SAFARI!!

Hey everyone!
Its been another great week! I’m back after our safari trip this weekend which was SO cool!

As far as work last week, it was a short week but a very gratifying one. I built my first tippy tap on my own with help from a P4 class at one of the schools I work at. They mostly watched the construction, but were huge helps when I needed more sticks and the holes dug, etc. Literally, I was describing what sized pole I needed, and this like 9 year old boy runs out into the woods with a machete and starts hacking away and brought me an armful haha…I can’t even imagine what sorts of lawsuits would come about if they found a 9 year old using a machete in schools here!

On Wednesday Rhea, Hema, Shane and I met up with everyone else (all 8 interns) in Kampala and we headed out on the safari on Thursday morning. We drove for like 7 hours to the northwest to Murchison National Park, where the company running the safari had a campsite with a restaurant and bar area overlooking the Nile…it was INCREDIBLE. The first day we went in the actual safari van early in the morning and saw tons of giraffes, antelopes, hippos, really cool birds, monkeys, and baboons all up close. We even saw 2 female lions and one was feeding on a dead impala…it was like straight off planet earth or the lion king or something! In the afternoon we took a boatride down the nile to the bottom of a big waterfall and on the way we saw some elephants, hippos, and crocodiles!

Everything was going great until that night in the tent however when pretty much the most terrifying thing that’s ever happened to me happened. There was this HUGE tarantula spider thing in our tent and so me and Megan, my friend who was sharing the tent smushed it with a shoe and literally like 200 baby spiders exploded out from it and started crawling all over the tent. It was a nightmare! Needless to say, I slept about 10 minutes that night. But besides that the trip was really cool…one of the restaurant staff kept us entertained by his Michael Jackson tributes…he was apparently obsessed with MJ and completely devastated by his death. That’s been really big news here…I’m trying to find a paper today to bring home

Oh, the other thing about the campsite was the warthogs! They’re literally like pets around the campsite..and I’m not talking a cute pumba-like animal. These things are big, ugly, and hairy and will literally rip through your tent if they smell food in it. Gross.

The last morning on the way back to Kampala we hiked to Murchinson Falls, one of the biggest waterfalls on the nile and the view was amazing…of course, we got our guide to take a C-A-R-O-L-I-N-A picture of us from the top since there were 8 of us. Pretty cheesy I know…

We got back to Kampala Saturday afternoon and then all went to Mukono for the night because John, our internship coordinator wanted to have a party for us while we were all together. He had us all stay at his house and cooked us a huge African feast, with pineapple and even cake for dessert—it was SO good and his hospitality was unbelievable.

Well that’s it for now! Full work week this week and then next weekend I think we’re going to head to Kampala because there’s a BBQ at the embassy for the 4th of July…until next time! Hope everyone is doing well at home!

Love,
Kate