Beth's Adventures in Mbarara Uganda

One day, Terri drove Debbie and I to Lake Mburu (only about 45 minutes away from Mbarara) to the National Park, where lots of zebras live. On the way to the park, Terri hit a bird, which got stuck pretty good in the grate of her truck. When we got to the park and were going through the gate, the park ranger told us we might have to pay since there was a bird stuck in the truck. He said some park rangers might think we hit it in the park and charge us money! Terri told him, essentially, that it was too bad because we weren't touching it!

Since she has a roof rack, we decided to ride up top; unfortunately we weren't warned to bring something to sit on so we ended up with grate-shaped bruises on our rears. Even as we grimaced through the pain as we flew over bumps, we were smiling all the way. It was like riding a roller coaster. I think I only ate a couple of bugs...and thank goodness I had my Hollywood shades on to protect my eyes!

When we got to the end of the drive, there is a beautiful lake where hippos live. There was a beautiful buffalo with lots of birds on it (see my pictures at: http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/bethellent). I tried to pet a warthog...oops! He was NOT happy, so he snorted at me and tried to get me! We didn't see any hippos at the place where they usually are, so we walked over to another piece of shoreline and heard them. We got a couple of pictures and then heard some rustling in the bushes next to us. Two ladies from the UK told us that the most dangerous animals are hippos and that it sounded like there were some in the bushes next to us--OOPS! We got out of there pretty quickly!

Anyhow, it was a great afternoon. Debbie and I both kept saying, "Wow! It's so beautiful!" or "Everything is so green!" or "I can't believe I'm in Africa!" Those are things that I find myself saying pretty regularly. Well, not the green thing anymore...since it's currently dry season.

We saw an amazing sunset and there are lots of pictures of that too...unfortunately, pictures can only capture about 50% of the true beauty. Sorry...but please enjoy the pictures anyhow!