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PHOTOGRAPHS JONATHAN GREGSON
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ILLUSTRATION: STELLA ISAAC
Safari on foot and by boat
IT IS NOT EASY TO NAP ON THE DRIVE FROM Entebbe to Lake Mburo. The view outside the window puts paid to any attempts to doze. Our Land Cruiser trundles through hills planted with sweet potatoes, yams and banana palms, passing villages where small kids run out to wave, men gather round to ix beaten-up old motorbikes, and goats nibble at the verge. Vendors at roadside tables sell watermelon, pineapples and jackfruit, and grilled tilapia freshly yanked out of Lake Victoria, a strip of gleaming blue visible across the ields. The sweet smell of warm dust and wood smoke wafts through the open windows. At the turning to Lake Mburo, tarmac turns to mud, and goats are replaced by zebra and giraffe. A national park since 1983, the area is not fenced, and cattle constantly wander in and wildlife out. Stopping to pick up a guide, Bonny Baloiganikiya, at the park entrance, we bump along an orange track through a landscape pocked with candelabra trees and termite mounds. Baboons casually move off the road to stare at us from the thickets. Warthogs match their indifference for a while, then whirl off through the bush in a panic.
A black and white pied kingisher ater a successful ishing mission.
‘Wild animals, cattle and humans compete for food, land and water here,’ says Bonny. ‘The secret is for people to beneit from the park, to support them by putting up a school or a health centre. You can’t have conservation without the community.’ Lake Mburo is a success story, with high numbers of zebra and antelope, among which are topi and eland. ‘The population is crazy because they have no predators,’ says Bonny. ‘There is only one lion, and one lion cannot do much against 3,000 zebra.’
One of the 300-plus hippos that live in Lake Mburo.
The park is home to most of Uganda’s zebras
The centrepiece of the park is Lake Mburo itself. We swap Land Cruiser for boat as the heat of the day starts to fade. Swallows lit over the water, competing for insects with wagtails, sandpipers and weaver birds. Tiny malachite kingishers sit in the papyrus, lashing orange and blue, while their larger cousins, pied kingishers, hover then suddenly dive, sending up splashes as they break the surface.
They’re not the only ones ishing. Men in small boats let down nets, steering clear of the hippos that honk from all around the lake. Thirty-three sets of pink ears and piggy eyes turn towards us as we drift near a pod in our own boat, the engine momentarily stalled. Our captain, Yusuf, has been merrily recounting tales of the 500 people who die annually from hippo attacks in Africa. ‘If a hippo capsizes the boat,’ he says, ‘what happens next is between you and your god.’ With the swallows in a riot above us, he gets out an oar and starts to paddle.
Park entry £31 (ugandawildlife.org)