Elephants, hippos, giraffe, zebras.....bring 'em on!

Mar 1st

Akagera Day! My birthday treat to myself. Up at 4.30 and out to our safari jeep by 5. Big, comfortable Land Cruiser with opening panels in the roof.

For two hours or so we cruised Eastwards along roads more or less empty of motors, through Rwamagana, Gahini, Kayonza and Kabarondo till we took the dirt road that leads into the park. Even at this hour of the morning there was a lot of cycle traffic; men pedalling enormous sacks of produce to market, and women walking, sometimes in groups but often alone, through the grey dawn with bowls of vegetables on their heads. The valley bottoms were misty and very beautiful in the early morning light, but we were going too fast to be able to take usable pictures.

What struck me at one is how the landscape changes as soon as you leave Kigali and head Eastwards. It’s not too high, and the valleys are wider, with gentler slopes. It’s an altogether less challenging landscape than ours around Gitarama. It’s very attractive, too, with a huge natural lake (Lake Muhazi) stretching for miles and winding through the valleys.

By eight o’clock we were at the park gate and paying our fees. Even on the road into the park we had to slow down to let a troupe of olive baboons pass in front of us! We had anticipated a problem in proving we were residents, as opposed to tourists (the tourist fees are much higher), but as soon as we produced our VSO identity cards and explained where we were based and what we were doing there was no problem at all. Outside the headquarters was a tree ornamented with weaver-bird nests, looking for all the world like Christmas tree decorations. The weaver birds had brilliant yellow plumage and I tried to get some snaps, but unfortunately the light was all wrong and I’ve failed miserably!

No matter. Inside our wagon, this time with our guide Cécille. She was a chubby and cheerful Rwandan who spoke perfect English and was mad keen on birds. She also had an amazingly sharp eye for the tiny smudge in the distance which turned out to be a waterbuck or a warthog, too. Not all guides are as knowledgeable and we were lucky. We were also lucky in the weather. It was cloudy and cool and really pleasant, as well as a good light for photography. It must be quite an ordeal if you spend the whole day in blazing sunshine!

Within half an hour we were surrounded first by herds of Impala, the males with impressive, curved horns, and all with vivid black and white stripes on their rumps. We passed through thorny scrub so dense it would be impossible for people to get through it, and then into a beautiful section with clumps of thorny acacia trees separated by open swathes of grass. In front of us were about a dozen giraffes, including young ones, nonchalantly chewing acacia and generally unfazed by our presence. We snapped away like mad – already, with just two species of animals, it was a great day!

We’d expected the Park (on a Saturday) to be busy, and that we would be chasing other vehicles around all the time. But during the day we covered an area bigger than Dorset and we only saw two other vehicles. It just staggers me how an area so beautiful can be so little visited. I know that even at their discounted rates, it’s expensive for Rwandans, but there are plenty of tourists and wealthy people working for NGOs in the country. Where were they all? Off watching gorillas? All the better for us – we virtually had the entire Park to ourselves.

No sooner had we exhausted the giraffes when we met a big family group of zebras. They were slightly more huffy about our getting up close, but already my telephoto lens was paying for itself and we snapped away till we were satisfied. Reedbucks were timidly lurking close to the shelter of bushes. A large group of topi, bigger than impala and much more robustly built, were grazing in a clearing. At one time we had giraffes, impala, topi and reedbuck all within sight, and a waterbuck as a distant smudge in the thorn bush.

Geert had been to Akagera before, and wanted to go up North to the hilly section of the Park. None of the rest of us – Kest, Wanlam (an Indian VSO based in Kibungo in the far south-east) or I were bothered as long as we could see animals. The guide said there would be more animals in the south, round Lake Ihema, but we agreed to go north for Geert (Wanlam and I will probably come again with families, and we can stay in the south on those occasions).

We agreed a compromise. Doubling back from the giraffe area to the park entrance once more (vervet monkey scampering too fast to get a picture; Bateleur eagle perched on a treetop with vivid red beak; striking black and white shrikes perched on a small bush almost within touching distance) we descended down to Lake Ihema. This is a massive piece of shallow water. It’s easily bigger than Windermere and home to an amazing variety of wildlife. We quietly rolled past a papyrus bed to the water’s edge. No crocodiles, unfortunately, (almost certainly too cold for them to come out of the water), but a group of four or five hippos close to the bank. They, too, weren’t going to come out onto land, but they were close enough to take snaps. After a while the big male got randy and started mating with his female. Another male tried to get in on the action and for a few seconds the water was churning with much snapping of huge mouths and grunting. His dominance established, the dominant male got on with the job of ensuring his genes would outlive him. Mating in hippos means the female is completely submerged under her partner. If he can’t do the job within five minutes or so, there’s a fair chance she’ll drown. (Must be the only occasion when the female of the species is glad if the bloke is over and done within a couple of minutes)!

We left the hippos to their bedroom romp and went in search of more goodies. Right on cue a flock of pelicans was dozing on the lakeside; we were able to get the wagon within twenty feet or so, so got some real close-up photos. Two fish eagles circled over us, shrieking at our intrusion into their hunting area. A bee eater, iridescent blue and green plumage on display to perfection, perched on a reed, while a small brown heron perched motionless, waiting for its dinner. There were water birds all over the place; I can’t remember all their names but ranging from cormorants to egrets.

Opposite us, on the far bank of the lake, was one of the park campsites. (You can camp in only two or three places and there is a proper shelter in which you can hide if it rains. I must say, I wouldn’t want to be camping too close to the water’s edge if there were hippo or crocs around, but apparently it’s quite safe if you follow the basic rules. (Like never get into the water and never get between a hippo and water).

