Today was the first day we slept in on our vacation. It was a sunny day which boded well to see more animals on the boat cruise this evening.
We relaxed around the lodge, bought some souvenirs from the gift shop, wrote our postcards, and looked at our pictures.
Finally 4pm rolled around and we took a short five minute drive down to the docks. It turned out our driver for the past days, Patrick, also piloted the boat and was our guide for the Kazinga Channel cruise. He knew everything about the birds and animals in the channel.
From the deck of our room we had a view across the channel where we had watched the buffalo and hippos. However there was way more to see further down the channel.
There's lots of interesting birds in the channel as well. Marissa and I missed a few pics of the hippos with their mouths open because we were to busy focusing on the birds.
We saw dozens of hippos and buffaloes, a handful of crocodiles and hundreds of birds. The hippos tended to submerge as we approached (they can stay underwater for 5-6 minutes), so I'm sure there were far more hippos than what we saw. They are huge - you don't appreciate the size until you see them beside a buffalo.
The boat cruise was a great way to end our safaris in Uganda. We were back onshore by 6:30, cleaned up and went for dinner. We were still pretty tired from all the early mornings. Heather went back to our room to start packing while Marissa and I finished off our beers.
Our room is far enough from the main lodge that they have a golf cart to shuttle guests back-and-forth from their rooms. There's also signs posted about the risk of the animals around the lodge - it is in the middle of QENP.
So after we finished our beers, Marissa and I were being driven back to the room when a very large hippo burst out of the bushes and trotted alongside the golf cart, less than a foot away. I think we startled it, as the golf cart is electrical and runs pretty quietly. The hippo was longer, taller and wider than the golf cart, weigh on average 1,500 kg and can run up to 30 km/h on land. Being a foot beside a startled hippo is not the place you want to be.
The hotel staff driving the cart hit the brakes, and the went into reverse. The top speed of the average golf cart is around 24km/h so we weren't going to win a race if there was one. Fortunately the hippo turned back into the bushes and I could hear it moving away from us. Our driver quickly took us to our room (we were only about 25m away). And so we survived yet another brush with wildlife, this one probably the most dangerous.
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