MONKEY!

The past weekend was interesting enough to write a short bit about. Sadly, the internet prevented me from positing this earlier... If there’s something more general you want me to talk about or investigate: let me know! (not sure actually if you can comment here, but otherwise just do it via FB or mail).

This website and my internet are not good friends. I can't change much about it, I'm happy enough I managed to get pictures on here anyway... but: scroll down (forever) till you get to the text!

On Saturday not all too much happened, except that I went to play tennis, despite having never played tennis before! Rebecca, from the office, told us she played on a high level when she was a kid (primary school age), but hadn’t played tennis in ages. Anna took a small course at Trinity and I started playing badminton, which I feel is close enough. Always on the lookout for things to do during the weekends, which can be very boring if you don’t make plans, we told Rebecca it might be fun to go and play tennis once, maybe she could even teach us something as ‘formal professional’. Saturday we thus went to Makerere University, Uganda’s biggest university, located say 20 minutes walking from our guesthouse, where Rebecca had made an appointment for us to rent equipment and use a court. On the way there it was warm and we feared we would collapse if we had to play in the tropical sun. However, as soon as we were ready to play it started to rain a bit (not too heavy though) and we ended up playing nearly two hours in the rain. As you might guess it stopped raining just before we finished… But maybe that was good, because without some ‘refreshing’ rain we probably wouldn’t have lasted even half the time we played now! All in all a fun afternoon! (We were all kind of bad btw, maybe it was good that because of the rain barely anyone saw us play…)

On Sunday we woke up before sunrise to have a quick breakfast at 6.30, before heading out to meet Rebecca on Nakulabye roundabout (maybe 10 min walking). She passed there on her way to church and decided to help us out getting fixing transport to reach our intended destination: Mpanga Forest Eco Reserve, a small rainforest 40 km outside of Kampala. The forest is/was used for research purposes and therefore well maintained. There are about 200 different bird species (this country seems to have more different types of birds than you can even comprehend!) possibly even more different types of butterfly, red-tailed monkeys, bushbuck and bushbabies. Enough reason for us to go there and finally escape the polluted air and noise of Kampala. Except… how to get there? Fortunately Rebecca was able to help out and joined us to Kampala’s new taxi park where she figured out which of the over 300 minivans we should take. She negotiated a little (there are two people ‘in charge’ in a taxi, the driver and the guy hanging out of the window. Somehow when we needed a taxi nearly ten people felt the need to join the negotiations…) and made the deal that we’d be dropped in front of the forest if we paid a little more. An hour later we indeed found ourselves alone in the taxi driving over a wobbly dirt road that ended at the entrance to the forest. Time for adventure!

We got out, the taxi drove away and… the place was abandoned! The ‘headquarter building’ was closed, there were no guides and no signs of other people. After waiting for maybe 10 minutes we thus decided to just go for it and enter the forest on our own. Fortunately there was an old, hand-painted map in front of the path to the forest, so we had at least something. There was meant to be a ‘baseline’ path, a straight path cutting through the forest leading to a ‘giant fig tree’. We figured that on a path without turns we couldn’t get lost, so we went in, picked a patch and hoped it was indeed the baseline…

The main birds to look out for were some giant blue bird (great blue turaco or something) and two different types of hornbill (the bird equivalent of the rhino). We might spot bushbuck and red-tailed monkeys, bushbabies apparently you would only see at night. Indeed, soon enough we hear and saw hornbills, the black and white casqued hornbill. They make a horrible and loud noise (constantly) and when they fly their wings make a deep sound, so they were easy enough to spot and we came across them throughout the day. The other 199 bird species however were impossible to spot! I think we heard at least 30 different birds (two of which sounded just like the keypad tones of an old-fashioned phone… very strange), we saw maybe 15 different ones flying (as in, above the trees for maybe 2 seconds maximum) and I managed to catch 1 other bird on camera. It seems you do need some talent for bird spotting after all…

Fortunately the butterflies (and other insects…) were much easier to spot and we enjoyed the wide variety of butterflies. Maybe we saw some rare ones, maybe we didn’t… all I know is that we saw a lot of them and in many different colours! We also managed to spot the monkeys twice. Their tails, as you can see, were indeed bright red/orange and made a sharp contrast with the rest of their body. They were shy and looked at us from the trees, probably wondering who these creatures staring at them were. Surprisingly they barely made sound (despite the internet telling us that ‘the monkeys will let you know if they’re around’) and we only became aware of them when they were jumping from tree to tree, loudly shaking the trees and leaves.

For those interested in trees, apparently there’s over 500 different types of trees and scrubs in the forest. Might well be, we didn’t really count… What I can confirm is that the trees, especially the fig trees, were very tall and that the giant fig tree was indeed gigantic!

After walking for a few hours we found our way back, had a simple lunch, rested a bit and then went for a short ‘butterfly trail’ loop before heading home. It had started to rain a little bit, but we wanted to give the forest another go before leaving. Unfortunately, this trail wasn’t straight and we got lost in the middle of the jungle. To make it worse, because of the rain we barely saw butterflies on the butterfly trail, nor did the monkeys show themselves again. After an hour of wandering around over small (or no) paths, even resorting to the compass I have on my phone to make sure we wouldn’t walk in circles, we found or way back. Tired but satisfied with all the flora and fauna (and fresh air!) of the day we headed back to Kampala (by taxi, on our own! #PersonalVictory. Okay, it seemed first as if they were going to kidnap us, but in the end all turned out well).