EAST AFRICA Part2 TRAVEL JOURNAL
My room at Lake Albert Safari Lodge looked out over the lake: 35km wide. We were in the far west of Uganda and the mysterious-looking Blue Mountains on the far side of the lake belonged to the DRC. How I’d have loved to visit that country, too!
I was travelling with my son Ryan, friends Pete Meyer and Paul Kalil, and Paul’s son Josh. Our self-styled Africa –Wild & Untamed adventure had started nine days before when we flew from Durban to Ethiopia via Joburg. We made swift progress to Rwanda (see previous issue) and then to the Albertine RiftValley here in Uganda.
Lake Albert Safari Lodge is owned by Bruce Martin. During our visit, the lodge was run by his daughter Robin Martin and her partner Aston Sparks. The Martins are originally from Pietermaritzburg in our home province of KwaZulu-Natal, and we contacted them through mutual friends. They took us in, even allowing us to stay over on the house!
We were gifted five beautiful double-bed chalets and were treated to a game drive through Kabwoya Wildlife Reserve, where the lodge is situated. Kabwoya teems with game – recent counts estimate more than 8000 Ugandan kob (a relative of antelope like lechwe and reedbuck), 400 Nile buffalo (a sub-species of our Cape buffalo) and smaller antelope like oribi and bushbuck.They also have primates like chimpanzees and black-and-white colobus monkeys, and at night the lodge is visited by porcupines, genets and civets. A special bird among the roughly 450 species is the striking Abyssinian ground hornbill, which has blue and red skin around the eyes.
When the Martins took
