OFFBEAT AFRICA : UGANDA : By launch to Murchison Falls

There are three of us, the sole passengers on a creaky 28-seat launch chugging up the Nile to the foot of Murchison Falls. It’s late afternoon, and a light rain is falling intermittently, making circles on the smooth surface of the river. The water is the color of milky tea.

We lean out over the railing of the boat, trying to get a closer look at the hippopotamuses wallowing in the shallows along the river edge. They are submerged except for their pink ears and eyes and a patch of oily-smooth black back. Suddenly one of them, with a great whoosh and flapping of ears and a snort and a geyser of spray, rolls up and out of the water, yawns and submerges again. And then another. There are hundreds of them.

Two uniformed park rangers carrying assault rifles--leftovers from Uganda’s civil wars--take turns piloting the launch. One of them, a young woman, smiles and points out a crocodile. We don’t see it at first, camouflaged in the grass. Then we spot it: a huge brown and black and silver monster with a yellowish belly, a crenulated back and a sinister jaw. It is lying motionless on the bank. We will see more than a dozen crocodiles no more than 20 feet away from us before this afternoon is over.

I am spending a month in Uganda, at this point watching the astonishing drama of Murchison Falls National Park unfold. It is like a play, with subtly suggested dangers along the river, the excitement of the falls and the serenity of the grassy giraffe-dotted hills. With me to marvel at this performance for a weekend are a vacationing Englishman and a friend of mine who teaches in Uganda. She has joined me for a couple of weeks during November, and we are spending our days visiting villages where her friends treat us to lavish luncheons in mud-walled huts (we eat with our fingers, sans forks and knives), as well as jouncing around in her pickup truck on Uganda’s ubiquitous rutted red-dirt roads.

Today we have arrived at Murchison Falls, about 160 miles north of the city of Jinja, where the Nile (in this area called the Victoria Nile) spills from Lake Victoria. We are the only sightseers on the river, and apparently the only visitors in the park, and we’re having a pleasant two hours meandering through the waters.

Murchison Falls National Park is the oldest established park in Uganda. It was registered as a national park in 1952, during colonial days as a British protectorate, and became East Africa’s most visited park. In those days, the capstone of an African safari was Uganda, the lush green land Winston Churchill had earlier called the “pearl of Africa.” And this park was a mecca for glorious game watching and hunting.

After Idi Amin seized power in 1971 and began a campaign of torture and persecution, tourists deserted Uganda and flocked instead to Kenya. For more than two decades after the coup, Uganda was racked with savagery and war. Hundreds of thousands were brutally murdered under Amin, who was toppled in 1979, and under his equally cruel successor, Milton Obote. In those dark years, the country’s economy collapsed, the parks teeming with wildlife became poaching grounds and tourist lodges were looted and burned.

Amazingly, the country has turned around. The current president, Yoweri Museveni, has led the government since early 1986 and despite sporadic rebel and bandit activity and serious problems along its border with Sudan--which is embroiled in a vicious civil war--Uganda seems to have achieved a kind of stability it hasn’t known for years. The infrastructure is still shaky and poverty remains widespread, but the people we met all over were friendly and warmly polite.

The national language of Uganda is English, taught in the schools, and most people in the cities speak English, with a lilting British-cum-tribal-language accent. Away from the cities, English is less frequently used.

But smiles go a long way, and part of the pleasure of visiting Uganda is stopping in villages where tiny tin-roofed shops advertise wedding gowns or bicycles, buying grilled bananas and oranges at roadside markets, sipping a fermented banana drink in a small bar, smiling back at a tiny bare-bottomed child outside a thatch-roofed mud hut.

“Uganda is no longer an international pariah,” Museveni said with brave pride a few years ago, and now the statement is truer than it was then. With civil wars blazing like forest fires in so many African countries, Uganda is viewed by State Department observers as one of the more politically stable countries on the continent.

British Airways resumed flights to the airport at Entebbe in spring, 1993, after a lapse of almost two decades. European businesses and Abercrombie & Kent, the Chicago-based travel company known for its safaris, are investing millions of dollars in hotels and lodges. A&K; last year completed permanent tented camps in Murchison and in the Buhoma Valley, near Bwindi National Park. Between 80,000 and 90,000 foreign tourists visit Uganda annually; early this year, Museveni’s government abolished visa requirements for most countries, including the United States.

Still, efforts are being made to prevent tourist numbers from ballooning too quickly and overwhelming the infrastructure. Ben Otto, permanent secretary for the Ugandan Ministry of Tourism, Wildlife and Antiquities, says the plan is that “there shall never be mass tourism like Kenya’s. We’re developing a different kind of tourism: eco-tourism. Not many other countries offer primates; we have the largest number of mountain gorillas in the world.”

