24 July -- Entebbe, Uganda (by Roger)

July 24 – Entebbe

It was WONDERFUL for us all to finally be together and started on the trip. After closing the poolside restaurant last night, we went to bed, got up this morning, and headed to the airport. I’m amazed at how well everyone is doing, especially David. He just got in and should be suffering from jet lag, but he’s as good as new and ready to go.

When we got to the airport, we got the bad news that the flight had been oversold (and overconfirmed) and that we couldn’t get on our flight to Entebbe. We had some pretty amazing help from Kenya Airways, but you can’t create seats out of thin air or Delta would be doing better. We had to wait for another plane about 2 pm.

That was a long time at the airport, but we got to eat, correct some hotel reservations, and spend some time talking. I got out the laptop and made everyone look at my pics from Ethiopia, and then we looked at the ones from Linda and Caroline’s trip around Nairobi. We fooled around with PhotoShop, too, and Caroline showed me a few things to do with it.

When we finally got away, we only had an hour flight. Our driver, Josef, met us with an enormous landrover. I’d never seen a stretch Rover before; it looked kind of like a Ugandan Hummer.

We reformulated our travel plans and went right to the Botanical Gardens at Entebbe. I’d visited this place a couple of decades ago, and it was one of my best memories of that trip. I wasn’t disappointed this time around either. Josef knew a biology undergrad here, and we got that guy to take us around the gardens. We walked along a path a little up from Lake Victoria, and then we went right down by the Lake itself. Caroline attracted a small crowd of children by taking pictures of them, and we saw Linda’s soon-to-be favorite bird here in abundance – a little blue kingfisher (Woodland Kingfisher). Also saw mine – the Hammerkop, a kind of brownish egret that has a triangular crest that gives it a hammer-shaped head. These birds build simply gigantic nests -- way bigger than you’d think for a bird of its size – and other birds often try to take over the nest and even do an entire colony there.

There were kingfishers and water birds everywhere. As we started up around a little rainforest segment of the Garden, we spotted a small hornbill (Crowned Hornbill); these toucan-like birds have a really big beak that is shaped like ..well, like a horn. It had a large, red nutmeg, and it sat in the top of the tree playing with the fruit for some time. We enjoyed watching it flip the nutmeg around for awhile before it gave one last flip and caught the fruit in its mouth, swallowing it. We then saw a big, white vulture (Palm-nut Vulture) sitting in a tree, and we walked toward the entrance of the rainforest section. Sunday here, and the park had a lot of weekend picnic-ers. They were having a blast with Afropop playing on the car stereos while they ate, sang, danced around and played games. Vervet monkeys scouted the exterior of the picnic groups waiting for a chance to steal some food.

The tropical forest section of the garden was great, too. Walking down into it, we passed Golden Orb spiders on their webs and stepped carefully over a very active line of army ants. All the while, we kept hearing a sort of deep, booming bird call, and when we came out trees, we saw a huge hornbill. This was a Black-and-white-casqued Hornbill. We had been marveling at this huge bird for a while when an even bigger one of the same species flew up beside it with a nutmeg in its beak – this was the male. I could hardly believe it, but the beak on this bird was double, wide and about 1/3 the length of the bird. He sat by the other hornbill flipping the nutmeg around, then he flipped it over to the female who caught and swallowed it. The two then flew off over us, sounding like turkeys flying with the loud, slow swish of their wings. This was an absolute highlight, David’s and Caroline’s favorite bird.

We went back to our stretch landrover and drove on back to Kampala after that. We’re in a great hotel there, the Speake, named after the Brit who came this far looking for the source of the Nile. (He found it, too – Lake Victoria. At least the source of the White Nile.) Slept long and deep.