Elephant Encounter (and Other Safari Adventures)

To bring our visitor's trip to a grand finale close, we took them to Queen Elizabeth Park for a few days before they headed back to Canada. Our friends in Kibaale tell us that whenever they take visitors on safari they always pray for good animal sightings - we took their advice and saw some pretty amazing things!

The drive to the park took several hours, but the scenery was beautiful as we drove through fields and fields of tea. It made we want to buy a field and open a tea shop on the side of the road!

When we reached the park it started to downpour, which added to the fun and didn't stop little Kyra from riding with her head out the window.

She also became a fan of riding in the front seat - particularly "driving" with Paul.

It didn't take long for us to find some of the typical Ugandan safari animals, such as cape buffalo, Ugandan cob, water buck, hundreds of birds, etc. But some additional excitement came when we found lions within our first 20 minutes of driving - and then 4 more sightings the next day!

Some of us decided to take an afternoon walking tour around a small crater lake, where we found hippo, lion and elephant tracks in the sand by the water. Also a lot of bones. Below Paul and Travis are holding up a full hippo skull - wouldn't want to be crushed by one of those!

Another highlight was our afternoon boat ride. Our group had a boat to ourselves with our own guide. We saw elephants, hippos, crocodiles, more birds than we could count, and cape buffalo bathing in the water.

As we piled back into our 2 vehicles to head back to the lodge for dinner, we were pretty certain we'd seen it all and were happy with all our findings. Our hired driver was in the vehicle ahead of us, and Paul was driving the Land Cruiser. Just as we came over the crest of a hill, we were shocked to find THIS:

This huge, ornery, lonely, stubborn male elephant was blocking the road so that vehicles coming from either side couldn't pass. At first, it seemed like just a good photo op. But things turned from fun to freaky when the elephant turned and faced us head on, stomped his foot and started charging! We flew into reverse (meanwhile, the guys in the vehicle ahead still had their torsos hanging out the roof to get it all on video) until the elephant stopped and went back to standing sideways on the road. This went on for 20 minutes, until finally the rev of the engines was enough to encourage the elephant to move off to the side of the road. Needless to say we sped pretty quickly past him to avoid bothering him any further! Later on our driver said, "That was very dangerous. But I stayed close so that everyone could take pictures." It was sure a thrilling end to our day!

On our last morning as we were heading out of the park, we were mentioning that it was surprising we hadn't seen any monkeys or baboons yet. Within a few minutes we spotted this guy sitting on the side of the road. It truly made our safari experience complete!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!