Carrion call

Carrion eaters is not a subject that flies across the radar screen of most people's daily lives, but on a recent day I encountered the subject of giant, flesh-eating birds not once, not twice, but three times (one of those times in the flesh).

In the morning Dana handed me her college application essay, the piece of work that will, if done well, convey to admissions officers something true and real about her that other components of her application may not.

Her essay is about our trip to Uganda and its effect on her life. It's beautiful, and I love it more with each reading. Near the beginning she makes a reference to the big birds that lurk in and circle over Kampala:

"There were differences between their world and mine: four-foot-tall marabou storks don’t rest on my neighbors’ satellite dishes, ubiquitous signs warning about the prevalence of AIDS don’t mark my Boston streets, whole families don’t navigate the city on a single, chugging motor scooter, and women don’t sit by the side of the road selling bananas and spreading sorghum out to dry..."

A few hours after Dana's essay had plucked Uganda memories from the back of my mind and put them up front, I sat down with a book, the 2002 edition of The Best American Travel Writing. I'd picked up the anthology the week before at a used book sale and was half-way through. The next story on tap was Edward Hoagland's "Visiting Norah," originally published in Worth magazine. I almost dropped the book when I read the first sentence:

"Two pairs of marabou storks, each of them five feet tall and battleship gray with a pink neck and a wattle pouch, proudly posing and croaking, were raising chicks in bulky nests in the flame trees that overlooked the swimming pool at the Fairway Hotel in Kampala, Uganda."

Where Dana's marabou storks stay benignly in their satellite dishes, Hoagland's fowl are ready to swoop down and feed:

"... marabou storks... are carrion feeders and offal scavengers, similar to but larger than the most no-nonsense vulture, and in famine territory they of course will eat children who drop by the wayside. In the chaos of modern Africa, they have moved from the veldt and forests into the cities, wherever garbage and death and anarchy erupt. They are tolerated because, as they stalk around, gobbling refuse, rodents, fruit rinds, rotting vomit, dog carcasses... with their thick, scary beaks, they fend off disease. But when I saw them roosting in the downtown parks... as if watching for any homeless person who might be staggering or bleeding, they looked like undertakers to me."

They are hideous and huge, and they are everywhere in Kampala. It took me and Dana about a day to get used to their wheeling, squawking, hulking forms as just another routine piece of the urban puzzle.

So, it's lunchtime in my little Boston 'burb, and I've had two carrion encounters. Odd.

After lunch I go off for a slow run. A mile from my house, above the well-trafficked, densely-built route I've been running for 15 years, a giant bird circles above my head and lands on an antique Cape's peaked roof. His wingspan stretches at least three feet. I stop in my tracks and stare. What is that bird? An eagle? He opens his wings, stares directly at me, and keeps his awesome wings open, as if to dry them in the sun that's beating on the black-shingled roof. A second bird flies up a side street, rounds the corner onto the street I stand on, and joins his friend on the roof. Their great wings are outstretched. I am transfixed.

They are magnificent -- from the neck down. No, these are not eagles. These have hideous heads.

A man and his son ride toward me on bikes. "We saw you, and wanted to see what you were looking at," said the dad. I asked if he knew what kind of birds these are -- some type of giant hawk, perhaps?

"Turkey vultures. They're around here, but they don't usually come out into the open like this. They're usually in the fields."

Vultures. "There must be dead meat around," I said, and a second later we spied half of a dead, bloody fox lying near the side of the road.

I continued my run, again with thoughts of Africa in my head, Kenya this time, where, on dawn game drives in the Masai Mara we'd watch scavengers -- jackals and hyenas -- fight over the remains of kills that the lions had brought down and feasted on through the night. Predators kill at night; scavengers feed in the morning. The sated, fat-bellied simbas were asleep in the grasses, leaving wildebeest haunches and zebra heads for the dawn patrol, animals lower on the food chain. Hyenas ruled the carcass-cleaning chaos, and they chased and swatted the jackals who darted fast and low into the feeding frenzy to tear off small chunks of flesh and spirit them away.


The vultures were too smart, too patient or too lazy to fight for their food. They simply waited on the sidelines for the others to finish, then swooped or waddled over to the carcass so many animals had already dined on, spread their wings over it, then hunched down to pick every crevice clean.


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Speke's million-shilling spinach

I've been cooking chicken tikka masala a lot lately. I take a jar of Patak's tikka masala curry sauce, a can each of drained chick peas and spinach, and mix those into chicken breast chunks sauteed in olive oil. Everyone goes back for seconds (which is why I've recently begun doubling the recipe).

Indian is one of my two favorite cuisines. (Mexican.) And because of the centuries of Indian emigration to places around the globe, you can get it just about anywhere, Uganda included.

Dana and I ate lots of Indian food in Kampala, and our favorite restaurant was the Khyber Pass at the Speke Hotel on Nile Avenue in the city center. The Speke is Uganda's oldest hotel, built in the 1920s and named for 19th-century British explorer John Hannington Speke, who poked around Africa with Richard Burton and "discovered" Lake Tanganyika and Lake Victoria, the source of the Nile. The hotel has a colonial look and feel and reminds me of the Norfolk in Nairobi.



