Murchison Falls

Max is safely back in the US. Holly and I finished up her time in Uganda with an excursion to Murchison Falls, the largest national park in Uganda. We traveled with a backpacker hostel group, who organized the transport, lodging, and activities- a lovely break from self-sufficiency. The falls are at a place on the Nile river where the river bed narrows to a 6 meter wide crevice in the rocks and falls 45 meters so there is wild, crashing and roiling water. The falls scene in "The African Queen" (can't wait to watch this Humphrey Bogart/Katherine Hepburn movie again as I was imagining them in the little boat approaching this maelstrom) was filmed here; and Ernest Hemingway's first plane crash occurred here. We took a game drive in one of those vans in which the top raises and you can stand (when not being thrown around the van by the potholes or driving overland). We started at 6:30am and saw small herds of giraffes as the sun was rising. We found a lioness under a tree with a freshly killed Ugandan cob with a thousand cob, hartebeest, oribi, bushbuck, and waterbuck (all antelope type animals) grazing behind her on the savanna. On the afternoon boat ride that goes upriver towards the base of the falls, we saw huge crocodiles- we got close enough to one that was lying very still with it's mouth wide open to hear it breathe. We stayed in a tent and were told not to 'freak out' if/when we heard or saw baboons, hippos, or warthogs at night (this changes decision-making about bathroom trips in the middle of the night, by the way). On the second night we heard the chomping of hippos pulling grass outside our tent. It was so dark outside, I couldn't see much but as we continued to listen and watch, we saw the silhouette of a hippo (like a shadow puppet lit from behind by the lantern in front of the tent next to us) walk from the front of the tent to the back before nudging the back of our tent.....And then there were the falls. The last morning we hiked to the top of the falls. Without much in the way of safety precautions and with low density of tourists (our small group was alone), the experience was breathtaking and reverential as we approached and sat with this power of nature.