MIHINGO

Today we drove a long hard road from damp Bwindi area to the southern dry area of Lake Mburo.  We were schedualed to stay at our last echo lodge....Mihingo.  I already wrote about the mishaps along the way, but one more thing happened.  We decided we had done enough game drives and river cruisers, so in late afternoon, we look a game "walk" with a park ranger. Lake Mburo NP is the second smallest park in Uganda, but boast 315 bird species( keeping my mouth shut, here) and zebras and eland, and even ardvarks. It is open wooded savanna and thickets and rolling grass hills.  After a while, we noticed a big "single" Cape Buffalo watching us.  We had learned that a sigle buffalo is the msot dangerous, and also more people are killed by Cape Buffalo in Africa than any other animal.  Our ranger took his gun off his shoulder and we were ordered to clump together and move farther away, but not rapidly.  This is why I did not take a picture.  It was serious, and I didn't want my last picture to be a full on charging Cape Buffalo.  We hid behind a thicket, and he stalked us!  It was kind of scary, without any vehicle to get into, and only one ranger(our guides and drivers) were coming back later. After a few tense minutes, we put some distance between us and this snarly male, but I can tell you, everyone was glancing back over their shoulders the rest of the walk.  

It was getting late, and we saw the new Lodge high up on a plateau and asked the ranger if we could just walk to it, instead of waiting.  He said yes.  It was a long hot sweaty climb, and we were all dying for a cold beer and to clean up as the sun was going down.  As we approached the lodge, it seemed eerily deserted.  There was a good reason for that.  It wasn't our lodge!  There had been a couple big miscommunications, and our drivers were waiting somewhere close to where we had been, and here we had hiked far away to a place where no one was expecting was.  There was a care taker and he graciously let us have some cold beers.  By the time the Land Cruisers arrived, it was dark and NO ONE was very happy.  We got to Mihingo late, in the dark, and dinner was a bitch fest!