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ok, time to do some housecleaning so i can start with the updates again. to summarize: paige’s parents visited and we went all over the place. paige is growing in a big way. she’s been busy at work. i’ve been busy on the computer. we are here for only five more weeks.

from a uganda tourism point of view, the two new places we visited with paige’s parents were bushara island on lake bunyonyi and bwindi impenetrable forest national park. bushara was fantastic. excellent food in the main lodge area. canvas wall tents that were really well-kept and in secluded locations. tons of birds and a number of new ones for us. beautiful lake bunyonyi location. and it was all 1/4 to 1/3 the cost of comparable lodging that we’ve seen. win/win.

now that we’ve been here a long time and been most places, i’m pretty comfortable just driving around uganda. so much so that i forgot our map. so much so that i didn’t really read the clear instructions of which road not to take to get to bwindi from bunyonyi. so we took that road. i got nervous that we were on the wrong road a few times and it was a big relief to get to the gate where the road passes through part of the park. so i thought we were in the clear. i should have been nervous about the quality of the road. we stopped twice to push minivans out of mud holes and had a couple tense moments ourselves.

having safely arrived on time, though, i was really glad we took the wrong road. beautiful views of jungle and valleys we wouldn’t have otherwise seen. but it was probably 50/50 that a car would have gotten stuck that we couldn’t get around, necessitating our turning back. i tend to be positive in the face of adversity but there is no upside or silver lining to not making it to the gorillas because i didn’t read the guide book.

in bwindi we stayed at the buhoma community rest camp. very similar in all descriptors to bushara. food, lodging, location all at 1/4 to 1/3 what you could pay at some “luxury” camps. and we had a great hour with the gorillas. lots of time with the silverback, a couple playful kids, and i had an adolescent walk up and stand next to me with its hand around my ankle until the ranger shoed it away. super-cool. also tooka long hike to a waterfall and paige and i did two productive hours with a bird guide.

following, a good day in the southern ishasha sector of queen elizabeth national park. sadly no lions, though. driving home from ishasha, i had to drive around a trailer stalled in the middle of the road and sank the driver’s side of the car axle-deep in mud. getting stuck isn’t so much an issue as where we got stuck, which is on a road with very little traffic. i was not happy with myself. i pulled out the winch cable to pull us out on the semi trailer only to find that i don’t really know how the winch works. but i think it’s missing some parts so i don’t feel too bad about that. as luck would have it a land cruiser from the congo with some swarthy-looking mzungus (i think they were belgian) came by and we hooked the winch to their tow and we were able to pop right out. between that incident and our adventure on the ruhija road to bwindi, i’ve become a big fan of locked hubs and low-ratio 4wd.

32 new birds for the trip in total. highlights being the white-backed night-heron, little bittern, giant kingfisher to name a few.

after a day at home to rest, we drove up to arua in the far northwest of the country. normally an eight-hour drive, we split it in two, staying at a women’s cooperative tourism orginization just outside of murchison falls national park. highly recommended. then continued through the park, across the nile and up to arua the second day. the highlight of our drive through murchison was finding a lion resting near a recent kill. paige’s mom spotted the kill and then she and paige found the lion. it’s only the second time we’ve seen a big cat without a guide finding it for us.

finally, we flew home to kampala from arua on a small regional airline. this was my first flight within uganda and a very cool experience. i had driven a lot of the terrain we flew over and i had our map with so i could follow our course pretty well. one new experience was seeing some internally displaced persons (IDP) camps. some were huge. we’ve driven through them, but it was different seeing them and their scale from the air.

in other news, paige is getting big like whoh. we have our tickets home to the US and it’s coming soon! we go to DC on may 31 where paige has a few days of meetings and phil has a few days of checking out the ballparks of baltimore, DC, and NYC. we’ll both get two days to be tourists though which will be fun because paige has never been to DC and i was there once for a day. then home to MN on june 8, have a kiddo in august more or less, and back to uganda the first week of october.

ok, that’s a marathon. thanks for reading this far and i’ll try to keep them shorter and more frequent in the future.