One evening we sat on the outside terrace under the lights, watching the bustle along Nile Avenue as we ate our dinner. I'd ordered a saag dish, which contains spinach. Saag dishes by definition contain spinach. The description of my dish on the Khyber Pass's menu, right next to the price, listed spinach.

After we'd enjoyed our meal and the soft yellow lights and the warm Kampala night, I asked for the check, which, according to the menu, should have been 68,000 Uganda shillings (USH), about $35.oo US. The waiter brought the bill.

The figure 68,000 was, indeed, written on the bill, but the waiter pointed to another number written at the bottom of the slip: 830,000 shillings -- $420 US dollars. I checked my wine to make sure I hadn't inadvertently ordered a bottle of vintage Dom Perignon and then laughed up at the waiter and asked what he was expecting me to pay. He did not point at the 68,000, but at the 830,000, which my brain had already rounded up to a million.

"But that says eight hundred and thirty thousand!"

"Yes, madam. Because of the spinach."

"Eight hundred and thirty thousand?"

"Yes, madam. It is the spinach."

So I'd be paying more for my saag than the amount printed on the menu. Was there a spinach shortage in Kampala? Was there a tourists-only spinach levy? Maybe there was a spinach disclaimer somewhere in the menu's fine print.

When you're traveling and don't have home field advantage you pick your battles carefully. I wasn't going to argue over some easy-to-swallow spinach surcharge, fake or otherwise, but an extra 385 bucks? What was this, truffle-infused spinach?

I went at it again: "Eight HUNDRED and thirty THOUSAND?"

"Yes, madam. For the spinach."

"How is that possible?"

"Yes, it is the spinach." Dana by this point was giggling wildly into her tea cup.

I pointed to the first two digits of the original bill amount. "Sixty-eight."

"Yes, madam."

Then I pointed to the other number. "Eight hundred thirty. How does spinach get me from sixty-eight to EIGHT HUNDRED THIRTY?" Surely, when expressed that way the absurd distance between the two figures would register and the waiter would apologize and tender a revised and more reasonable amount.

"Yes, madam. It is for spinach." Dana spit tea on the terrace.

"Perhaps you mean eighty-three?"

"Yes, madam," said the waiter, nodding placidly. "Eighty-three."

"So it's eighty-three thousand, not eight hundred and thirty thousand?" At 83,000 USH the bill would clock in at about $42 US, meaning a seven dollar spinach tax, which, at the moment, sounded like a bargain.

"Yes."

"So, the comma is in the wrong place!" (I said this with a little "Gotcha!" tone in my voice. Vindicated.)

"Yes, madam."

"And there's an extra digit."

"Yes, madam."

I paid the 83,000 shillings, and we left the terrace for Nile Avenue, replaying the million-shilling spinach conversation all the way back to our hotel. Through the night, one of us would whisper, "Yes, madam," and we'd both crack up.


www.LoriHein.com

The death of Nkuringo

I recently became aware of the April 2008 death of the silverback Nkuringo, dominant male of the Nkuringo band of wild mountain gorillas that Dana and I tracked in Uganda's Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in February. Megan from New Zealand, who used information from my Uganda posts to plan her July 2008 Bwindi gorilla trek, gave me the news in an email she sent after her trip. (Megan had a marvelous Uganda experience, and I'll share parts of her report in an upcoming post.)

Nkuringo lived 50 years, the average life expectancy of a wild mountain gorilla. When Dana and I visited the Nkuringo band in February it had 18 members, and it still does. After Uganda Wildlife Authority rangers found the silverback's body in the forest, they discovered a new baby born to one of the band's adult females.

When we visited the band, the group's two adult blackback males, Safari and Kisoro, were quite visible, positioning themselves between us and the group's females and children. Perhaps they knew that Nkuringo would soon pass and the role of protector would fall to one of them. I read that Safari, who remained loyal to Nkuringo in past coup attempts by males since banished from the band, is the new chief.

Nkuringo died 60 days after we met him. I was awed by our Bwindi experience even as it was taking place, but now I feel that our hour with mzee -- the old man, the respected elder -- was a rare and special gift.

I stood less than 10 feet from Nkuringo when I took the above photo, one I now realize is among the last taken of him. It's fitting that it shows him walking away.


Click on Uganda in the "Where Do You Want To Go?" sidebar to read more about our journey to Bwindi.


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Details, details: Lowdown on tracking Bwindi's Nkuringo band

One more Uganda post, then I'll take you to another piece of the planet. Tell me where you want to go.

Megan from New Zealand, who'll be tracking the Nkuringo gorilla band in July with her brother, sent an email asking for more details about the hike and trek itself. Happy to oblige with both trek details and other info that Uganda travelers might find useful or interesting. This post will be long, but I'd rather give Megan more than less:


-- First, Megan's going to Bwindi in July, which is good news. July should be dry. Bwindi's rainiest months are March through May and September through November, when hours-long downpours are common. Besides potentially finding some dirt roads impassable, sliding and sloshing around in wet boots on a Bwindi mountainside would, I think, detract mightily from the trek experience. If you have a choice, go to Bwindi in a dry season. You may still get rain -- we got hosed down by a rain shower at the end of our hike -- but it'll likely be short and not a complete buzz-killer.