We drove on, this time for miles through thorny scrub which occasionally overhung the dirt road. We learned the Dutch for “watch out” (“pas op”), and swatted tsetse flies from our skin. Tsetses are like horseflies; they bite hard and it swells like a horsefly bite, but apparently the ones in Akagera don’t pass on sleeping sickness to humans. Just as well, too. An African kingfisher, four times the size of ours but just the same electric blue plumage, buzzed us close as it flew past. Rollers and touracos, flamboyant in dusty pink or bright red feathers, bounced away from treetop to treetop.

The road jolted and bounced, and we learnt that when you go in one of these safari trucks you need to pad your chest well or you get bruised to pieces. We were black and blue by the end of the day. The sun had come out and it was getting extremely hot. Every few yards a termite mound poked out of the grass, some more than three feet tall and as big around as dinner tables. Just a few had the spectacular chimneys you see in “National Geographic” pictures, but I’m afraid I didn’t get a photo of one of them (this time).

By now we had reached Lake Hago (Akagera contains a whole series of these lakes; they’re all shallow but two in particular are enormous and very single one would rank as a major tourist attraction in England). We’d been gone three hours from the park gates and had seen only two other cars. We were just getting close to the water’s edge to park up and look for crocodile when a young male elephant burst from the trees and came towards us. We’d surprised him, just as he’d surprised us. He was a really unhappy bunny. Swinging his head, snorting, then trumpeting, he pawed the ground and started to charge. We’d just switched on our cameras ready to get a close-up of the nice jumbo…… Both driver and guide reacted immediately. The car swung round flinging us all off balance, and we retreated at full speed with the elephant still coming for us and still snorting as he crashed through the bushes. We didn’t know if there were more elephant hidden around us, and the guide wasn’t prepared to risk us getting encircled by them if the male was in such a temper, so I’m afraid we beat a retreat and we never got our picture of jumbo! But, then, how many times have any of you readers been faced with a stroppy elephant intent on doing you damage for trespassing on his patch?

Come to think of it, we didn’t see any crocs either. No matter, they’re not my favourite creature!

In between all this excitement we were trying to feed ourselves as we jolted through the bush. We’d had no breakfast, and there wasn’t exactly going to be a Macdonald’s in the Park, so we’d bought bread, marge, jam and loads of bottled water with us, and a big bag of imeneke (tiny bananas). What we’d forgotten was any useful cutlery except for Geert’s swiss army knife. So at intervals we tried wiping crumbly sliced bread into the marge tub, then tipping jam onto the result. You know what comes next – marge softening in the heat, jam missing its mark and ending up on the upholstery; marge stains on our trousers (mine were going to have to last me most of the coming week); sod’s law decreeing that just when you though it was safe to try eating, there’d be a creature popping up behind a bush. There were lots more baboons and other monkeys, but they were too shy to let us come close. Families of warthogs, too, which turned out to be the shyest of all. By the time you’d recognised them, they’d be in full flight with tails held up vertically; father leading the way and mother escorting the piglets (hoglets?) away into deep cover.

And so it went on for the rest of the day. We climbed up into the Mutumba Hills where there were wonderful views across the lakes. The air was fresh (but thunderstorms across Lake Ihema meant that it wasn’t brilliant for long-distance shots). No more tsetse flies; more open grassland with just occasional acacia trees – the landscape you see in all the films about African Savannah. Any time now we expected Meryl Streep or Karen Blixen to come round the next bend. Here the zebras were dusty brown and white – they’d been rolling in mud to get rid of parasites. Loads more impala, topi, dainty oribi (almost always in pairs) and one solitary Eland – the biggest of all the antelopes and a genuinely beautiful creature.

A solitary, grumpy warthog woke up from his afternoon siesta and ran off across our path. A distant flock of Cape buffalo, one of the most belligerent and dangerous of all the savannah animals, munched their way through the afternoon heat. Oribi jumped four feet clear into the air as they fled; every couple of yards you’d see first a couple of ears prick up, then you’d realise that what looked like small twigs were a pair of tiny horns, and then the gazelle would be on its feet and away, blending into the brownish grass.

Near the end of the Park we passed a group of white-backed and hooded vultures, each perched on a different tree as if they’d all fallen out with each other. We never saw what had died or was dying and attracting them, but it was probably an impala – our last experience of the park was a huge herd of sixty or more flitting in front of us and really not that bothered by our being so close. I suppose they felt safety in numbers.

Out of the park, we passed mile after mile of the beautiful (but semi wild) Akole cattle. The population pressure in Rwanda is so great that recently two-thirds of the entire original Akagera Park was handed over for animal grazing and cultivation. This isn’t quite as dreadful as you might think. There’s still a huge chunk of land with wild animals (you’d need the best part of a week just to drive round all the tracks), and the wildlife populations seem to be thriving, albeit some species more than others. We never saw lions, or hyenas, or cheetahs, even though they’re supposed to be there. Poaching does go on, but not as badly as before. And animals can cross into and from Tanzania’s wildlife areas on the far side of the Akagera river, so there’s no reason to despair for Akagera Park’s future. People need land to farm or they’ll be no better than refugees in their own land. Most of the settlers are Rwandans returning from Uganda. They speak English and dress as Ugandans (I can’t tell the difference but it was perfectly clear to Cécille, the guide). Some have been in Uganda from the 1970s violence in Rwanda; after thirty or more years they’re finally home.

And so ended our little safari. Four old men – combined age of 238 – and one jolly Ugandan.

Back in Kigali I went to Kersti’s birthday party. With hindsight this wasn’t a good move. I was tired, dusty and scruffy, but I’d arranged to sleep at hers and needed to be in Kigali ready for the refugee camp trip next day. Never mind, today was brilliant.

Best thing about today – everything about Akagera. Yet another red-letter day.
Worst thing – being too tired to enjoy a party!