Safari in Murchison and Chimpanzee Chumps

November 19^th, 2023

We woke up at 5:30 am in order to be on the road by 6.  Sunrise is always around 6:30 in Uganda as we are very close to the equator, so it doesn’t change much throughout the year.  It looked like it was going to be a nice day for an early morning safari.

 

Along the paved road our first encounter with wildlife was a herd of buffalos (also known as bubalina, and not to be confused with bison in North America).  They are one of the “Big 5” animals in Africa and do have some cool, curly horns.  Okay, a good start, but they are probably the least interesting of the Big 5 (the others are: rhinos, elephants, leopards, and lions). 

Where buffalos roam:

Julius turned down the same dirt road we were on the evening before.  David and I stood up to peer out of the popped-up roof.  Next, we saw a group of bushbucks, a type of antelope.

The safari amped up a bit as a herd of elephants were near the road, walking in the opposite direction, and they crossed the road behind us.  In the early morning light, that was stunning.

Early morning elephants:

Some more buffalo...one of the Big Five:

Here's a nice waterbuck:

Then a real treat…a female lion just off of the side of the road…my first lion in the wild!  She didn’t seem to care about us at all as we snapped some photos.

A slight repeat from yesterday, we saw another leopard lazily hanging out in a tree.

Rush hour on the safari:

Giraffes were having breakfast, munching on leaves from some small trees and bushes.  I thought it was funny that they have their long legs and necks to reach high vegetation but this morning they were having to bend down to get their food.

Giraffes are crazy looking animals.

We noticed some vehicles stopped ahead and wondered what it was…a male and female lion!  Awesome.  We pulled over and observed them for some time.  They were a good hundred meters from the road, but they got up and started walking closer…and closer.  David had lent me his binoculars, so I had a good view of them.

Well hello...

Almost looks like a two bodied lion...just a little foreshadowing...

Someone's on the prowl.

The female proceeded to lie down and then…what?!?  The male mounted her.  We’re going to have some action!

But Lion King my butt...he lasted all of 10 seconds, letting out a bit of a small grunt as he finished!  A few years ago, I saw a llama at Machu Pichu and a giant tortoise on the Galapagos Islands who lasted way longer than this while mating!!!

Continuing on, we eventually reached the Victoria Nile, as far as we could go.  Across the river was a lush green mountain range of the Democratic Republic of Congo.  The DRC is currently having some political unrest with many rebel groups vying for power…so as inviting as the landscape looked, it’s not an area that many tourists are currently visiting.

Backtracking along the same road, we saw the same lion couple.  They looked quite relaxed, like maybe hey had a cigarette while we were at the river.  They crossed the road and lied down to relax so we got to pass close by to them once again.

David commented that the last thing he wanted to see was another leopard, but one that was moving and not just lounging in a tree.  Well, he got his wish!  A small vehicle was stopped ahead, by a few big trees and there wasn’t just one, but two leopards.  We were lucky enough to watch one descend and then jump out of the tree as the other one switched from one comfy branch to another.  Super cool.

A leopard getting comfort in a tree...he's also one of the Big Five.

You might be able to see his leg hanging down, he was actually full straddling the branch.

Interesting that their patches try to camouflage them, but giraffes just kinda naturally stick out, at least in this terrain.

Giraffes, giraffes and more giraffes.

And all this action was before 9 am!  What a way to start the day.  We had to be out of the park by 11 am, or we would have to pay $40 USD each for another 24 hours.  On the drive back we saw more baboons but then were treated to a new monkey to me and David, the black and white colobuses on the paved road.  Most of them seemed to be licking something that was on the tarmac.  They are interesting looking things.  Their white long white fur seemed to hang off of their shoulders and back like they were wearing a funky 70s jacket.

For some reason, the closest one had a nice piece of wood in his mouth that was knocked out and stolen by another baboon.

They looked like skunk monkeys to me.

Arriving back in Masindi, Julius asked us whether we wanted to try and see chimpanzees.  The most popular place to see chimps is in the Kibale National Park, a few hundred kilometres south from here.  It had been on my itinerary but while staying at Murchison Backpackers, Doreen had mentioned that there were also chimps in the Budongo Forest, which was on the fringe of the Murchison Falls Park and that it cost half the price to see them there ($100 vs $200).  Well Julius proposed an even better offer, $50 to see them in a small forest, which used to be connected to Budongo, but sugar cane fields had cut it off.  This would be David’s only chance to see chimps as he had to take a bus in the late afternoon back to Kampala before getting an overnight bus to Kabale, en route to Bwindi Impenetrable Forest where he was going to see the mountain gorillas.  Both of us had purchased our gorilla permits in Kampala when we first met but I was going there 8 days later.  I would have preferred to go the following day as I was doing all of my planned activities in a very short time span, and I wasn’t sure what I would do to entertain myself in the upcoming days.

 

We decided to go for it, and we picked up a local guy named Joseph.  He was a short, smiley man who knew this forest like the back of his hand.  He was dressed in green pants, a camouflaged jacket and rubber boots.  Julius parked by the forest and at first, we walked along some of the perimeter, with Joseph listening for any chimp sounds.

An ant superhighway by the edge of the forest:

Just before heading into the forest:

He didn’t hear anything, so we took a trail into the forest.  I didn’t clue in until later, but there are only a handful of “feeding trees”, like a type of fig tree, where the likelihood of finding a chimpanzee would be higher.  For the first half an hour or so, I was wildly scanning the trees and the lower foliage, trying to spot one.  Eventually, I just kept an eye on the trail.  Sometimes we were on a decent trail, others an animal trail and occasionally we were just bushwhacking.

On the hunt for chimpanzees:

Starting to get a big thick in the woods...

Super dense and lush.

Well hello Mr. Baboon.

That's one big tree.

This continued on for a couple of hours and eventually David called it, stating that he needed to head to the bus station to catch his bus.  We had put up a valiant effort.  The odds were against us as it was the middle of the afternoon and Joseph mentioned that the chimps changed their “program” everyday, so unless you caught them in the morning when they were waking up from their tree nests and heading to a feeding tree, or in the evening when they would call out to each other to meet up and build their nests, it was a bit of a crap shoot.  Oh well, I thought, I can go to the main section of Budongo Forest and try again there…it will just cost some more money.

The end of an awesome 30 hours...Thanks Julius!!!

Back in the vehicle, Julius mentioned that David would get his money back and that I could try again the next morning for free!  That was kind of Joseph to do that.

 

Even with our strike out with the chimps, what a day!  I have now seen all of the Big 5 in the wild…and as my close friend Naomi texted me, I’ll never want to go to a zoo again…and she is right.