No Stopping for Lions (15 page)

Bwindi Impenetrable National Park is home to half the world's population of mountain gorillas, and three habituated families can be visited from Buhoma, a small settlement straddling the park border. We have booked three days' accommodation in town, hoping that we'll be able to pick up gorilla tracking permits at short notice for one of the days.

We arrive at Buhoma late in the day. The village has a number of gorilla curio shops, gorilla rest houses and even a gorilla orphan centre for human orphans, but it still manages to present a laidback face, unaffected by tourism. The next morning we front up to the Uganda Wildlife Authority's office early and yes, there are two cancellations for the day's gorilla tracking. And even better, the vacancies are for the R group, the gorilla family that usually hangs out closest to the town and which will require much less strenuous trekking.

We have our packed lunch, binoculars and bottled water in backpacks but these are carried for us by porters. There are also trained guides and armed rangers in our little platoon, as we are dangerously close to the Congo border where poachers and rebels have been known to murder the innocent. We set off up a vehicle track into the forest, everyone excited and chattering about fitness levels and camera settings. Neil and I wave to the staff as we pass our guesthouse and they call out, ‘Good luck, good luck, Mr Neil!'

At first it's not quite the slipping and sliding that we'd anticipated but it's not long before we veer off into the forest and start climbing. In single file now and with the rangers protecting our rear we follow a rough track of damp leaves and not much sunlight. It becomes very steep and one girl loses a zip-on leg of her trousers while another lifts her T-shirt to fight off red ants. Talking has stopped. I have a strong young porter who takes my hand and pulls me up the slippery muddy bits. The head guide is in radio contact with the trackers who have gone out at first light, and after 45 minutes he turns to inform us matter-of-factly that the gorillas have been located and they're just ahead. We take a last drink of water, disentangle our cameras and leave everything else behind with the porters. We climb up one last rise and there in front of us are two fluffy little black balls wrestling and squealing and rolling all over the others. Over there is a mother gently cradling her baby, gazing into its eyes, and with infinite care picking a twig from its scrunched-up little face. To the left, sitting happily against a tree is the silverback. We're all momentarily taken aback by the ordinariness of it all. A family in their leafy living room, having a nibble, scratching bellies, farting occasionally. They've allowed us to share their morning, and it's only later that we understand what a great privilege that is.

Getting to Ishasha Gate in the south-west of Queen Elizabeth National Park from Buhoma should be straightforward but we misinterpret directions, head back towards Kabale, have a fight about it, and then finally find ourselves on the right track.

Lush low forest lines the road as we near the park and baboons lounge about on the road and all over the verges. As soon as we turn into Ishasha Gate we see that here is something different to any park we've experienced so far. Big herds of antelope, such as Ugandan kob and topi, and buffalo and zebra are all grazing on green rolling hills that are more Switzerland in summer than winter in Africa. It looks so domesticated that we have to remind ourselves that we've come here to see tree-climbing lions.

The camp we've booked into is on the banks of a small river and we arrive to the busy sound of water flowing quickly around bends and over rocks. We're greeted by Nathan, who is tall and has a gentle smile. He shows us around and we discover that some of the water music is coming from a tree overhanging the river. It's heavy with hundreds of weavers' nests, the busy buttercup birds noisy with importance as they fuss with home renovations.

Nathan is easy company and he laughs when he hears that on our way in we've driven right under the lions' preferred tree for resting in. His colleague had just radioed in to say that two lionesses had been spotted heading for the tree about 40 minutes ago. We would have seen them, if only we'd looked up.

We settle into camp routine quickly and decide that here is where we want to stay for a few days. The road network throughout the reserve is extensive, and unlike those in some parks we've been to, it covers the best parts. After an initial recce with a park ranger we take off early each day in the Troopy, searching high and low for those lions. Some drives take us through green grassy fields of wildflowers and once we come out on the banks of the Ishasha River, the border with the Congo. We watch dismayed as two beautiful big tuskers pad across the river towards an uncertain future, as gunshots are often heard coming from the bush on the other side.

