Bufallo Bill

Sunday, 29th August, Semliki Time: 7:33pm

The rainy season is approaching and I find myself hauled up in our wind-shaken tent listening to the sounds of rain pattering overhead. I must confess, of late there has been not a lot to report. Here are a couple of vignettes from the last couple of days that may well delight and hurt not.

As I believe I’ve mentioned on a couple of occasions, for the sake of her project Alex has taken to hauling my up and down rivers for hours at a time. All is fair – I make her gaze at flies landing on bark in the hot sun until she begins to look like a zombie – but even so, if it weren’t for the BBC world service, I would find these river trudges almost suicide inducing. The monotony of the trudge was broken, yesterday, by a rather peculiar sound. From a few meters upstream of us drifted a tremulous mooing followed by a loud thump. We came round the bend and saw a young cow, nose deep in the water and trying desperately to run away from us up a very steep, very muddy bank. It ran up the bank again, before sliding back down with another pathetic and painful thud. I must say, seeing a cow in the middle of a tropical jungle was surreal enough, no less a cow intent on causing itself grievous bodily harm. The feeling of bemusement was replaced by sympathy at the third failed attempt, and I would have helped the poor beast, if it weren’t that it would probably try to maul me. Because, of course, it wasn’t a cow, it was a young buffalo that had become separated from the herd and, from the uncontrollable trembling, was obviously very cold and worried for its like. Second to elephants, buffalo are the most dangerous mammals in Semliki, so we patiently waited for it to run away upstream.

Today’s adventure was also moderately exciting. After a fruitless hour of chimp searching, Alex, Ellie (our current ranger) and I found ourselves well on the way to the Semliki waterfall. Having heard rumours that the chimps sometimes went up there, and quite curious, we set forth. Our camp is 3km up the Mugiri trail and the Mugiri waterfall was over the 10.6km marker and uphill. The walk was quite long, but certainly worth it, for the ten meter high Mugiri waterfall was truly beautiful. Vines and tall trees stood either side and tropical birds flitted about in the barely visible, bright blue sky. The temperature was also very nice and, while Ellie shivered and complained of the chill, the climate felt normal to me for the first time in two months. Of course, there’s not else to really say about a waterfall, so I’ll sign off there and bid you adieu!