-- The jumping off point for Nkuringo band treks is Kisoro, a town that sits near both the Congo and Rwanda borders. The drive across Uganda from Kampala to Kisoro takes about 11 hours. I don't know how you're traveling, Megan -- we hired a private driver from Churchill Safaris, an outstanding tour company that I highly recommend -- but whether you travel by safari vehicle/Land Cruiser as we did, or by bus, you're looking at a roughly 11-hour cross country road trip. The buses cut that time down a bit -- but only because they go way too fast.

If you travel by bus, the buses leave Kampala (a city that grows on you -- you'll like it better on Day Two than Day One, even better on Day Three, and so on) about two in the morning. In a country where road travel is dicey on its best day, you might want to avoid bus lines like Gateway, Horizon and Baby Coach, ubiquitous, but with sketchy safety records. Each time one of these buses tore by us our driver, Ronnie, would offer some variation on this theme: "The drivers take drugs. We know this. Not so much alcohol because it makes you weak at the end of the day. The drugs make them hyper all the time, and it makes them feel the bus is a very small car, like this one." The buses are seriously overloaded. We saw a few Gateway and Horizon bus drivers make moves that left me thanking God I wasn't one of their passengers. Ronnie would just shake his head and say, in disgust, "Look at this bus!"

I'd read or heard that the safest buses are the postal buses that leave from Kampala's main post office. I asked Ronnie about this and he said, "Not the big ones -- it's the same drivers as the other companies. Safest are the smaller, 29-seater buses."

The safest road travel option in Uganda is to hire an experienced driver from a reputable safari or tour company. Churchill is top-notch. I asked Ronnie (also top-notch) to name a few other good companies, and he recommended Matoke Tours, Access Uganda Tours and Acacia Safaris. There are, of course, others. (One company that has a spotty reputation among travelers I've encountered online is Volvo Tours. I asked Ronnie about them. His response: "I've never heard of them.")

Uganda's gorillas won't hurt you, but its drivers might. They're crazy. I felt safer in the jungle with its wild animals than I felt on the highway with its wild drivers. Hire somebody who knows what he's doing then relax, to the extent possible, in the back seat. (Self-drive? I wouldn't do it. And I'm no rental car weenie. I've rented and driven myself in lots of places, including the Jordanian desert, but I wouldn't try it here.)

-- They may be wild behind the wheel, but Ugandans are among the warmest, most gracious people I've ever met. Dana and I felt welcomed from the moment we landed to the moment we left. To a man, every Ugandan we encountered in our nearly two-week sojourn welcomed us in his or her fashion, either by ignoring us -- and I mean that in a good way; they let us just blend in -- or treating us as friends, guests and equals. I've experienced this totally benign, stress-free interpersonal vibe in only a handful of countries around the world, and it's a lovely treat for a traveler.

-- On your drive across Uganda, you'll pass through many villages and see stunning scenery as you near the mountains. You get an up close and personal look at Ugandan village life. If you've hired a driver, take advantage of the 22 roundtrip hours you'll spend with him and ask questions about everything you see. You'll learn much, and your driver will appreciate your interest in his country and its people.

The road is smooth and paved until Kabale, where it turns into a rough, rutted, red-dirt ribbon for the final 80-kilometer push to Kisoro. The road twists and winds up into the mountains and is in such tough shape that those last 80 kilometers take about two hours to cover. When our Land Cruiser's wheels rolled off Kabale's pavement and onto the Kisoro road's pocked dirt, Ronnie grinned at us in the rearview mirror and said, "We call this road 'the REAL African massage.' " The stunning mountain scenery, which gets better the nearer you get to Kisoro, and roadside life going on in the villages you drive through take your mind off the twists, turns, bumps and ruts. Gorgeous landscape.

-- Trek day: Unless you're staying in the new lodge near the Nkuringo trailhead, scheduled to open sometime in 2008, you'll wake up in Kisoro about 5:30 AM to prepare for a 6:15 departure from Kisoro town to the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA)'s Nkuringo headquarters. (If you're staying at the Traveller's Rest Hotel, Kisoro's best and the place where Dian Fossey came to hang out when she needed human companionship and a break from her beloved gorillas, don't count on the "wake-up knock." Ours never came. Not that I needed it; anticipation woke me at 3 AM.)

The trailhead is about an hour's drive up a thin, twisting unpaved mountain road from Kisoro, and drivers leave Kisoro town by 6:30 to ensure your arrival at UWA's Nkuringo office by 8 AM, when you'll gather, with the other travelers lucky enough to have scored gorilla permits for that day, inside the office for a "briefing." A ranger will welcome you and go over the "gorilla rules" (see earlier Uganda posts). Bring your passports with you on trek day, as the UWA checks your gorilla permits against your passports to confirm your identity.

After the briefing, the ranger will ask if you'd like to hire a porter to carry your backpack (which, at a minimum, holds your camera, lunch and a few bottles of water). The cost is $15 per porter. I recommend engaging a porter for a few reasons.

First, the trail is extremely steep in places, and it's at those places if nowhere else that you'll be glad to have nothing bulky either pushing you downhill or impeding your uphill effort. Second, the 15 dollars you pay the men (and women) who work, usually part-time, as porters mean a great deal to the local mountaintop economy. There isn't much opportunity for people living near Nkuringo to earn income from the gorilla trekkers, because, once beyond Kisoro, there are really no tourist services or shops. Putting 15 bucks into the hands of a few locals felt good and was appreciated. Third, the porters are cool people. Ours, Enock and Jeffrey, were delightful, and we enjoyed their company.

