Time flies!

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.