One of these days, I'm going to sit down and write a long letter

MIA for a month, but justifiably so.  Have been in the bush, in the forests, climbing mountains, getting soaked by the rain, interviewing people, sharing ideas, promoting peace parks, visiting gloriously beautiful places with little or no internet and only sitting down in front of the computer when it's absolutely necessary. 

Basically, I turned 29, threw a little housewarming/birthday party at my flat in Kampala, had a few local visitors and my first international visitor, then took off with my supervisor (Emmanuel) and his family for the village, Bushamba.  We had a minibus packed with people, laughter and stories that went caroling down the bumpy dirt roads, stopping to pick up fresh vegetables, tiny eggs that are shockingly yellow when cooked, fruit and what along the side of the road.  We reached Bushamba by night and there was a small group to greet us, Emmanuel's brother and his family, and all the people who work for them. 

For the next handful or so days, Ale (my Italian visitor friend) and I would sleep in late, eat ridiculous amounts of food, play with the kids, hang out with the adults and take small excursions to nearby places - the top of the hill where the water tank is, the magical lake that flooded out a serpentine valley one day (there's a great story behind it that maybe I'll tell in another post someday), the local trading centers, or just the outdoor courtyard to watch football (aka soccer) matches between U.K. teams projected on to a wall of the house in the dark of the night.  Ale had brought delicious cakes and sweets from Italy, which we spread out over the days and shared with all.  There were also a good handful of birthdays and tasty cakes across a spattering of days and sadly, one death in the family.  I've never met him before, but Rogers' father had been ill for some time.  He missed Rogers and Sandra's wedding to pass away the morning after Christmas.  As it goes, that's the circle of life and as Rogers said, now he's in heaven.

For the first time possibly ever, I went to church on Christmas day.  In this super religious country, I am considered the worst of all things, a pagan they say.  Nevertheless, on Christmas day, I put on the best clothes I'd brought (jeans and a t-shirt) and went with the family to church.  Everyone was packed into wooden benches on 3 sides of the small building and Emmanuel's father sat at the front by the cross.  Once an active community priest, he had relatively few words for the congregation that day.  Other, younger members, have taken over most of his duties.  Singing, drumbeating, dancing and prayers later....the fun part began...the auction.  Villagers had come to church carrying all kinds of joys from their gardens, tall sugarcanes, spiky pineapples, baskets of eggs, beans, potatoes, avocados, and so on.  These were piled at the front and auctioned, one by one.  Emmanuel's family ended up buying nearly everything, then sallied out just as indiscretely as they had entered.  They were blessed and God was thanked for bringing the bazungus (white people) to church, a.k.a. Ale and me.

Just a couple days before the new year, Aunt Betty (Emmanuel's sister) offered us transport for 6 days of travel through the parks.  It's really difficult reaching some of these parks or moving around inside them, so this was amazingly helpful.  We took off immediately for Mgahinga Gorilla NP at the very southwest corner of Uganda.  From there, you can see Rwanda and the DRC.  Three national parks meeting at one stupendous volcano, it's the kind of stuff that makes me giddy.  Ale went mountain gorilla trekking while I met with the wardens, then the next day he went golden monkey trekking while I spoke with a local NGO. 

New Year's Eve, UWA threw a party and we were invited...at one point, even introduced to the community.  After a healthy plate of food and seemingly endless speeches, Ale asked me what time I thought it was.  I said....9pm, 930?  His expression indicated that I couldn't be more wrong.  So I said, what?  10pm?  He said, no....it's 8, 8:10 to be exact.  I stared back at him and said oh no....if I'm going to make it past midnight, I think we should leave and come back.  It was way too early and the party really hadn't gotten started yet.  So, we took off, back to the community camp and hung out a bit with the people there, packed up our stuff for the next day's travel, and eventually at around 11:40pm, headed back to the party just across the road. 

