Day 30: River Adventure!

We had to wake up villainously early at 4:45am this morning to start our long drive to the Merchantson Falls National park, because today were gonna see some wildlife yay! We had an insanely bumpy drive on the way up there, now I really understand why everybody drives big 4by4s in this country ha. At one point there was a big section of the road under construction, so the workers put an endless amount of speed bumps in sequence in an effort to slow down the cars I guess. Ughhh every time I tried to fall asleep a big bump would send my head into the window. Well we got into Masindi town right outside the park to check in our hotel. It's a great little German mission that rents a couple of beds at a real cheap rate, a nice place. So we dropped off our stuff and headed towards the game park, a bit more of a drive through the rain forest. While driving to the park we kept seeing a familiar sight, Baboons!!! Those lazy monkeys were everywhere, laying on the roads lazily walking away from the car. And its not like we can knock them off the road, those monkeys can hold a grudge for a very long time.
So once we got to our destination we realized it was too late in the day for a game drive, animals don't walk around in the scorching mid day sun, so we had to book that for tomorrow morning. What we could do that day was take a boat ride to the waterfalls, and see all the animals by the water.

So we took a very scenic boat cruise on the Nile, and I saw some pretty amazing animals running around. A lot of Hippos were lying around, periodically popping in and out of the water to check us out, those are pretty dangerous things, and you don't want to get too close. There was also a lot of water buffalo and other buck walking around in the water doing their thing. Then I saw a big giant lumbering around in the distance, it was a big bull elephant. The size of those things are simply amazing, the elephants are pretty much walking bulldozers. I saw one knock over a big tree like if it was a flower. At one point we were very lucky and saw a whole herd of elephants, about 10 of them I think. You couldn't see them at first, but you could make out movement in the bush, trees were being tossed side to side, you knew something big was coming. The group of elephants walked along side of the boat and I managed to get some nice photos. It was a pretty memorable sight. There were dozens of other animals long the river side, we saw crocodiles and birds just going about their business.

The boat stopped at the waterfall, and steamed right back, the whole ride took about 3 hours. We were extremely tired on the way back and Joseph Keshy and I had to drive back to our hotel in the dark on a very untrustworthy road. All I can say is that we were very very careful. When we got back we had some chow and hit the hay soon after, to catch the game tomorrow, we would have to be out of there by 5:00am.