Hey folks!
Hope you've been enjoying the story so far.
Here's the thing about doing mountain gorilla trekking - you do have to trek back from the mountains afterwards.
It hasn't all been long days on the road though. We found some time to visit some chimpanzees in the Kalinzu forest, via a tea plantation. Sadly no opportunity to have a taste, but the walk was very dramatic, with strong "leaving the shire" vibes:
If I were planning this tour, I'd do the chimps first, cause I'm sure they were very cool, but they weren't gorillas, y'know?
This was a much easier hike, but - perhaps correspondingly - much less impressive. They tended to stay in their trees, and I can't say I really blame them.
We crossed back over the equator, where a man who was not a scientist tried to show us something that definitely wasn't science:
This was not my finest hour as a science communicator - I assumed everyone knew this was a scam, and they did not, and I accidentally did the geophysical equivalent of telling a bus full of kids that Santa wasn't real, without having anything cool up my sleeve to bring the vibes back up. Oops.
We stopped in Jinja for a couple of nights too. Imagine a ski town, but instead of a mountain it's the Nile river, and instead of chalets it's shacks, and you've got Jinja. We skipped the white water rafting, but we did go on not one but two cruises on the Nile. One was at sunset, on a boat, with drinks:
and the other was during the day, on a tube, also with drinks:
(What, like I was gonna pass up the chance to drink Nile on the Nile?)
And since then, we've spent a fairly chill couple of days meandering back towards Nairobi. This is nowhere near as boring as it sounds. It's been very cool to watch the scenery outside the windows change as we head back out through Uganda and back into Kenya - and there's always something going on beside the road, or on it.
Seriously, I wish I'd been keeping a montage of all the hilarious and creative signage going on out the window, but it passes by just too dang quickly. I'm trying to take it as a reminder to live in the moment or whatever - but scrolling through my photos, I did manage to catch this one, which was a real mood and maybe the best we'd seen:
We're roughly half way through, and you can definitely tell that this is actually two tours in a trenchcoat. It feels like we've just done all the lowkey winding down type activities, because for some people we have - we'll be losing a few of the squad in Nairobi.
But for us, it's more of a half time break. Tomorrow we're heading back out, to the Serengeti this time, to get back in the tents and spot some more real big animals.
WiFi could, as you might expect, be scarce on the Serengeti (although our last safari camp had Starlink, so who knows these days), so I'll catch you on the other side,
Rocky.