Home is Where Your Rump Rests

Amidst all of the craziness at school, our program for this weekend remained as scheduled, which meant Saturday was…

SAFARI DAY!

Our guide John picked us up at 6:00AM sharp, and we made our way to the bush.

The sky was unreal.

Once we had arrived to Queen Elizabeth National Park, we immediately began our search for wildlife.

Here’s what we saw:

Too many water buffalo to count.

A similar magnitude of waterbucks. 

Several families of warthogs. 

And a few Crested Cranes!

The highlight of the morning, however, was without a doubt…

The lions! 

I may or may not have taken 100 pictures of just the lions we saw, but let’s be serious, when will I ever get that close to big cats in the wild again? Exactly. Totally warranted.

We took a lunch break around 1:00PM and grabbed a nap atop some picnic tables before heading over to the afternoon boat tour down the Kazinga Channel.

In addition to seeing about a hundred more waterbuck, buffalo, and kob, we also met…

some hippos,

crocodiles,

and fish eagles.

We finished the boat tour and began our journey back to the park entrance. On the way, we were determined to find some elephants, but had accepted that leopards were a long shot by that point in the day.

Welp, take a guess what we saw next.

Every Ugandan’s favorite—Mr. Leopard.

Our guide insisted that we were such a lucky group because within the whole park there are only 50 leopards, and out of all of his tours through Queen Elizabeth, he’s only come across a leopard 16 times.

Just before the park exit, out lucky streak continued. We had seen some elephant tracks and noticed a trampled tree, so we knew we must be close, but it was still surprising to find these beauts in the trees. 

Unfortunately, our time with the elephants was short-lived. For some reason, unbeknownst to us the elephants began to run away not long after we pulled up. Before their getaway, one of them actually trumpeted and started to charge towards us.

Was it something we said?

John got us out of danger very quickly and sooner than we would have liked, our safari adventure came to an end.

Luckily for us, we meet John again next Saturday for chimpanzee tracking.

Beyond excited.

Until next time!