Playing Tourist

At this point I've been in Uganda for basically two and a half months. We talk a lot in my Faith and Action class (the one that I get to take instead of Core 399 for my Dordt friends) about how we aren't here to be tourists and instead we are here to learn from the locals and really grow while we are here. That being said, the first weekend of March I got to play tourist and go on a safari! It was a really great time to get off campus and hang out with a bunch of different people. We left on Saturday morning at 6 am and drove to Murchison Falls, a national park in Uganda, to start our safari. The first thing we did was see the top of the falls.

 It is absolutely beautiful, even though it is dry season and wasn't at full force. After that we went down to the loading dock at the bottom and took a cruise on the Nile. We were running late (African time), but they waited for us. Unfortunately, we did miss lunch because we had to basically run straight onto the boat, but totally worth it. It was super cool to be on the Nile and see crocodiles, hippos, elephants, birds...basically a lot of nature.

bottom of the falls and my friend Sarah.

After the Nile cruise, (on which I took like 400 pictures of hippos), we were heading back on the bus to go on what's called a game drive. One of the girls in our group was carrying bananas and a baboon ran up to her and tried to steal them. Baboons are so much bigger than I thought.

The Baboon that stole the bananas.

We were all laughing about the strange event on the bus when a man with a gun came on the the bus. We all were kind of frozen for a minute, but he said he was our tour guide (named George) and the gun was for scaring away elephants if needed. We then went on our game drive.

We saw a lot of really cool things and George was a great tour guide with so much information. We went back to the hotel and had supper. I was taking a shower and the power went off mid-shower. If you don't understand the irony, reread the blog post on Sipi Falls. I was rooming with the same friend who got stuck with me.

We got up at 6 am again to go on a mini game drive before going home. We got back at 7ish on Sunday. We crammed a lot of things in that short amount of time, but it was very fun.