Grace and Rhino's

In Kampala we spent most of our time figuring out the rest of our trip. Tour companies are incredibly expensive and we wanted to cut costs by using public transportation, but we needed to figure out if that was possible for the route we wanted to take. We also went to the Uganda Wildlife Authority to obtain our chimp tracking permits!
On Saturday evening we met Grace. Grace and Steefka knew each other from the first visit Steefka made to Uganda in 2010. Back then Grace was a housemaid at the place where Steefka was staying. Now, she has one semester left before finishing catering school and she’s planning to start her own small business selling cakes which she will slowly expand. Grace looked her best with a beautifully tailored African dress and her hair braided in an intricate pattern. She came to Kampala especially to meet us, because she was in her hometown for the weekend to attend the burial of a classmate who had died of malaria. It struck us how easily she was talking about this, like it was just part of everyday life. A young woman losing her life just before finishing school is tragic and especially confronting to us, since malaria is a disease we don’t even have to worry about. It has been eradicated in our hometowns and even if we go abroad we have ample means of preventing or treating malaria by means of mosquito repellent, mosquito nets and prophylactics (that can be used at a higher dose as a treatment in case we get sick).
On Sunday morning we left for the Ziwa rhino sanctuary. We were at the bus station at 10, where they told us the bus would leave at 11. Nevertheless, the bus only leaves when it is full, so we left at 12. After a 3 hour bus ride and 8km on a boda boda, we arrived at the sanctuary where we checked in to stay overnight. We were in time to do an evening rhino tracking, but a ranger told us mornings are better, so we decided to relax and get up early the next morning. What a good decision that was!! We had dinner on the terrace of the restaurant, where we met an amazing French couple. They have travelled all over the globe and were more than willing to share some stories. The place in Ziwa is astonishingly beautiful and wild. In the evening the rhino’s wake up and all of a sudden a male rhino decided to cross the accommodation and restaurant area (apparently he is trying to make it his territory, so they see him a lot). The rangers told us that we need one of them to guide us between the restaurant and accommodation area after 7pm and before 7am, because not only rhino’s but also lots of other wild animals like antelopes come out of the forest into the open area’s to be out of reach for the leopards that like to stay in the woods. LEOPARDS?! Oh yeah, those are here too. The next morning we wanted to have breakfast on the terrace again, but a ranger stopped us and we had to follow him. Then we saw why.. a mother and her calf right next to us! Do we still need to go on that tracking? We’ve already seen 3 rhino’s and normally you see only 2-3 rhino’s while tracking… But seriously, rhino tracking is amazing. We quickly found Augusto, the male we saw the evening before. We followed him for about half an hour on a save but super close distance and saw him mark his territory by spraying and pooping and driving away a group of 3 adolescent rhino’s (a charging rhino is incredibly impressive..). Later on we also saw the female with her calf again as well and we got to spend a lot more time with them. This sanctuary is absolutely amazing. All the rangers are super helpful and always happy to share knowledge about rhino’s. You can just know that they love their jobs by the way they talk about it. During the time of Idi Amin, white rhino’s became extinct in Uganda because of uncontrolled poaching. In an effort to reintroduce rhino’s, the Ziwa rhino sanctuary started to breed them in 2005. They got 4 rhino’s from Kenya and 2 from the USA. The first rhino was born in 2009 and since it had a Kenyan father and an American mother it was called Obama. Now the second generation is already growing, with 3 calves born from Ugandan mothers. The goal is to breed until there are 40 rhino’s in Ziwa, after which 15 will be reintroduced in one of the national parks of Uganda (and then the breeding will continue to bring another 15 into another national park etc.). The rhino’s at Ziwa are definitely wild animals. After reading this it might sound like they are in a small park with lots of visitors, but in fact they can roam wild in a huge territory of about 7000 hectares, always protected by rangers to prevent poaching. In contrast to black rhino’s who charge at anything that enters their territory, white rhino’s tend to flee rather than charge when humans are approaching. This is why white rhino tracking is possible under guidance of an experienced ranger who knows these animals and their body language. Fun fact: rhino’s cover themselves in mud to cool down and to protect themselves from the sun – a little bit like sunscreen. Therefore, Ugandans also sometimes call them muzungu (white person and a name we hear a lot on our travel here), because they need sunscreen, just like white people.
After the early morning rhino tracking, the French couple we met the evening before gave us a ride to Masindi, where we were able to get a taxi (that’s what Ugandan’s call a small bus/matatu). The same system of the busses applied that it only left when completely full, except full has a different meaning in a taxi – the van was made to fit 15 people, but was packed with 20 adults and 5 children. The ride to Fort Portal was long and bumpy, because the road was under construction in some places, but we got there!
Tuesday morning we slept in, decided which natural parks to visit and booked some things for the next days. In the afternoon we took a boda boda to some nearby crater lakes where we went on a hike with a nice view over the Rwenzori mountains in the distance (also called “mountains of the moon”).