Before you set off on your trek, the ranger will offer you long walking sticks. These came in handy, especially on the steep downhills and for what I call "poling and flinging" yourself across the small stream you'll encounter on your hike. (If you've hired a porter, he or she will help you over the stream, picking the best boulders to leap onto and holding you by the arm so you don't fall in.)

The Nkuringo office and trailhead sit in a stunning setting high atop the Nteko Ridge. The peaks of the Virunga Mountains (which you can see from Kisoro) rise on one side and the deep, blue-green, unviolated forest of Bwindi Impenetrable sits across the ridge on the other. You are five miles from the Congo border, and much of the Virunga-side landscape surrounding you sits in Congo.

Your trek starts with a downhill hike and, if you leave the ridgetop on the same trail that we did, you'll be driven from the UWA office about 10 minutes up the road, toward Congo, to the trailhead. Your porters will likely drive in your safari vehicle with you (with your backpacks on their laps -- they get right to work as soon as they're hired...), and a UWA vehicle will carry the ranger/men-with-guns (see previous posts) contingent that will accompany you into Bwindi.

Earlier in the morning, scouts with walkie-talkies will have left Nteko Ridge to head for the place where the gorillas were seen last the day before. The scouts look for clues -- broken branches and limbs, dung -- to the gorillas' present path and location. The head ranger traveling with you will have a walkie-talkie, and he'll communicate periodically with the scouts, who tell him where to guide your group. The scouts actually locate the gorillas for you, then your ranger leads you to the site.

This advance scouting means that most trek groups reach the gorillas' feeding site within 2-3 hours. We'd walked for about 2 1/4 hours when our chief ranger, Augustine, took his walkie-talkie from his ear and said, "They have found them. We are going to the place where you will get your cameras ready."

The hike itself is a physical challenge, but if you're reasonably fit with no significant mobility issues, you should be fine. The uphill climb at the end of the day is, for some, the most difficult part of the trek. Dana and I are runners and in excellent shape cardio-wise, and we both handled the hike with relative ease.

The four young Swedes we were traveling with also did well, but they were neither as nimble nor as quick as we were, and they tired more frequently. That was a price they paid for not having hired porters. (And their packs were massive -- definitely not daypacks, but backpacks holding all their travel gear; not a good idea -- bring a collapsible daypack with you to take on this hike, and stash your luggage/travel pack at your hotel or in your driver's vehicle on trek day.) The other two people in our group of eight were gents from Antwerp in the 60-70-year-old range, and they had an awful time. They were gasping for breath and sweating from every pore, had difficulty negotiating the hillsides and rocks and limbs of the trail, and had to stop every few minutes. Our entire group had to stop frequently and wait for them to catch up. We didn't much mind though, as the rests gave us a chance to revel in the incredible scenery.

The gorillas are often found at the bottom of the ridge in a forested valley, so your hike consists of 2-3 hours of serious downhill through jungle that's sometimes quite dense, then 2-3 hours of serious uphill when you leave the valley and hike back up to the top of Nteko Ridge. Again, if you're in reasonably good physical shape, you'll find the hike intermittently challenging but eminently manageable. (And always thrilling and gorgeous.) Not including the mountain drives between Kisoro and Nkuringo at the beginning and end of the day, our trek day was about seven hours long. We started down the trail toward Bwindi a bit before 8:30 AM and regained the top of Nteko Ridge about three o'clock in the afternoon.

You'll be climbing over rocks and boulders, pushing aside branches, avoiding stinging nettles and other burr-like plants, and stepping over thin lines of ants that march across the trail here and there. Keep your eye out for ants because if they get into your shoes or up your pant leg, they're hard to remove. The ranger in the lead will warn the hiker behind him when he sees a line of ants, and each hiker passes the message to the hiker behind.

We wore hiking boots and were glad to have them. But the Swedes all wore good quality sneakers/running shoes and did just fine. The key is to have good traction and ankle support. (The rangers, porters and UWA guys-with-guns all wore shin-high rubber galoshes. I don't know if they wore anything else under them.) Because your feet might get wet if it rains or if the stream in the valley is swollen and rushing, you might want to carry an extra pair of dry socks. Be sure to bring a foldable rain poncho, a hat to keep the sun off your head and ample sunscreen. You're in the forest much of the time, but there are plenty of places where you're exposed on a hillside to the blazing, equatorial sun. I brought gloves to grip branches and limbs, but we didn't use them. The Belgians wore gloves and never took them off. I'd stash a pair in my pack, just in case.

Much of the hike is through an area that is not technically part of Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, a national preserve. The UWA allows farmers to cultivate this contiguous land, and you'll pass through several farmsteads, stumble upon grazing cattle and pecking chickens, see patches of terraced fields, and find plantings of coffee and bananas.

You'll know the real Bwindi when you see it. It rises from the valley floor and faces Nteko Ridge, and it's a series of rich, utterly untouched mountain humps that host the thickest, lushest stand of forest you're likely to ever see. "That is the primary forest," said Augustine, as he gazed at it with what I interpreted as love. Bwindi is primal and deep. The world as it must have looked before man reshaped it.

