Murder at Murchison?

In the morning, we manage to somehow get a taxi to the Red Chilli Hideaway hostel, where our tour to Murchison National Park will depart. We wait for ages for them to get us into the van, and when we do, T and I sit in the back row with a guy named Ben. Ben is English/South African, having grown up in SA but moved to England when he was a teenager. He works for the UN as an economic consultant and T and I like him immediately. Unfortunately, the same is not true of Vladimir (whose actual name is not Vladimir, but go with me here) who sits in the row in front of us. Vladimir is a Ukrainian with American citizenship (I feel it is important to qualify that he is not American by birth), who knows Everything. He joins in the conversation with T and Ben about economics about an hour outside of Kampala and for the rest of the ride he never. shuts. up. I give up on the conversation when he informs us that 95% of Americans have health insurance, at which point I told him that I must know the entire 5% who don’t. I am more grateful for my iPod than I have ever been.

We stop for lunch and meet the other members of the tour: Sammy, a Ugandan working in Sudan, her friend Marlene, a Dutch girl working for the same organization, and a couple of German women. I try to eat my lunch while averting my eyes from Vladimir, who is shoveling food into his mouth with a relish I have never seen of Jews eating pork. I can’t look at it or I will retch.

I spend the rest of the ride with my iPod on, trying to tune out Vladimir’s constant assertions about The Way Life Is and T and Ben’s economic durka. It works well, and we drive through colorful villages and children stand on the side of the road waving to us for most of the ride. I am listening to “Under African Skies” when the iPod dies, suddenly, just outside the entrance to the park. Fortunately, we are all distracted by the monkeys running around outside the van, and I wonder, were I to throw Vladimir out the window, would they eat him on the spot? I amuse myself with my twisted, bitter thoughts until we get to the camp.

The camp is a bunch of tents built around a large wooden hut, overlooking a stunning green valley and the Nile. We dump our bags in the tents and head down to the river, where we have been strictly forbidden to bother the hippos, or we will face a certain death by hippo. So we walk down, swatting at mosquitoes, and look for wildlife that won’t kill us. We don’t see much wildlife of any sort, except for hippos across the river, which are much too far away to chew our faces off. Or are they? I don’t test the theory.

In the morning, after a boozy dinner the night before, we get up to go on our safari. We take a boat across the river and immediately see all kinds of baboons running amok. We climb into the van and head into the wild (or a dirt path through some deep grasses). We see elephants and lions from a distance, and I am equally fascinated by them and annoyed that we can’t get closer (because we are on a low-budget safari, we don’t have a 4×4). We see water buffalo and giraffes and Uganda kobs and they are all beautiful. As usual, I am too short to be able to see out the top of the van, which lifts off, becoming a kind of sun shelter, so I spend most of the time looking out the window. I am in love with the sunbaked nature of things, which makes everything brighter. It reminds me of Australia.

After lunch, we go back down to the river for a boat tour of Murchison Falls. It’s starting to rain, but the boat is covered, so it’s okay. We cruise slowly up the river, past a bunch of fat, fighting hippos and I realize why my friend Cara is terrified and repulsed by them. They could and would chew my face off, if I let them. The falls are really beautiful, and everyone stops to take some photos. I mostly sit and watch out the side of the boat, still exhausted for no good reason. The rain kicks up and starts pouring into the boat and finally stops just in time for us to get out and go to dinner.

Dinner is wildly entertaining, because everyone is drinking too much, except for Sammy, who is on a special diet. Still, she wins for best story of the night, which goes like this: Sammy teaches English in Sudan. Her class is entirely Muslim boys, no girls. One day, she was teaching the alphabet and she got to the letter Z. Z is for zip, she told her class. She pointed to one of the boys. Show me your zip! He just stared at her. Show me your zip! she says again. The boy starts to cry and runs out of the room. Later, Sammy finds out that zip is the local word for penis. Oops.

In the morning, we wake up and have breakfast and drive over to the top of the falls with some local Peace Corps volunteers. The sun is sweltering and we hike to the top and look down. It is a long, long drop down to the bottom and the rocks are slippery. I wonder if anyone on these tours has ever plunged to their death, but decide not to ask the guide. After walking around the top of the falls, we get back in the car and start the long drive back to Kampala. My iPod is dead, so I try to sleep. Unfortunately, because the two Peace Corps girls are getting a free ride, everything is much more crowded, so instead I stare out the window like a zombie, as the world flies by.

The trip is good enough that on the way back, I am no longer contemplating the various ways to kill Vladimir, and I am even willing to spend another night in his company. But fortunately, I don’t have to. And this pleases me.