About 300 gorillas live in Bwindi National Park, a wild and remote area in the southwestern corner of Uganda. Two families of gorillas have been habituated to humans, and only six trackers a day per gorilla family are allowed permits, so there are no tourist crowds. Tracking can be arduous--sometimes for six hours at a stretch, through three valleys, along muddy, root-tangled paths.

At Kibale Forest, northeast of Queen Elizabeth National Park, I sloshed along a muddy but fairly easy path and heard the strange calls of monkeys and watched them, tails coiled above their backs, as they swung in the canopy, 200 feet above me. Kibale is a cool, green cathedral of a rain forest said to contain 300 species of birds, 114 species of butterflies and 11 species of primates.

Uganda has an extraordinarily varied geography--rain forests, savanna, snowy mountains that slice through the Equator, hot springs, lakes.

The wildlife that was depleted is slowly coming back. (It’s heartbreaking, though, to imagine what once was: The rhinoceros, once abundant, has disappeared, and the elephant population, about 18,000 in 1973, bottomed out at 1,000 in 1987.)

Bird life here is unsurpassed, since Uganda is a home to the birds and animals of both East and West Africa. I remember particularly the flocks of white pelicans on Kazinga Channel in Queen Elizabeth National Park (also called Ruwenzori National Park). I also recall delicate cattle egrets perched on burly black buffalo to feed on bugs, and the perfectly named red-cheeked cordon bleu bird, a puff of blue and red splashing in a puddle.

There were certain places that simply took my breath away. I could only think of Shangri-La when we drove around the hairpin turns through the mountains north of Queen Elizabeth park, past mountain sides farmed (not terraced, just farmed; I wondered how the farmers could even stand on such steep slopes) almost to the summit, and looking down on the green expanses of the western segment of the Great Rift Valley.

At Murchison, while the variety of animals and especially birds is wonderful, the centerpiece is the falls. Here the Nile pounds over great black rocks, and all the force and power of the river is squeezed into a cleft in the rocks only 20 feet wide. The river doesn’t simply tumble over the cliff edge, it explodes thunderously through the gap and down a 130-foot drop, and the spray rises from this cascade far above the cleft, clouding everything like wet smoke.

Our first look at the falls was from below, from the launch. At a distance, the cascade is a white, ruffled ribbon above a river dotted with patches of white froth that look like ice floes, its thunder a muffled roar. The pilot wedged our 30-foot boat into a chink in some rocks in mid-river, and there, feeling a little corny, my fellow passengers and I clambered out onto a rock, took pictures of each other with the falls behind us, and mused briefly on how the early explorers must have felt when they came on this sudden violent interruption in the Nile’s wanderings.

Murchison Falls (also known as Kabalega Falls) have been called the most exciting thing that happens to the Nile in its 4,000-mile journey from Lake Victoria to the Mediterranean. It was more than exciting to British explorer Sir Samuel Baker. In 1864, he and his young Hungarian wife, Florence, were the first Europeans to see the falls, and as they contemplated the experience, a biography indicates, a hippopotamus bull charged their boat and lifted it half out of the river. The Bakers continued onward and named the falls for the then president of the Royal Geographical Society: Sir Roderick Murchison.

For us, there were no charging hippos, and as day was dimming we drifted back on the river, which was serenely quiet even though the current was strong. The river had a metallic sheen; the sun dropped quickly, as it does near the Equator, suffusing the sky with orange, the water reflecting the sky’s glow.

In this quiet copper twilight, I watched as fishermen paddled their wooden dugouts--the same kind of dugouts that were used a century ago--alongside our launch, and the rangers took on board a big Nile perch that they would cook later, back at their barracks. We moved from one side to the other on the launch, looking toward the shore at cliffs and trees and scrub and then along the river edge where the hippos’ pink ears popped up from the murky water. Out in the middle of the river were small drifting islands of hyacinths or lilies where we saw wonderful birds.

Waterbuck had come to the river edge to feed, and they stood in a glade, beautiful to see. We spotted buffalo at a distance. If you’re lucky, we were told, we might see elephant and even lion (although we didn’t on this occasion).

When we returned to the launch dock, we saw fishermen coming in with their catch and women filling plastic jerrycans or earthen jars with water, which they hoisted to their heads for carrying up a steep dirt road to their homes. The women came in the morning and the evening to fetch water, and in their bright long skirts, often with babies swaddled in a shawl on their backs, they seemed like figures from illustrations of Biblical times.

