Dec and I woke up in the morning to the sounds of Rihanna
blasting through our tent from behind us, assuming that this must be the alarm
we thought it was 5am and time for us to get up and dressed. It was just before
4am and was in fact the alarm for the staff, so we tried to go back to sleep,
but were woken up again by the sounds of hippos. We both got up kind of worried
and got out of the tent as quickly as possible; as there was no way that I
wanted to be trampled to death in a tent by hippos. The hippos were clearly
very close as the sounds were really loud and had woken up a couple of the
other volunteers. We wanted to go to the toilets but they were a short walk
from the camp and we would have to go with a security guard. Walking along with
a guard who was panicky, shining his torch in every direction was both worrying
and amusing. As a result me and Dec began laughing at the whole situation we
were in, which angered the guard who started angrily whispering at us ‘STOP
LAUGHING, WE IN A LOT OF DANGER RIGHT NOW! HIPPOS ARE BAD AND DANGEROUS!’
Straight after, we heard Hippos again and rushed to the toilets and got out of
there as quickly as possible.
By 7am we were in the vans and heading out for the morning
safari, our van was the 2nd to leave, we caught up with the first
van which had stopped and were apparently yelling something about seeing a
leopard, we (…) decided that they were trying to trick us so we carried on past
them. Along the main road we saw ahead of us a herd of elephants crossing over
the road. We sped up so that we could watch them cross the road, at the point
where they were crossing there were still some elephants in the foliage who
hadn’t crossed including a huge angry elephant. The Elephant suddenly trumpeted
at us which made us all jump, other than Dec who for the whole safari had been
begging for something to ‘KICK OFF!’ We were all standing in the van 15 metres
from the elephant when suddenly it properly ‘KICKED OFF’, we were watching it
and from it casually watching us and eating, it did a fake charge at us.
Everyone practically wet themselves, and was yelling for Aggrey our driver to
drive away, Robyn managed to film our terrified cowardly reactions, and screams
of terror.
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| The Elephant that 'KICKED OFF!' |
Later we arrived at a small touristy place looking out over a
lake, when we were there we found out from the other van, that there was in
fact a leopard, that we had chosen not to see. At the touristy place, there were a group of Asian tourists posing with this huge camera that they had bought. Afterwards we went back to the
campsite where we packed up all our stuff, got back in the vans and started the
journey back to the lodge. On the journey back my red hat which had been on the
floor of the van, must have been against some metal, as the front of the hat
was melted. For some of the way back I sat on the back of the van with Dec and
Robyn, my other hat which I was wearing suddenly blew off my head, never to be
seen again. Somewhere in Uganda there is now a really cool Lion wearing my hat.
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| Look at the size of that camera. |
Driving back to the lodge we went over a large a pot hole
where we all jumped up from the impact. I turned around to Robyn to see if she
was OK and she was holding her head. She took her hand away and it was like
something from a horror film, there was a thick red line of blood going all the
way from her forehead to her chin. She had managed to smack head on a nail
hanging from the ceiling.
That night was mine and several other’s last night at the
lodge so we had some drinks and said goodbye to everyone as I and some others
would be going to Kampala a day early.
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