Our son Mark has just
been out to visit us, his first trip to Kisiizi for 10 years! Yet so many people remembered him (though
wouldn’t necessarily have recognized him!) and it brought back a lot of
memories.It was a real treat to have him with us in Kisiizi...
Mark completed his PhD just
before Christmas and is now teaching undergraduates chemistry in the University
of Reading. He could only come for a
short time but we were able to pack a great deal in and really enjoyed having
time with him.
Straight after Ian had
spoken at the Good Friday service and we had had lunch we set off for a 24 hour
visit to Ishasha, the closest section of the Queen Elizabeth National Park, and
were blessed to see herds of elephants, buffalo and many antelope types as well
as a hyena, warthog, baboons etc plus hippos in the river that is the border
between Uganda and Democratic Republic of Congo.
But the highlight was the animals in the
trees. Ishasha is famous for its
tree-climbing lions, the only place this occurs other than a location in
Tanzania. We found 3 lions up in a fig
tree, mostly quite sleepy but one lioness then woke up and sat up looking
fairly fierce!
Then, as we started
driving back towards the park information centre, our ranger spotted a leopard
in a tree… this was a real thrill as we have never previously seen a leopard in
the wild as they are often nocturnal and quite shy so difficult to find.
No TV for us in
Kisiizi but we enjoyed one night of the power cut to look at the stars and
planets with a small telescope and followed in Galileo’s footsteps as we gazed
at the moons of Jupiter, and then looked at the nebula in Orion… another
breath-taking experience.
Finally we went with
Mark to Lake Bunyonyi, the lake of the little birds, for 24 hours, and had a
swim, watched some of the birds and relaxed together before taking him down to
Kigali for his plane home.