Our lodgings in Murchison Falls park were in a rest camp of mud huts half a mile uphill from the Nile. The huts were just like the round thatch-roofed structures where villagers live; the floors were of mud and dung pounded smooth; the windows small apertures letting in little light. Toilet and bathing facilities were a pit latrine in a thatched shelter about 20 feet from our hut and a basin of hot water heated over a fire and brought to a lean-to by a camp attendant. But the beds were comfortable, and we would sleep deeply in them, after first spraying with insecticide to discourage lurking pests and fastening mosquito nets around us. (Most tour groups are lodged in somewhat more luxurious tented camps but since my friend and I were traveling independently, that option wasn’t open to us.)

In the evening before slumber, we sat by a fire--a bright circle of light in the deep dark of an African night--and listened to then park warden, John Otekat, spin tales.

Because of our camp’s proximity to the Nile, hippos sometimes wandered up at night to snort and chomp on grass; a hippo eats 150 pounds of grass a night.

The next morning, soon after daybreak, we went on a game drive, bouncing in a pickup truck over rutted dirt roads that wound through plains of tall golden grass and spiky thorn trees. We saw elephants munching and giraffes loping across the hills and various antelopes--shaggy waterbuck and red-gold Uganda kob and hartebeest with their ridged horns. It looked like an unspoiled world, the beginning of time.

In the afternoon, we traveled to the top of the falls and listened to the thunder. I climbed up a rock at the edge of the river, just above the falls, feeling the fine spray, feeling the roar and power of the avalanche of water. I gazed at the swirling, boiling water just before it plunges over the cliff, hypnotized by it, and then looked down the chasm to see the pool that spread out below the falls before rearranging itself into a stolid river again.

We stayed another night in the park, taking a walk to the riverbanks to look at the marabou storks perched in the treetops like gloomy hunchbacked sentries and later enjoyed an evening meal of chicken and rice, and savored the evening fire. Then, too soon, we left Murchison. We drove away on a road cut through a forest, and as a pleasant farewell to the park, we met a family of baboons in the middle of the road--just hanging around, the way baboons do in Uganda.

GUIDEBOOK: Going to Uganda

Getting there: From LAX fly British Airways to London, with connections to Entebbe. Or fly any airline to Brussels and change to Sabena, which flies to Entebbe. Round-trip fares start at about $2,892. Entebbe airport is on Lake Victoria about a 45-minute drive from the capital city of Kampala.

When to go: The dry season of December through March is the recommended time to see wildlife because the grass is shorter, making the animals easier to see. There are two peak periods of rain--the long rains from March to May and the short rains from September to November. The showers of the short-rain season are short and sweet but can sometimes put a damper on picture taking. Uganda straddles the Equator, and the dry summer months are likely to be quite hot. But the altitude and the lakes and rivers moderate the equatorial heat, and Uganda is usually comfortable.

U.S. State Department advice: Because of rebel and bandit activity and renewed fighting in the area along the Sudanese border, travel in the northern part of Uganda is considered extremely dangerous, although the central and southern regions are peaceful. Before traveling to Uganda, contact the State Department for an update, (202) 647-5225.

Tour operators: It’s possible to arrange a safari on your own after arriving in Uganda, but easier (although somewhat costlier) to make arrangements in advance. Often in Uganda, tours are custom-tailored but tour operators also offer standard tours.

Abercrombie & Kent offers a six-day gorilla-tracking safari to the Bwindi National Park and a seven-day tour of Queen Elizabeth National Park, Kibale Forest and Murchison Falls. The gorilla tour includes two days of tracking in Bwindi, after a drive through Uganda’s “Little Switzerland,” an area of deep gorges and mountain valleys. Since Rwanda and Zaire are dangerous locations for tourists, Uganda is, at the moment, the only place for tracking mountain gorillas. The Queen Elizabeth tour concentrates on game drives and includes launch cruises on Kazinga Channel and on the Nile in Murchison. Land costs start at about $3,500 per person. Abercrombie & Kent, 1520 Kensington Road, Oak Brook, Ill. 60521; tel. (708) 954-2944 or (800) 323-7308; fax (708) 954-3324.

Hot Ice Ltd. in Kampala schedules a five-day gorilla safari to Bwindi, similar to the A&K; tour, with two days of gorilla tracking. Among other offerings are the six-day “Highlights of Southwest Uganda” safari and shorter visits to Murchison, Queen Elizabeth or Budongo Forest. The “Highlights” tour takes in Kibale Forest with walks to look for primates there, game drives and launch rides in Queen Elizabeth and a bush walk in Lake Mburo National Park. The newly opened Budongo Forest, not far from Murchison, is home to habituated chimpanzee families, and visitors are split into small groups escorted by knowledgeable guides. Hot Ice safari prices are generally somewhat lower than A&K;’s. Address: P.O. Box 151, Kampala, Uganda; tel. 011-256-41-236777 or 011-256-41-245165; fax: 011-256-41-242733.