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walking near rhinos
Saturday, July 29 2017
location: La Petit Village Hotel, Kampala, Uganda
We had a hurried breakfast at La Petit Village, meaning I got coffee but not those delicious potatoes from yesterday. But then Ronald was stuck in traffic, something that my father-in-law seemed to think he'd been deceived about. "We've seen what happens with lies in America," he told Robert, referring to our embarrassment of a president. But eventually Ronald showed up, and all of us piled into the vans for our drive to our next destination, a rhinoceros sanctuary to the northwest. There were two of them for the eight of us, which gave us plenty of room to spread out. I wanted to maybe do some offline computer work on the road, but I kept running into problems. Maybe it was a missing directory tree or the need to log in with Google Auth, which requires a real internet connection. At least there were things to look out the window and see. As we headed north out of Kampala, the congestion eased and we started seeing more chickens and goats (and even some tawny African street dogs) wandering among the humans. The makeshift industries were still largely the same, particularly the metal workers making steel doors and bed frames (triple deckers weren't uncommon; that's how you cram lots of kids into a bedroom after you've proved unable to reign in your fecundity).
At the gates of the rhino sanctuary, we were told to turn off our GPS, though of course I did no such thing. It wasn't like I was going to be broadcasting the coordinates of rhinos in real time.
We went directly to the lodge, where we were served a lunch of beige foods (the little puck-like potato slices were especially good). I also ordered a pot of not-terrible coffee, which I shared with my sister-in-law. I really wanted to have access to the internet, but there was some sort of communication problem. I'd ask for something and the guy would act like he was going to do something to help me, and then he wouldn't do anything. It turned out that someone had to go inside a locked room to get the credentials I needed. Once I had that, the internet worked fairly well.
This afternoon, we were driven down to the rhino sanctuary's central office, the place where the rides to see the rhinos is staged. The guides took one look at my flip flops and declared I would need "gum boots" for walking in the bush. It took a few tries to find a pair that were big enough for my feet. They were pink. Gretchen eluded the closed-toe requirement initially, but then one of the guides saw that she was just wearing socks and sandals, and she had to put on gum boots too. There were skulls of various critters hanging on the wall in the place where the boots were distributed, and I was particularly struck by the skull of a shoebill. It was nearly as large as a leopard skull.
We were driven directly to where the rhinos happened to be, which was a known fact since the rhinos have to be kept under 24 hour guard to keep them from ending up in a tea intended to help a Chinese man maintain a boner. We got out of the van and walked a couple hundred feet, and there they were. We'd been instructed to be quiet, walk in single-file, and go behind bushes if the rhinos approached. Mostly they seemed preoccupied with each other, nuzzling faces and staging play battles. But in the process they kept getting closer, and our guides kept edging us away. All the rhinos are known by name. One of them has a Kenyan father and an American mother and so is named Obama. And I happened to be wearing my OBAMA 2008 teeshirt today. The most interesting thing about rhinos that we learned today was that it's easiest for them to keep their heavy heads near the ground, and so for this reason they prefer to eat short grass. Not being ruminants, they ferment their grass in the hind gut, leading to lots of audible farting (as with horses, a fellow member of their mammalian order). I should mention that my sister-in-law's mother did not go on this particular walk (though it was not particularly arduous and the ground was surprisingly even).
Back at the lodge (where we'd had lunch), I brought my laptop to the restaurant area in hopes of recharging it and maybe doing some work using the WiFi. But I found the power for the entire facility (provided by generator) had been turned off until dinner. I'd ordered a big Nile beer, and, since it hadn't been properly refrigerated for hours, it wasn't all that cold. It's a surprisingly good beer, but it must be drunk cold. Eventually I was able to communicate my power and WiFi needs to that guy who had managed to get things working for me at lunch. But he managed to do was get me electricity. I wouldn't have internet access for the rest of the day. While I was dicking around with these things, Gretchen showed up to report that our cabin had just been swarmed by a big group of vervet monkeys who had passed through. They'd even been on the roof (which was made of metal) and made a racket. There had been baby monkeys too. Gretchen loves monkeys.
Only six of us showed up for dinner, which was an Indian curry with rice (a vegan food it seems safari lodge kitchen staffs are familiar with making). It was great, and when offered extra "to go" portions for the two who had not come, we happily accepted. During the meal, I noticed that my laptop (Hyrax) had shut down, and when I went to start it up, it got hung indefinitely in the booting process. Out here in the bush, far from start-up disks and tools, this was not a good thing.
The laptop failed to boot after several more attempts, and indeed I left it trying to reboot when Gretchen and I eventually went to sleep beneath our mosquito net back in our cabin.
I awoke in the night, concerned about my laptop. Would I be dragging that useless thing through the bush for the rest of my time in Uganda? I went out on the porch under a beautiful dark Uganda sky and did what I could to revive the damn thing. I was having trouble getting it to go into safe mode, but eventually I hit the key sequence at the right time and got it there. Once I'd booted it into that (and removed an SD card), the computer started working again. It's clunky but it's generally fast and reliable, and I need it to work. In the future, I will always travel with one or more SD cards that I can boot from.
Me with the rhinos and my Obama tee shirt. One of these rhinos in the park is named Obama. Click to enlarge.
Rhinos!
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