When the scouts find the gorillas and radio the news to your ranger, he'll lead you to a spot close to where the gorillas are feeding and tell you to "leave your packs and get your cameras ready." If you've hired porters, they'll stay with your packs. You bring only your camera with you as you walk into the trees to meet your gorillas.

You'll spend an amazing hour, and it will pass too quickly. At some point during that hour you'll find yourself forgetting that these animals are wild. You'll see them as a family -- maybe even as family...

When the hour is up, your ranger will whisper, "It's time to go," and you'll leave the clump of trees and begin your hike up and and out of Bwindi, perhaps stopping, as we did, to eat lunch on a sunny hillside.

We ate the cheese sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs the Traveller's Rest had packed for us on a sunny knoll a few hundred feet above the patch of forest we'd just left and watched and listened as our gorillas ate their way through the trees, which rustled and swayed below as our friends lumbered loudly through the brush, climbed trunks, swung on branches and tore off satisfying fistfuls of fresh, green leaves.




This will be my last Uganda post for a while. Let me know where you'd like me to take you next.



www.LoriHein.com

Message for Megan in New Zealand

This is a quick note for Megan in New Zealand. Megan and her brother are tracking the Nkuringo gorilla band in July, and she emailed me for more details about the actual trek -- terrain, how long it took and so on. I told her I'd answer her questions in a post.

Megan, I got a little busy hosting Easter for 18, but will post trek details in the next few days. I'll also share tips about the road trip across Uganda and other info that you might find useful or interesting.

In the meantime, order yourself the Bradt guide to Uganda by Philip Briggs. You can find it at Amazon or at www.bradt-travelguides.com . It's the best Uganda guide I've seen.


www.LoriHein.com

Bwindi's humans

As promised, some Bwindi wildlife of the non-gorilla variety.



Dana waiting at the Uganda Wildlife Authority's Nkuringo office for the trek to begin:

Dana and the porters I hired to carry our backpacks. We didn't need them to carry our packs, but hiring them -- Enock, next to Dana, and Jeffrey, on the right -- meant infusing 15 bucks per porter into the local mountaintop village economy. Enock and Jeffrey were lovely and added greatly to our trek experience. They smiled nonstop for seven hours. (So did we, pretty much.)

Dana, holding her walking stick and mine. Those sticks came in handy, especially on the steep, slippery downhills.

Drinking in the scenery on a rest break:

A few members of our merry band of tourists, porters, rangers and men with guns:
Nearing the end of the trail. As I've mentioned in previous posts, the Uganda Wildlife Authority grants 40 gorilla permits per day. Groups of eight humans visit each of Uganda's five habituated bands for one hour. Our group of eight included me and Dana; four young Swedes named Joachim, Karli, Rebekka and Jens (who looked like a Navy Seal, wore shorts on the trek and seemed unbothered by the stinging nettles that attached themselves to his bare skin as he hiked); and Jon and Willy, two horribly unfit, elderly Belgians who we thought might die on the trail. Jon and Willy had hired porters, too. Prescient move: their porters ended up literally pushing the two beet-faced, panting gentlemen's butts back up the trail and out of the forest.

Near the trailhead:

Augustine, our chief ranger guide.

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Bwindi's gorillas: A family portrait

Next post, I'll share some of the human faces of Bwindi.

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Not quite hakuna matata

My film is off being developed. Thanks again to Dana for letting me post one of her photos.

There were a few things, some bigger and hairier than others, that weighed on my mind before and during our Uganda experience, things that could unravel and fall apart and cause us problems.

None of my worries involved gorillas. When I told people we'd be 15 feet from these wild creatures (we were actually as close as seven feet, but don't tell the Uganda Wildlife Authority), some folks marveled at that while others leapfrogged to images of us being mauled and eaten: "What if they attack?"

They've been so carefully and expertly habituated to human contact that I knew they wouldn't -- the only time a habituated mountain gorilla has charged a tourist was years ago when a professional photographer decided the "no flash" rule didn't apply to him and was put in his place by a silverback. He survived to tell the tale of his hubris and stupidity.

No, here's what I worried about, in ascending order of hairiness:

1. We'd miss flights and connections: With layovers of under three hours between the five flights we'd make on our roundtrip journey, any delay anywhere could be the domino that toppled the works. Snow at JFK would mean missing Amsterdam, which would mean waiting a day for the next flight to Nairobi, which would put us in Entebbe with just a day to spare before the gorilla trek, booked and permitted specifically for February 18 and an 11-hour cross-country drive from where we'd touch down.

As it happened, our outbound flights went off like clockwork. It was on the way home that our two and a half-hour Heathrow layover disintegrated because the fourth engine of the Boeing 777 we took out of Entebbe wouldn't fire, causing us to sit on the runway for an hour and a half. "This happens often in Entebbe," said the flight attendant. "The thin air at this altitude causes problems." My goodness! I thought. Entebbe's at about 4,000 feet! What happens to a 777 when it tries to take off from airports with real altitude?