Every afternoon at siesta time the sky clouds over, a strong wind whooshes through and then heavy rain pelts down, so much of it that trying to focus on the next tent is like looking at it in a shower-fogged mirror. It's exciting yet also peaceful to sit in our tent and watch all that commotion outside, knowing that in a few minutes it'll be over, calm will return and the weavers will be singing again.

It is here at Ishasha that we meet David, who is to become the guiding light for the Kenyan leg of our journey. He is a senior guide with Abercrombie & Kent in Nairobi and we very soon get the feeling that he loves safariing and the African landscape as much as we do, and that his special places would be ours. I give him a few guidelines and before we've left Uganda David has put together an itinerary that we would never have thought to follow if left to our own devices.

We leave for the Mweya Peninsula, the hub of tourism for the park's north, on a road that bisects the national park. No one has mentioned the road much except to say that it is used by large trucks transporting goods between Uganda and the Congo, and that after rain it can sometimes be tricky. A mild warning compared with those given about most other roads, and besides, we've already driven on part of it when we visited a fishing village days earlier. Initially it's okay, the main obstacle being large families of baboons using it as a private sitting room. The afternoon rainstorms seem not to have affected it much, we mention in passing to each other as we tootle along. Two-thirds of the way into the trip ruts start to appear in the road, and the black cotton soil it's composed of looks more and more like wet and shiny playdough. The ruts inevitably get deeper; we get slower; and the treads of our tyres fill with the dense squelchy cotton soil, making them no better than bald. Then in slow motion we slide off towards the bank, tipped precariously at 45 degrees. Luckily, the bank is high and we come to rest against it before we can topple over onto our side. Through some pretty crafty driving on Neil's part we manage to reverse out and crab along for a bit in the right direction. Bang, we slide and drop into the ruts almost up to the dif, but the Troopy is still moving in a forward direction and we progress along these upside-down railway tracks until we reach dryer ground. A convoy of trucks approaches from the other direction and it's just good fortune that we didn't meet them earlier on. Neil is decidedly calm and from this moment on he and the Troopy can do no wrong, such a good team are they.

Every second person who's been to Uganda has spoken to us of Ndali Lodge with great fondness. It sits high and precarious on the lip of a deep lake in an extinct volcanic crater, and its rose- and lavender-filled cottage gardens mirror the comfy ambience inside. A slightly crazy place in an oddball English sort of way, with chipped, mismatched crockery and house dogs sleeping under coffee tables. Our cottage porch looks out on a peaceful, dreamy landscape over more volcanic lakes to the cloud-covered Ruwenzori Mountains, the Mountains of the Moon. The latches on the doors in our room are handmade, carved in the shape of wild animals, and the beds are canopied with bright Moroccan blankets.

There's an interesting group staying at the lodge: a South African travel agent and his charges, an elderly couple whose eccentricities are right at home in Ndali, and a retired doctor and his mates. At dinner the conversation turns to malaria and the pros and cons of taking anti-malarials, and the others are interested in what Neil and I have decided on in light of our travelling for such a long time. We'd been loath to cart around a year's supply of tablets — for two of us they would have occupied a drawful of precious space, and the cost would have been exorbitant. However, before we'd left home we'd heard from contacts in Zambia that there is a very effective and cheap treatment available in southern Africa, but in case we couldn't source this miracle cure when we needed it we carried a good supply of Lariam, which can be used as a cure as well as a preventative. We're pleased to hear that our dinner companion, the doctor, agrees with this decision. But he adds, looking pointedly at my bare arms and Neil's shorts, that prevention is the thing. So long as we're diligent with applying a strong mozzie repellent and covering up before the sun goes down we should be fine.

Dinner is over and we're saying our goodnights when the travel agent sidles up to Neil. He's
very
interested in the Troopy, he says. He'd been looking it over earlier on and wonders if we'd ever consider selling when we finish with it. Yes? He slips a card into Neil's hand, leans in close and whispers out of the side of his mouth that he'd appreciate first option.

