8/8 - 8/9/09: Queen Elizabeth National Park
Our team has been working extremely hard these last couple of weeks, and the work is no where near finished.. but we all decided to head to Queen Elizabeth National Park this past weekend to go on safari and have a wee holiday (I've been hanging out with British folks too much huh?) I'll have to keep this brief because the amount of work I have to finish in the next 4 days has got me all sorts of wound up.. I have to build a section of the website for PH and retouch tons of images for the anthro and edu teams to use on their sections of the website.. not to mention the PH daily blog and features...
Ok so- Safari: saw elephants, buffalo, warthog, gazelles, kudu, a lioness, a leopard, hyenas etc etc.. There is a "loft" type deal behind the cab of Nox, which opens up on top so you can hang out the roof and take photos from about 25 feet up. I hung out there all day photographing and got a great tan.. But that's about all I got. I really have a renewed respect for wildlife photography in Africa. It's so difficult to get a great image! One day, when I can afford it, I would like to hire a driver/truck/with a tripod mounted in the bed, rent the appropriate equipment (I need a lens that is about 3 times the one I use now) and take a few weeks of doing nothing but safari photography. I haven't actually made it through the images yet, so maybe I've got something.. we'll see. I'll be sure to post some when I do!
We ran out of gas to cook with, so we've been cooking all three meals a day on an open fire (which takes about 3 hours or more), so when my turn to cook for the team comes around I can pretty much kiss my work day goodbye.
Camping in Queen Elizabeth was amazing.. the climate was different from the damp, cool weather in the rainforest that we've been in this last week.. we were back in a more arrid spot (and personally, I was loving it).. we pitched our tents beside Lake Edward and as soon as we arrived, saw hippos in the water. Hippos are the 2nd biggest (animal) killer in Africa (behind the mosquito of course).. and everyone was wary of wandering off from the campfire that night.. we could hear the hippos all around us. One of my fellow web teammates, Conor, got out of his tent in the middle of the night to tink and came back to find a hippo standing directly in front of the opening of his tent (which was about 10 feet from mine). He quickly got back to Nox and was clinging on to the side before he was able to break into the back of the truck and get out of danger. Unfortunately he had to sleep in the back of Nox because the hippo wasn't moving. In the morning, everyone said they could hear the enormous creatures munching around their tents all night long.. I was so exhausted I didn't wake up once though.
We also had another creature to be wary of in Queen Elizabeth. There were large, netted traps set up throughout our campsite.. it's victims: the tsetse fly. The tsetse fly causes "sleeping sickness".. that's all I can remember from my African Issues course from my Zoology program.. When I have some time I want to look into it more.. All I know is that I managed to not get bit by one during the course of the weekend, but when we were all loaded up in the back of the truck and headed back to Kibale on Sunday, I felt a sharp bite on my ankle and looked down to see a nice plump Tsetse fly make his escape. Luckily, I haven't fallen into a coma yet, so I think we're good. :)
To and from Queen Elizabeth, we crossed the equator. On the way back, we hopped out to take a snap...