We made our Heathrow flight to JFK as it was boarding and the gate closing, thanks to the Indian driver of an inter-terminal airport bus who spirited us from our arrival terminal to our departure building several miles away and dropped us at a back entrance with a completely queue-free security checkpoint. "Get in madam!" he'd said, pointing to the empty bus that he was supposed to fill with passengers bound for all of Heathrow's far-flung terminals. "You WILL make your flight! I will take you there directly!" And he did.

2. We'd get stuck in Kenya: The recent post-election violence in Kenya has caused travelers to cancel safaris, the Peace Corps to pull out, and the State Department to advise Americans living in rural parts of the country to make their way to Nairobi. I'd registered our trip with the State Department and had signed up for email alerts for Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Congo, and the day before we left I received a warning about the deteriorating situation in Kenya. "International flights are still operating normally," read the message, "but be advised that this could change at any time." I knew traveling overland through western Kenya to Uganda would be extremely dangerous -- travelers had been attacked and armed Kenyans had ripped up portions of the rail line between the two countries -- so I made mental plans, should our flight to Entebbe not take off, to hunker down for the duration inside Nairobi's Jomo Kenyatta airport. I packed emergency Power Bars.

Our KLM 747 from Amsterdam to Nairobi was nearly empty. Sadly, every passenger had his or her own row for the nine-hour flight. In a plane that should have been full of excited tourists anticipating life-changing game drives in Kenya's magnificent parks, there was a single group of four American safari-goers.

I asked the flight attendant if all the Nairobi-bound flights had been empty recently. "Yes," he said, "they have. And this is our biggest plane. I guess they're sending the biggest plane so they have room on the way back for people who want to evacuate."

3. We'd get sick: Yes, this rated higher on the hairiness scale than getting stuck in Kenya because it was more likely to happen and because sick people cannot track gorillas. Contracting human disease is the biggest threat to habituated mountain gorillas, and if you have the least cough, sniffle or touch of diarrhea, you forfeit your gorilla permit and must stay behind. If you're sick and fess up, the Uganda Wildlife Authority will refund your $500 permit fee. If you're sick, try to hide it, make your foolish way into the gorillas' forest and are found out for the selfish idiot you are, the Uganda Wildlife Authority will deal with you, without humor.

So, I put me and Dana on a prophylactic regimen -- highly effective, as it turned out -- of Pepto Bismol, zinc, echinecea, vitamin C, bottled water and hand sanitizer. Before our 30 hours of transit inside germ-coddling airplanes, we coated our nostrils with saline spray and toasted each other with glasses of Airborne dissolved in water. At any hint of immune system breakdown, we cracked open tubes of Zicam and swabbed our nasal passages. Obsessive? Maybe.

But we were healthy on gorilla day. The day after that, I got a cold.

4. We'd have a close encounter of the Congo kind: In 1999, fugitive Rwandan rebels living and hiding in eastern Congo near the Ugandan border stormed a tourist camp in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, where we went tracking, killing eight tourists and several Ugandan guides. While there have been no attacks on human visitors to Bwindi since, and the Ugandan government maintains heightened security in the forest, and Rwanda is at peace, no one has a crystal ball that says such horror will never happen again.

The current and more likely threat is from Congolese rebels fighting against the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and these bad boys live in the Virungas, the series of lush, volcanic peaks shared by Rwanda, Congo and Uganda that are home to Earth's mountain gorilla population. In 2007, in four separate attacks, Congolese rebels murdered 10 of the planet's 700-odd wild mountain gorillas. Some were killed for bush meat, others to focus attention on the rebels' cause and unmet demands. The murders were carried out scant miles from Bwindi and the Ugandan border where we were trekking.

We set off on our trek from a ridgetop road that led into Congo, five miles away. As we hiked, I looked into Congo at nearby forested peaks knowing they harbored men with no respect for life.

I'd told Dana that "men with guns" would accompany us on our trek so she wouldn't freak when she saw them. There was a rifle-toting ranger leading our party, a second one bringing up the rear, and, I'd heard through the grapevine, others hidden in the forest along our route.

I'd told Dana the armed men were there to protect the gorillas, which is, of course, true. But I think, if confronted, they'd be swift to protect themselves and their human charges, as well. I was damn glad to have them along.

www.LoriHein.com

Back from Uganda

Dana and I are back from Uganda. Our 17,000-mile journey came full circle this morning when we pulled into the Massachusetts driveway we left nearly two weeks ago.

We're wired. Adrenaline, vagabond excitement, topsy-turvy body clock, caffeine, good-to-be-home weirdness. Our trip home was a 26-hour deal with an additional overnight at a Ramada Inn in Stratford, Connecticut. When we pulled onto our street, Dana asked, "What time is it in Africa?"

As those who follow this blog know, I shoot film, so I won't have photos of our journey for a week or so. But Dana got some great shots with her Nikon Coolpix digital, and I asked her to share one of her favorites for this "We're home" post.

She picked this shot of the start of our trail down (then up) into Bwindi Impenetrable Forest as we set off to track the Nkuringo gorilla band, the start of our trail down to a special world where gorillas welcome you into their midst.

I have to go to bed. Will share more of the wonders of beautiful, friendly Uganda after I've had a really good, deep sleep.

www.LoriHein.com

We're off to see gorillas...

Dana and I are leaving for Uganda tomorrow. New York to Amsterdam to Nairobi to Entebbe, 21 hours in transit.

