Tuesday

 Our day started with the usual excellent breakfast.  Ndali Lodge makes a great breakfast open-face sandwich with avocado,tomato and eggs (cooked to your choosing) served on whole wheat toast.  They also make a delicious green smoothie.  After breakfast, we headed back to Kibale National park for another chimpanzee trek.  A short way into our trek, we had to make a quick retreat and a large detour.  Why you may ask.  Well answer is simple: forest elephants.  Some forest elephants started crashing through the forest towards our path.  Since the elephants will charge humans on sight,  our guide immediately turned us around.  It would have been cool to see the elephants, but if we saw them, they would probably see us, and that would spell trouble for us.

The detour our interlopers caused us to take was rather long with a lot of trekking through the jungle, generally not on any sort of trail and much of it steeply uphill.  For a while we were thinking we walked far enough to have crossed into the Congo and would be in trouble because none of us had our passports.  We did eventually come upon a single male chimpanzee, age 33. He was initially up in the trees, but shortly after we came upon him, he climbed down and started to travel on the ground.  We were in pursuit.  He would stop briefly and we followed diligently. Unfortunately he kept doing this for awhile.  Finally he found a spot with lots of fruit on the ground.  He settled down to a long meal which gave us a fabulous opportunity to observe him as well as take a bunch of photos.  The park guides told us that being able to watch a chimpanzee on the ground for such a long period of time is considered a rare event.

Our new photogenic friend eventually took to the trees and we took to the regular trails towards the park exit.  On the way, however, we came across a mother and toddler chimpanzee (it was about 5 years old) in a tree — more observing and photos.  Our time in the park was drawing to a close, so back to the exit trail.

Once our trek was over and we were waiting to board our vehicles for the ride back to the lodge, who should appear but a group of black-and-white colobus monkeys.  They were great entertainment and gave us our last opportunity of the morning to observe and, of course, take more photos.

Back at the lodge, before lunch, we had one last opportunity to spot, identify, and photo some of the sunbirds inhabiting the lodge grounds.  Sunbirds are East Africa’s equivalents to hummingbirds ( beautifully colored, love flower nectar and never stay in one place very long— well sunbirds are worse in this regard). We did manage to identify a few and get some photos; however, I think more got away nameless.  After some local fish and chips lunch, we were reflecting on what a great day we had.

But wait, there’s more! After lunch we piled into the jeeps to retrace our steps to Kasese, then turning southwest towards Queen Elizabeth Park. We went straight at one intersection where a right turn would have taken us across the Congo border, and then crossed the equator. The road is wider there to allow people to stop and take pictures, but due to road construction they took down the signs. Fortunately our guides knew we were at this important location.  We stopped for a moment and cheered.

Once safely in the Southern Hemisphere, we entered Queen Elizabeth Park, then turned onto a road that would take us to our next lodge... this turn turned into our first game drive— we saw warthogs (lots of warthogs: bigs ones, medium ones, and, yes, baby ones) waterbucks , buffaloes, mongooses, elephants (all sizes as well, including a baby practicing land-snorkeling) and 25 species of birds.  All this in 45 minutes.  What a day!