paige is in arua for ten days heading a training session for her malaria project. i’m holding down the fort with the cats, and on thursday (international labour day, public holiday) tom came over to help me in the garden. he’s currently a deputy director for save the children africa but is also a big-time landscape gardener. so he was giving me pruning tips. he invited me to tag along on a weekend trip to murchison falls national park. so the following morning we were off.
this is my fifth time to murchison, so there isn’t much new for me up there. i’m always looking for new birds, though. i’ve updated our bird spreadsheet which i’ll make available on google docs once i get photos and latin names and info linked in. we’ve ID’d 285 here so far which seems like a lot until you learn there are some 1100 species in uganda.
what was new for me was finding out about two campsites. paige and i have always camped at red chili which is right at the ferry crossing. we like the scene there, it’s cheap, and the food is very good - but it’s often busy. this weekend we stayed at a campsite operated by the upmarket nile safari lodge. the campsite is awesome and a great way to go if you’re set up to cook all your own food. the super-sweet spot, though, is the campsite on the north side of the park on the nile delta. it is beautiful, right on the water, with tons of animal-manicured lawn. the key, though, is its location in the middle of the game-driving tracks. staying at red chili or nile safari, you have to first take a ferry across the river and then drive 20+km to get to the best game viewing. the first ferry is 7am and there’s the potential of missing it if you don’t get there early because a lot of vehicles queue up. so then wait ’til 8am. the ferry + the drive means it’s near 8am before you get to the prime animal spots. staying at the delta campsite means you can be in the thick of it pre-dawn and get much better views of the predators and much better light for photos. there’s nothing at the site, just you and african savannah, so you have to be fully self-contained.
the big highlight of the trip was finding 9 (nine!) lion cubs. we had just pulled alongside a water hole when we saw them emerge from the grass maybe 100 yards away. they all got up and yawned and stretched and paraded down to the water hole. for the next 20 minutes they drank, lounged around, gave us quizzical looks. all within 5 yards of our car. then they paraded back to their spot in the grass and disappeared in to the yellow. we never saw adults.
lots of pictures up at PPAD. philsgoodphoto.blogspot.com
2 responses so far ↓
1 Administrator // May 5, 2008 at 9:57 pm
phil here, but you can call me administrator.
realized after reading this that just as important as the fact that it takes a lot of prime-light viewing time to get from the first ferry to the animals is that it takes the same long amount of prime-light viewing time to get from the animals to the last ferry, at 7pm. missing that ferry would suck in that the only lodging on the north side of the river is the paraa safari lodge, which is many hundreds of dollars per night per person. i guess you could talk to a guide and they might put you up in their quarters, but it would be on a concrete or dirt floor and no mosquito net.
probably the kind of thing that leads to stress at the time but makes for a good story afterwards. and by afterwards, i mean after the malaria has been cured. i tend to stay away from those situations.
2 lion cubs – murchison falls national park, uganda – Sports and Documentary Photographer Phil Bowen // Nov 10, 2009 at 9:31 am
[...] wrote about this a little over at andersonbowen.comBLOG but this was one of the coolest experiences yet in africa. these nine cubs appeared out of the [...]
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