We're excited. We've been walking around the house for days in our "gorilla boots," breaking them in.

I don't plan to post while I'm away -- I'll likely spend any Internet cafe time cleaning the spam from my inbox -- but I might try to sneak in a quick post after we return to Kampala from Bwindi Impenetrable Forest.

While on our gorilla safari we'll be staying at the Traveller's Rest Hotel in Kisoro, a small town near the Congo and Rwanda borders. It has a lounge with a fireplace, and I'm looking forward to sitting around that fireplace with fellow gorilla trackers, sipping a Nile beer, and reliving the honor and thrill of having spent an hour in the wild with the 18 members of the Nkuringo gorilla band.

www.LoriHein.com

Doctor's advice: Pop the Pepto, lose the cubes (plus an update on the sunken sidebar...)

I've now spent four days (during which time I've written nothing gainful) trying to levitate this blog's sidebar from the bottom of the page to the top where it belongs.

If you're browsing with Firefox (and, I suspect, with Safari and perhaps Opera and Konqueror), things likely look fine to you. It's Internet Explorer (IE) that has a tough time dealing with some of the code in the blogging software that half the world uses. (The only relatively good thing that's come of my four wasted days is learning that my sunken sidebar has plenty of company. IE is kicking sidebars to Siberia all over the blogosphere, and thousands of people are, like me, at their wits' ends searching for and sharing potential fixes. We're a cyberclub of temporarily miserable people who go to bed worrying about their blogs. Very sad.)

I've decided to keep posting travel stories while I work to kill the elusive sidebar bug. I'm going to tinker and tinker and try some (to me at least) radical moves. So, if you see things moving around on the blog, new labels and categories appearing, old ones disappearing, it's just me working under the hood. I'd hoped to do all this experimentation with a test blog that I created, but the test blog isn't broken, and I can't get it to break like this one, so I can't test possible fixes.

Now back to our regularly scheduled progamming:

I got my shots for Uganda: Yellow fever, typhoid, polio, tetanus/diptheria and influenza.

The travel clinic doctor also wrote prescriptions for Cipro, a high-powered antibiotic I'll carry with me and hope not to have to use, and the anti-malarial drug Malarone, which Dana and I will begin taking two days before we leave the States and will continue taking for a week after our return.

The doc handed me a printout from Travax, a website for health care providers that's maintained by a division of Scotland's national health services department. It confirmed that the malaria risk in Uganda "exists throughout the year in the whole country, including urban areas." We may see mosquito nets in some of our hotel rooms. (That's Adam in the photo chilling in his cozy net at a lodge at Lake Nakuru, Kenya.)

Before I left the clinic the doctor took out his prescription pad one more time. "I know you're a seasoned traveler," he said, "but if you don't mind, I'd like to write down a few precautions you can take to avoid illness."

His list:

-- Handwashing
-- Sunscreen/Hat
-- Deet, 30% or more
-- Pepto Bismol - 1 per day
-- Bottled water only
-- No ice cubes

I've always adhered fanatically to the "no ice cubes" rule when traveling in remote or developing parts of the world, and I trained the kids early to think of warm Coke as a cultural experience.

As the doctor wrote his list he told me about a patient who'd recently let his guard down and paid for it. The man travels regularly to Asia and, on his last business trip, after a tiring tour through rural Thailand, he checked into a luxury hotel in Bangkok and went to the bar, where he ordered a scotch. A few hours later he was ill enough to have to be admitted to a hospital.

It was the "on the rocks" that got him.


http://www.lorihein.com/

Uganda: Gorilla rules

It's confirmed, and I'm excited. Dana and I will be tracking mountain gorillas in Uganda's Virunga Mountains in February.

After vetting it via email conversations with over a dozen of its past clients (thanks to all who responded), I chose Churchill Safaris in Kampala to take us to Bwindi Impenetrable (and when you zoom down on it using Google Earth, it sure looks it...) Forest. There, we'll hike up into the densely forested mountains to spend one hour with a band of 18 mountain gorillas. Churchill secured us two gorilla permits to track the Nkuringo band in Bwindi's southwest corner, on February 18. Rangers and wildlife professionals spent years habituating the Nkuringo band to human contact, and tourist access to this band, arguably Uganda's remotest and most difficult to reach, is fairly recent. We've been told to prepare for a strenuous uphill hike of up to six hours from the trailhead before we locate the gorilla band.

There are fewer than 700 wild mountain gorillas left in the world, and they live in protected habitats in Uganda, Rwanda and Congo. To visit Uganda's gorillas, you must have a gorilla permit ($500 each) issued by the Uganda Wildlife Authority. Only 40 permits are authorized per day, and they are often secured a year in advance. Churchill managed to locate and scoop up two permits available during the time period that Dana and I will be in Uganda.

