour” hotel had some good characters: David, the manager who fell in love with Alissa and wanted to come with us to our next destination and even asked my permission (in a weird, mumbly way that took me 5 minutes to understand), Jesse, our delightfully daft waitress who couldn’t bring boiling water for Nescafe because it was accidently mixed with the tea (she’s 20 years old, with a 3 year old, no parents or boyfriend, works 6 days a week from 6am until everyone leaves, has a 14 year old look after her child every day… would hate to know what she makes)… also mumbles a lot, as well as the chef who chased one of the town weirdos out of the restaurant for us with an unknown cooking utensil (very nice guy though).

Next morning up early to head out to the Kigali Rainforest to visit the chimpanzees!! Drive out of town was so so beautiful. Red dirt road with thousands of people walking on it to get to town for the day, rainforest all around with fog settled in the lower areas, tea fields here and there, neat little strips of town on the road once in a while, taxi driver, Julius with local music blarig on the stereo, driving like a madman, passed one of the crater lakes, entered the park to see a good 50 or more baboons and off in the distance a big, male chimpanzee running across the road. Everything I would have hoped for…

Cost $100 to see the chimps… ouch… Our guide, Paul started by briefing us on what to be careful of and for the next 4 hours I couldn’t get the words “spitting” and “cobra” out of my head (even though the Green and Black Mambos are much more dangerous… me in my shorts and fashionable short socks). Jen says she was more scared of the Jungle Book-style pythons hanging from the trees (not that we saw any of these things). Told us to be observant, quiet, don’t fall behind, and then took off down a trail where I almost had to jog to keep up.

After a good hour, found around 10 chimps waaay up high in a tree (maybe 7 or 8 stories up??) I think we were all worried that would be it for our 100 bucks, but after around 20 minutes it started raining so a mom came down with her baby and “teenager” behind her, hung at maybe 2 stories up for a good 1/2 hour before dropping to the ground and walking off. For the most part mom sat there with the baby grooming him, baby would get bored so wabble along a branch with mom helping, baby would hold onto a smaller branch and mom would push/shove him a bit into a somewhat steady swing, all of them keeping a fairly close eye on what we were doing the whole time. There are around 1400 chimps in the park, but only a couple dozen come into contact with humans/have been habituated (the rest run away at first sight… so that’s good), they’re 4 x stronger than humans and sometimes hunt and literally tear apart monkeys for food (but mostly eat berries in the trees and do little more than sit there and piss the whole time). They have such stunning human mannerisms the way they look and move around – it really did feel like we were sitting there watching the Missing Link! Overall a really wonderful experience, however seeing the Mountain Gorillas costs close to $500USD and I’m unsure if the chimps have made me want to do it more or less (apparently by enlarge, the experience itself is fairly similar but if lucky you can get a bit closer).

Next morning Tom and Steph left for a larger town to get money out to go to Rwanda (meeting us the next day at Lake Bunyonyi); me, Jen and Alissa took a taxi back out near the forest to Lake Nkuruba, and did a 2 hour walk to one of the other lakes. One of my favorite days in a while… just the 3 of us down a deserted country road with no irritating guide, no one really wanting anything but to say hi. Beautiful, green, rolling hills all around; terraced farmlands from top to bottom. Passed a group of school kids that acted like they’d never seen white people before and and got really excited when we took their pictures and showed them. Stopped for a minute at one of the crater lakes somewhere in the middle; got a bit jittery about something big rustling in the tall grass maybe 20ft away. Found out in th end that there IS actually a lone resident hippo that moves between the lakes, but I refuse to believe that’s what it was 🙂 We’re pretty sure Davy is thinking about us!

Called our taxi and had a beer while we waited for him. Takes about 30 minutes to drive out and get us, so around a full hour worth of driving for him, cost us 15,000 shillings which is $10CDN… keep in mind fuel here is MORE than home (around $1.40/litre) so after working maintenance and everything in, it’s pretty staggering how little he makes (we were likely his only fare for the day; in general the only people that can afford such an exorbanent cost are tourists). I find it incredibly interesting thinking about what the world’s approaching oil shortage will do to this continent. For most of Africa, there’s a lot of pressure and a great deal of desire to “Westernize” (ie. make yourself largely dependent on a dwindling fuel supply)… in some regards it feels like they’ll do it just in time for fuel to be WAY too expensive for millions/billions of people to afford, and be in a lot of trouble. On the other hand, the continent is FULL of self-sufficient “poor” people that the world thinks needs our help, but luckily have never even been in a car, let alone used a telephone or computer, and so in the end could be the lucky few that aren’t devastated by the rising cost of fuel.