Queen Elizabeth National Park

For the last few days of our trip, we stayed in a hostel at Queen Elizabeth National Park. The park apparently had another name before, but Queen Elizabeth I think visited one time and decided it should be named after her. Or something like that. This was the park where we were going on safari, so we kept our eyes peeled the whole drive into the park. We saw water bucks (kind of like deer but with much cooler horns), warthogs (which, yes, are called pumba in Swahili), and buffalo (but not like American buffalo). We went to bed early and got up the next morning at around 6 to leave for our game drive at 6:30. We were told by our guide that the big 4 mammals they had in the park were lions, buffalos, elephants, and leopards—which were the rarest. Within the first 5 minutes of leaving the hostel, we nearly ran over a leopard. It was still dark so we didn’t get the greatest pictures, but it was such a beautiful animal! After stalking it with the car for a while, we moved on and saw a herd of elephants! With a baby too :) Since it was still early, we also saw several hippos. Those things are huge! Apparently they come out of the water at night since it’s cooler to graze and then they return to the water during the day. We were right next to Lake Edward, Lake George, and a channel connecting the two, by the way. Half way done with the big 4 in the first 15 minutes! And actually, it was more like 3/4 of the way since we’d already seen the buffalos. Now onto the lions! We drove out into the park and passed many water bucks. They’re so pretty :) We saw a pack of cars (the most terrifying of all animals in Uganda) up ahead, and thinking they’d found a lion, we joined them. And we were right :) Way off in the distance, there was this dark blob moving around, which, our guide told us, was a male lion. Even with the binoculars, we couldn’t see him very well. So we hung around until most others got discouraged, made friends with an Israeli family with adorable kids, and when there were only a few vans left, all of the guides finally agreed to take us off the road into the grass where the lion was (which is illegal) and promised not to rat each other out—one of the guides even gave us a super excited smile and a thumbs up as we both drove off. Everyone piled in the vans and set off toward the lion—except for us. Our van decided that this would be a perfect time to break down. So about 5 minutes and a jump start later, we were off to go see the lion feeling very relieved. We approached him while he was lying next to a bush just relaxing. We ended up getting about 15 feet or so away from him, which was incredible. He sat up when we got closer, and we got amazing pictures!!! It was such an incredible experience :) Four for Four! We headed back to the hostel for breakfast, packing, and lunch before heading out on our boat ride that afternoon.

The boat ride was amazing! Also, I haven’t seen so many white people in one place in months. We set out along the channel that connected the two lakes and headed toward Lake George. We crossed the channel to the shore opposite the dock and began trolling along the shore. We saw several buffalos and hippos sitting in the water cooling off, and apparently they have no problem living side by side since they’re both herbivores. We also saw a mama hippo with her day old baby, as per our guides, lying alone away from the school (apparently that’s what you call a group of hippos). Apparently when mama hippos are ready to give birth, they leave the school to give birth alone because if the baby is male, the older male(s?) in the school will try to kill it to get rid of the future competition. I’m not quite sure what happens if the baby is male. Maybe he leaves the mom when he’s able to take care of himself. But if it’s female, the mom will bring the baby back to the school. Next, we saw an elephant!!! It was amazing. And huge. I’ll post pictures soon, but they were absolutely amazing. The elephants we saw all had short tusks rather than long ones. Apparently short tusks have evolved to be the dominant trait because elephants who had long tusks were the ones who were poached for their tusks for the ivory trade.