I'll be posting more about this trip, as the planning goes forward and, of course, when we return. For now, I thought I'd share one of the documents that Churchill sent with our safari confirmation, "Gorilla rules," copied here verbatim:

"Gorilla rules

No eating or drinking near the gorillas
Don drop litter in the park.
Flash photography is not permitted
Keep distance of minimum 5 meters or 15 feet from the gorillas.
Visits are limited to one hour per gorilla group per day.
Your group must be no more than 6 people and all at least 15 years old.
No smoking near the gorillas
Do not touch the gorillas.
After or before the visit keep your voices down until 200 meters away from the gorillas.
Do not look at the gorillas directly into the eyes.
You must stay as a tight group when near the gorillas.
If you must sneeze or cough cover your face and turn away from the gorillas.
If you have a cold or any infectious illness, do not visit the gorillas.
In case of an emergency toilet, dig a hole of 30cm and fill it up after use"


Gorilla rules. Pretty wild.

www.LoriHein.com

Tarmac impressions

Dana and I are going to Uganda in February. Gabrielle, one of Dana’s best friends, will spend her sophomore year of high school in Kampala, where she’ll attend an international school and live with family friends she’s met only once. An impressive and intrepid 14-year-old.

I’m planning a three-day gorilla safari in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest for me and Dana, after which we’ll hang out in Kampala with Gabrielle, whom I pray we’ll find well and happy and nursing, at worst, mild, manageable homesickness. We’ll tour the city and environs with her, treat her to lunches and dinners out and deliver whatever care packages her mom will have sent along with us. The girls are excited about the prospect of “meeting up in AFRICA!! YO!!” and I’ve started setting details like yellow fever shots and visas in motion.

When Dana and I touch down at Entebbe airport, a few miles south of Kampala on the northern shore of Lake Victoria, a wash of faint familiarity will come over me, as I’ve landed at Entebbe before.

I haven’t seen it, but I’ve felt it, courtesy of a 3 AM stopover on my way to Nairobi. When I bought my ticket from Brussels to Nairobi, I didn’t know the plane would stop at Entebbe – not because the fact was hidden from me, but because I was ignorantly focused only on Kenya. Ordering my ticket, I’d looked at the Brussels departure and Nairobi arrival times and skipped the lines of print between the two.

Months later and trip underway, the plane’s doors shut and, as we taxied from the gate, beginning our journey out of Europe and into Africa, the pilot welcomed us to our flight “to Entebbe and Nairobi.” I sat up straight. Entebbe... that’s Uganda... I’m going to land in Uganda... I looked around. Which of my fellow passengers, I wondered, would debark in Uganda, and which would continue to Kenya? The flight took on added interest.

At Entebbe, a cluster of ebony women with close-cropped hair wearing jubilant dresses of shiny, richly-colored cloth made their way up the aisle with bags, boxes and baskets of items they’d bought in Europe. They debarked, and in their places came mostly businessmen in thin black suits, bright white shirts and well-worn briefcases. Except for the time of day – before 4 AM – they could have been the corporate warriors who fly the every-hour-on-the-hour shuttles between business hubs like Boston and Philly, or New York and Washington. What would these men sell in Nairobi, I wondered, and to whom? What deals and discussions would fill the work day ahead? Or had they concluded deals in Uganda or beyond and were making their tired ways home to families waiting in Kenya?

The plane left the Entebbe tarmac, the lights of Kampala behind us and quickly out of sight, and we climbed over an unending expanse of utter blackness. The world below was pure pitch, a hole, and it scared me.

It wasn’t until I saw one single, bobbing light – a light on a boat – that I realized we were flying over Lake Victoria. The plane flew low between Entebbe and Nairobi, and I sat fixed to the window for the hour it took to cross the lake, looking for any light below. There were occasional cargo ships and tankers with multiple lights along their length; small fishing craft that sent only enough light to enable me to pick them out in their lonesome smallness and wish them safe harbor, candles in the wind, they were; and sporadic, star-like twinkles of gathered lights sitting on the arc of the lakeshore, jungle villages lit by wood and dung fires and, if the villagers were flush and commercially connected, perhaps a generator. Those small lights in the vast blackness are what I know and feel about Uganda.

There are other places I’ve been but not seen, places I’ve touched only through airport stopovers – dips down to tarmac to disgorge and collect people and perhaps refuel, or forced sojourns in the limbo world of transit lounges. While I don’t count these places as places I’ve visited, they inhabit some small space in the back of my traveler’s mind, and I can call up the impressions formed of them during those brief touchdowns.

Places like Kuwait – men gliding over polished floors in salt-white caftans, checkered headdresses and black dress shoes; Dubai – canals, dhows and the sterile glitter of near-empty luxury goods boutiques; Gander, Newfoundland – buffeting wind, blinding snow and the sensation of being at the edge of the world; Sao Paolo, Brazil (photo) – an impossibly huge and crowded place of concrete and corrugated tin where the wings of giant jets reached beyond the fence of the cramped airport's elevated taxiway and sailed over the heads of people on streets and sidewalks, casting entire neighborhoods into momentary shade; Anchorage, Alaska – lush forests clinging, along with hardy wooden houses, to mountains rising above a steel-blue sea; Seoul, Korea – neon, smog and sprawl; Damascus, Syria – low, whitewashed cube houses crouched beneath an unforgiving sun that blistered the earth and melted the horizon into a rippling heat mirage.

Perhaps I’ll land in these places again and stay long enough to leave the airport and see and learn more. In the meantime, I'm looking forward to flying again over Lake Victoria, landing at Entebbe and following the ebony women with their bags, boxes and baskets out of the plane and into the city.

LoriHein.com