It didn't take long for me to realize that I was one of only three females, the rest of the party was all men, some UWA staff, even a soldier here and there, but mostly loads of really drunken local villagers.  Thankfully, Izza was the diplomatic bouncer of the night, dancing up to any possibly threatening guy (especially those too drunk to keep themselves from falling all over everyone around them) and casually dancing them away.  Turns out, biggest danger was actually one of the other women!  Short, tiny little lady with shiny eyes and a drunken smile, had a baby strapped to her back...seemed harmless enough at first (I mean, the baby was still sleeping right?), but then she started to dance with me.  Really close.  Really wrong.  I won't say more, not here.

The next morning we said goodbye to the villagers and UWA and found ourselves with a new driver.  The guy who had taken us from Bushamba to Mgahinga and who was supposed to be with us for those 6 days, was at a party, so he sent another guy to drop us at Nkuringo on the southern side of Bwindi Impenetrable NP.  The plan was to get dropped in Nkuringo, hike through the forest to Buhoma and then get picked up to go to Mweya in Queen Elizabeth NP for the night.  Since we had a new driver now who was only supposed to drop us in Nkuringo and another driver was picking us up in Buhoma, Ale and I were forced to repack our backpacks and to hike through the rainforest with all our stuff.  It was a beautiful walk, but between the packs and the pouring rain, all I could think about was making it to Buhoma.  We were hours behind schedule and hadn't had anything to eat since early morning.  In Buhoma, we devoured a plate of food in our soggy clothes, hopped in a van with a new driver and took off for the bush.

We pulled into Queen in the dark of the night, had to let ourselves into the park gate because no one was there anymore, and then slept in the wrong house.  Basically, I've only been to Lu's house and I understood that all these researchers stay at his place (I also had to present my papers last time when I stayed there), so when I called UWA to reserve space in the Researcher's House, I assumed it was his.  Wrong.  When I went to Lu's house, two of the doors (his and Joe's) were locked and the other one was occupied by Jennifer (with the ringed mongoose project).  Agnes told me that she'd left the door to my room unlocked for me, so I was perplexed to find myself shut out.  Then she told me to ask for Winston...but there was no Winston in the house.  Strange.  It was too late to sort things out, so that night, we slept out in the living room.  Which is where I slept last time anyway.  The next morning, James walks in and tells me that the Researcher's House is two houses down.  Woops.

Finally in the right place, I discovered the door to the room unlocked and realized that I'd met Winston before at the UWA HQ in Kampala.  Ale and I hung our things up to dry and put the shoes out in the sun.  I childishly played around a bit with one of Joe's camera traps, so he now has a few photos of me sitting on the dry grass behind Lu's house, but he won't know that until he returns to his cameras a week from now. 

Queen Elizabeth is kind of an expensive place if you're just a tourist and don't have your own transport, so we didn't spend long there.  I had my meetings at the park HQ and then we cut out and made our way to Rwenzori Mtns. NP.  The park warden is really friendly and talkative guy, such a character, and he seemed pleased to have a researcher.  Apparently there aren't many, I'm the only one in the last couple months I think.  So, he set us up at the community camp at the base of the Central Circuit, which takes you up to the glacial peaks of Speke, Stanley and Margherita (the all-famous).  The next days were filled with interviews with rangers and some of the local organizations, plus a sweet day of hiking up to Camp 1 and Lake Mahoma, where they used to mine minerals and siphon off lake water until they realized that if they just kept pumping water out along with all mine tailings, the lake was going to dry up. 

We hung out by the lake and watched thick clouds cover and uncover layers of peaks and mountains before deciding that it was best to start heading down, clouds didn't look so good.  Not long after we started making our way through the steep slopes of the bamboo forest it started to pour rain.  It was like Bwindi all over again, but this time the path was steep so we spent lots of time sliding down muddy slopes and tearing up our knees. 

On the way, we passed trails of porters carrying heavy looking bags of gear with a strap across their forehead.  I was only slightly miffed to find that there was only one European looking tourist at Camp 1....all those men for him?  Thing is, each porter probably gets paid about 6,000-8,000UGX ($3-4) a day, so if you've got some money, you can hire an army.  None of these porters are well-equipped for the Rwenzoris.  They have thin shirts and pants, maybe a pair of wellies.  We're talking about an 8-day trek up to 5,109m and across snow and glaciers.  I don't know how they do it, especially for so little pay.

