East Africa – Day 15

Uganda 2 August 2015

I have not been able to upload photographs to my blog without wifi or decent band width but will add my photographs to my blog post as soon as I can.

We are having the most brilliant time in Uganda with everything being great. Our trip was organised by our local ground agents Avian Watch Uganda.

Everything is going really well with Robert, our fantastic guide (who knows all the sites and calls and can whistle birds in) and Paul, our driver and fixer, for who nothing was too much.

We were staying at Chimpanzee Guest House at Kibale Forest National Park and had another early start getting up at 5.30 am and breakfast at 6.00 am.

First, we drove to Seitori Forest and spent the morning birding along the roadside. It was really great birding and we saw Afep Pigeon, Black-billed Turaco, Joyful Greenbul, Many-coloured and Bocage’s Bushshrike, Pink-footed Puffback and Petit’s Cuckoo-shrike.

Late afternoon we arrived at Semliki National Park, stopping at a site for Orange-cheeked Waxbill where we saw them relatively easily, though they weren’t a new bird for us.

We then birded along the edge of the Semliki Forest, which borders the Democratic Republic of Congo. Usually, you would expect to see lots of birds at the forest edge, but here it was very quiet and it was hard to keep going with the birding as we’re seeing so little.

After an hour and a half of birding, we had only seen Red-throated Bee-eater, Baglafecht Weaver and Compact Weaver all of which we had seen before.

We then drove to the small local town, where we checked into Rainbow Guest House, a basic guest house. We walked into the lobby which was really a tiled outbuilding. On one side was a TV and a few chairs and one table and on the other side was a motorcycle and lots of rubbish piled up.

Paul said that some people kept their motorbikes in their living rooms to stop them from being stolen and so this was only an extension of that.

Our room was clean enough, but was quite small with two single beds.

Mum and I decided we would share a bed rather than have a separate room, as all our things were mixed up in the bags.

It was infested with mosquitos though and so Mum gave it a good spray before we headed out for dinner.

We went to the Hotel Vanilla for dinner and ordered fried egg and chips (french fries) for us three and chicken and chips for Digby. It was only 7.00 pm when we ordered our food but 8.45 pm when four portions of chips arrived. We had a really long day tomorrow and so it was a little frustrating that we couldn’t get an early night. But I’m looking forward to a whole day of forest birding tomorrow.

Trip list – My trip list up to the end of day 15 is 444 with 191 lifers.