We were “lulled” to sleep last night by the sounds of the Red Chilli
Rest Camp ‘lawnmower’, one of the hippopotamus’ that relished the nice grass
around our banda. Amazing how much noise
that 2 foot wide mouth makes!
Woke up early again to fairly clear skies and set off for the
top of Murchison Falls. The falls cascade over a 40 foot drop with a
huge volume of water. Quite spectacular
especially with a full rainbow in the spray!
Next stop was the ZIWA rhino sanctuary, a 70 square kilometer area set
up to breed the white rhino for reintroduction to the wild. Uganda
had a large white and black rhino population that was decimated by poachers
during the reign of Idi Amin. The horns
are valued in oriental countries for supposed health and aphrodisiac
properties. By 1986 only 5 white rhino
were left in Uganda
and those too were poached. We met a
lady on the plane to Nairobi who
told us her husband liked to hand out bumper stickers that read “save a rhino,
take Viagra”. The sanctuary started with
4 white rhino from Kenya
and was given 2 more by the US. Since 1993 those 6 rhino have produced 6
offspring. We were lucky enough to get
to see one of the females with her 8 month old, 300 pound calf. The white rhino are very docile and not a
threat to humans. They are hoping eventually
to breed and reintroduce the black rhino but that will have to be done on the
game reserves as black rhino are very aggressive and would kill people if they
escaped near human habitation. Next was
the not quite as long drive back to Kampala,
about 4 hours.
No comments:
Post a Comment