To access Kibale National Park, where we hope to track chimpanzees, we've booked into a tented camp nearby. It's situated on the edge of a forest and the access road passes right by a village school. The track's surface is so muddy and slippery that the Troopy slides out alarmingly at 90 degrees, first missing a parent unlucky enough to have just walked out the gate, then a tree, then a fence post — all to the glee of the pupils craning out of the glassless windows. For the next two days, every time we drive past the school we run the gauntlet of this tricky track and the kids laugh and wave every time, those in the yard running over to the fence when they hear us approaching, and stray dogs, keen to join this carnivalé, running along beside us and yelping and nipping at the Troopy's wheels.

We've been forewarned about the rather poor state of the accommodation at the camp. It is under-funded and neglected by the owners we've heard, the tents small, too close to the ground and too dark, and nearly always wet. Well, the tents are a bit mouldy and the bedding damp, and the lack of running water means that the staff have to carry over buckets of hot and cold water for washing, but their warmth and friendliness is genuine and the cook's efforts to feed us big, filling meals with limited ingredients are heroic, and when the dramatically coated blackand-white colobus monkeys move into the canopy above the camp, the waiters fetch us from our tent to watch — ‘Quickly mummy, they are here!' — and at dusk the garden boy continually re-positions our deck chairs so that we can follow the path of the rising moon.

After the ease with which we got to see the gorillas we anticipate a similar smooth run when booking for the chimpanzees in Kibale. We drive straight in to park headquarters, confident that we'll be able to go chimp tracking the next morning. So we're a little put out when the ranger informs us that the morning is already fully booked. He's sympathetic and radios the head ranger but, no, they have a big group from Norway booked in and Norwegians always turn up. We reluctantly book for the afternoon group but, everyone knows that chimps, even habituated ones, are more active in the morning and easier for the rangers to locate. The head ranger gives us permission to be there in the morning anyway, on the unlikely off-chance that the Norwegians let themselves down.

We wake up late to a wet morning but the staff bustle about to get us to the park in time. They're as excited about our chimping expedition as we are, and they've prepared a hearty breakfast and send us off with a packed lunch. But as we get closer to park headquarters the rain gets heavier and by the time we arrive we've decided that it's too miserable to be trekking through the forest. Instead we go on a long drive, mainly to fill in time until our afternoon booking but also to eat the packed lunch so that we don't disappoint the kitchen.

After a couple of hours it's stopped raining and the sun has come out. At the agreed time we roll up to the assembly point in the heart of the forest to register and meet our guide. This is Gerard, a slight, wiry man who looks to be in his thirties but turns out to be as old as me. He has bright eyes and an efficient manner and is at first reserved and untalkative. The reason for this emerges when we are told that we're the only people booked in — good news for us but it means meagre tips for Gerard.

We set off at a pace through thick bush, with Gerard stopping only to tell us the dos and don'ts of tracking. It's very muddy underfoot but not steep, and it's oddly quiet. Every now and then we stop to listen and then from deep in the forest comes a haunting hooting call, followed by the frenzied drumbeat of hands against a hollow buttress. Now we move even more quickly; the lone calls are sounding louder and closer and Gerard shows us knuckle prints in the mud. He signals for Neil and me to stay put, then he disappears into thick bush for a minute before coming out with a finger to his lips. We follow gingerly, trying not to make a noise but desperate to keep up. He turns around and points to a tree just ahead: a largish male chimp sits propped against its base, watching us. Then bedlam. It's like we've walked into a battlefield, with deafening screams and hoots all around us, while the trees shake and leaves and urine rain down. Gerard is calm and smiling, pointing up into the trees. Look there, and up there, and just right here. There are at least 30 of them: testosterone-fuelled males chasing accommodating females; bulky chesty youths lobbing sticks at each other; and adolescents stretched out along branches, yawning and scratching. A youngster swings down on a liana, curious to get a better look at us. It's such a thrill to be here, just the three of us with this big happy family. Neil and I take photos of each other with smiles from ear to ear. Gerard lets us stay for well over the allotted time and we only head back once the troupe starts to move off themselves, the boom boom booming of the buttress drums becoming fainter and fainter.