God Save the Queen

This past weekend was my first trip to Queen Elizabeth National Park, a huge park on the other side of the mountains, about a 6 hour drive away. We spent the weekend there to say goodbye to the Chedester family, who have been working with World Harvest in Fort Portal for the last 12 years, and are leaving Uganda in May. It was nice to get to spend some down time with them, and Queen Elizabeth is a spectacularly beautiful place. We stayed in a lodge built right on the edge of the escarpment overlooking the park - the little porch of my banda was just on the edge of a 200 foot drop to the plain below. Add to this the fact that it's actually quite affordable, and the Kingfisher Lodge becomes a perfect getaway (and 6 hours is about as close as anything else).

Saturday was an amazing day, partly because I got to watch Liverpool thrash Manchester United 4-1, and partly because I had a rare day of relaxation (in a truly beautiful place, none the less). On the way in, we kept our eyes out for satellite dishes in the villages near the park, and at game time I drove from the lodge with the Myhres and the girls to a building with walls of rough hewn boards and cardboard, a dirt floor, a corrugated steel roof, wobbly benches of split logs, a satellite dish on the roof, and a generator puffing away outside. I almost had a heart attack numerous times, but Liverpool pulled away in the second half and I celebrated with a bunch of Ugandan men. Serious fun.

Sunday morning we went for a game drive, starting before sunrise, with 11 of us in and on (mostly on) the Myhre's Land Rover. Despite my eyes becoming better trained at spotting a variety of animals, we saw little other than kob, cape buffalo, and waterbuck for most of the morning (all beautiful in their own right, but none of them rare or unusual). Soon, however, the other team called us to tell us they had spotted lions, and we soon found them and the lions. We then headed to a favorite place in the park (where I hope to do some camping sometime), and while driving through the brush, we stumbled practically right into the middle of a herd of elephants. It was amazing and powerful, and a little scary, being in the back of a truck. On our way out, we skidded to a halt as, Ashley had spotted something to the side of the road. For a few moments, I had the rare privlige of seeing a reclusive leopard, only about 50 feet away, sublimely beautiful and shimmering as it moved through the grass, slowly melting into the brush. To give you an idea of how rare this sighting was, that was the 4th leopard that the Myhres have seen in their 15 years living in Uganda. That I saw one after less than five months makes me unbelievably lucky.

The weekend was short, and the ride back was long and bumpy (with a stop for pictures as we crossed over the equator). By the time we got back to Bundibugyo, my hands were tingling from holding the steering wheel and my shoulders were tense from the stress of driving the Bundibugyo road. But it was a beautiful, meaningful, and relaxing weekend, where we had the chance to honor the Chedesters and wish them farewell. I might never again be lucky enough to see a leopard in the wild, and I consider myself blessed to have had the chance to see something that rare and beautiful once. Within 15 minutes of getting back, I was down at Christ School to train with the team, getting ready for our first game. And that's how the pace of life has been for me - from one thing to the next, some fun and some difficult, some relaxing and some stressful, some maddening and some refreshing, but never a dull moment.