Porters, guides and campsites on the Central Circuit are the exclusive concessions of Rwenzori Mountaineering Services.  Allegedly a community-based organization that's set up to provide jobs for the local poor and to protect their precious mountain environments, it has a horrible reputation for tricky bookkeeping, poor environmental practices, untrained guides and drunken porters (no joke, I was witness).  It's no surprise the management looks like they're making bank and everyone else looks like they're no better off than they were before.  Unfortunately, their concession from UWA has decades of monopoly to go.

The Rwenzoris themselves are amazing though; I dreamt about buying land there and putting up my own little yurt or cabina.  They say those mountains are sacred, I believe it. 

From the Rwenzoris we went to Kibale NP.  Kibale is further east and not so close to the border with DRC, so it was a bit strange to be talking about transboundary conservation when there is no boundary and little to no interaction with the Congo.  I think what happened is Kibale NP is the headquarters for the entire Kibale Conservation Area, which includes Semuliki NP and some of the other protected areas along the border with Congo.  In Rwenzori Mtns NP and Semuliki NP, all of the rangers and locals can tell you about the ADF conflicts that led to thousands of deaths and park closures not so long ago, not to mention all of the Congolese refugees that have settled this side of the border who are now exerting additional pressure on park resources.  But in Kibale, it's all about primates and rocket stoves.  Eyes glaze over when I talk about the transboundary network and collaborative conservation across borders.

In Semuliki, the dialogue appropriately returned to transboundary conservation, however, and it was really interesting.  Military presence around Semuliki is heavy, mud and wattle army barracks are here and there and they work closely with UWA to share security information, sometimes also to herd encroaching cattle out of the nearby Toro-Semliki Wildlife Reserve, where my friend Paul is the law enforcement warden and fighting a constant battle against cattle grazing in the park.  The ICCN (park authorities in DRC) has fled the northern sector of Virungas NP to Goma as insecurity reigns and UWA is left to fight all the cross-border trafficking (lots of timber) and poaching on their own.  For the last half year or so, transboundary collaboration this side of the PA network has fallen apart.  As the Rio Declaration says, "Peace, development and environmental protection are interdependent and indivisible" and "Warfare is inherently destructive of sustainable development."

This is what peace parks are all about.

Yesterday, I left Semuliki and returned to Kampala.  Got off the bus as it hit traffic in Kampala near Mango Hospital and got on a boda boda.  Bad idea.  Yesterday, I had my first motorcycle accident.  The boda boda rider ran into another boda parked in front towards the side of the road and we all went spilling to the gnarly ripped up asphalt below.  I went down on the left with my backpack and all, tearing up my left hand and knee.  It's like someone took a cheese grater to my skin.  But thankfully, we weren't going so fast, so the impact wasn't crippling.  I got up a little stunned and looked at the boda man like he was crazy.  He looked at me to get back on so we could proceed.  Not really knowing what else to do, I did, but only after sternly advising that he ride really carefully because that totally wasn't cool.  In front of Makerere, I got off and said, sorry but I'm not going to pay for that.  He said, how about just 1,000UGX?  Again, I looked at him like he was crazy and said, for what?  For dropping me?  And walked away.

As I fell, all I could think is that I couldn't believe this was happening.  For the last three days, Paul has been teaching me how to ride a motorcycle in an open football field of a local primary school.  I've been managing to ride around in circles, dodging kids and soccer balls, in and out of first and second gear, even third gear when we were on the open dirt road, and I'd just spent last night telling Paul how I'm afraid to get into some crazy accident, get knocked by a huge truck blasting through one of these dirt highways that cuts through so many of the national parks, or fall on one of these windy mountain roads filled with ditches and rocks.  These aren't exactly easy roads or terrain for an absolute beginner and I've definitely got a serious fear/respect for these machines, but, all I can say is that it would be so much easier to get around these parks if I had a motorcycle.  And now, I've had my first accident....hopefully last.

It's definitely time to get that helmet.