Getting close to wildlife under the Uganda sun

MURCHISON FALLS, Uganda — The giraffe looked down at me, his big brown eyes as calm as the savannah evening. Our eyes locked: me, wondering why he was so placid in a place where lions and leopards lurk. He, wondering at this pale person with a short neck and only two legs.

"The giraffes are my favorite," said our guide softly. Then he said to the peaceful giraffe, "Will you teach people to behave like you do?"

Murchison Falls National Park is a wild place where you can be eyeball-to-eyeball with a giraffe, arm's-length from a lion, close enough to a crocodile to count his pointy teeth. My husband and I are spending nine months in Uganda. Halfway into our stay I have traveled to the 1,480-square-mile park twice, once with him and once with my visiting brother; it is one of my favorite places in this beautiful country.

At Murchison, safaris are personal affairs, not crowded competitions to see the next big game animal. The park has recovered from the devastating poaching suffered during military dictator Idi Amin's reign in the 1970s.

Elephants now roam in large herds with no fear, their big ears flapping, not far from the occasional safari vehicle. Lions number about 200, and there can be as many as 50 giraffes in one herd. It is the same with other game: graceful kob and oribi (types of antelope), hippos, leopards, bushbuck, hartebeest, waterbuck, mean-looking water buffalo. The population of the park is alive and well.

Murchison Falls is a six-hour drive northwest of Kampala, Uganda's capital. The roads pass villages of round huts with thatched roofs and trading centers of shops with names like "God Is Able Dry Cleaners." At ramshackle roadside stands, tomatoes, mangos and avocados are stacked like cairns marking the way. Women walk along the road in gomesis (traditional dresses with pointy shoulders) carrying jerry cans of water on their heads, babies swaddled on their backs. As you get closer, olive baboons sit in the road, as if preparing you for Murchison, an oasis of wildness where the animals are up close and definitely in charge.

George Otuba, a ranger at the park for 30 years, tells this story about animals on the doorstep: Two hippos were fighting one night, and one backed right into his cabin. As he looked at the huge rear end of a hippo in his doorway, he decided the window would make a good exit.

On the evening we bonded with the giraffe, the sun was setting behind a ridge, outlining Murchison's signature palm trees and acacias. Elephants brought the seeds of the incongruous palms from Sudan and deposited them here, another ranger told us. Now solitary palms poke up from a sea of yellow grass, creating a strange and beautiful landscape.

The big cats

Our ranger/guide, Simon, met us early one morning for a game drive on the park's all-dirt roads. He stated confidently, "Today we will find the big cats." (You are not required to have a ranger with you on the game drives, but it is recommended. They know how to find the animals; they also carry a gun to scare away any aggressive animals.)

Our eyes strained as we looked for something furry and gold, but it was Simon who spied one: "There's a big male! In the grass." Pulling within eight feet of the resting lion, our driver turned off the Land Cruiser's engine. We were alone with the lion in the morning quiet as he yawned, stretched and surveyed the grassland. After several minutes he walked across the track to a water hole, where he met a second male lion. They drank together, these magnificent and muscular animals. We watched for a half-hour. There was not another person, not another vehicle, in sight.

On the second trip to Murchison, we saw the same two lions (our ranger and guide recognized the park's lions). One was loping across the game track toward a pair of fighting kob. "He is hoping they will lock horns and be trapped," George, our ranger that day, said. "Then he has dinner." But the kob separated and ran off. Walking down the road in front of us, the lion roared so loudly the air shook. George said he was calling to another lion, and sure enough, there was the other big male lying under a tree, roaring back. An entire herd of kob alertly followed the lion down the road like a crowd of commuters, all eyes on him, figuring it was better to have him in their sights than not.

All in all, we saw five lions the first trip, and seven the second. We saw huge herds of elephants, so close we could count their wrinkles. A female mock-charged us to protect her baby; it was just a warning that it was her turf, not ours.

One night when we were at dinner on the balcony of the park's Paraa Lodge, an elephant lumbered by below, munching the garden by the swimming pool (sometimes they take a dip). Later, a couple of hippos came up from the river. There are no evening strolls for Paraa guests.

As we headed back from a game drive another night our driver turned a spotlight on a snake in the road. It was about three feet long and eight inches wide, but when it slowly moved into the brush it stretched to six feet. It was a puff adder, a poisonous snake common to East Africa, but seldom seen.

The Nile

The park gets its name from the spot where the mighty Nile River is constricted and crashes down through a 23-foot wide gap on its journey northward to Egypt. We took the popular boat tour to the foot of Murchison Falls to see hundreds of hippos sneeze and harrumph in and out of the water, and dozens of crocodiles basking with their mouths agape. We drifted in close to see three baby crocs on their mama's back. Nearby was the spot where Ernest Hemingway's small plane crashed in 1954 during the American author's African safari; he, his wife and the pilot, who weren't seriously injured, were picked up by a boat much like ours.

Little red-throated bee-eaters with iridescent breasts flitted in and out of holes in the cliffs, and malachite kingfishers showed off their turquoise wings. Goliath herons, hornbills and snakelike darters barely cast an eye as we floated by.

At times, the Nile is possibly too alive with creatures for comfort. As we headed downriver, the boat engine stalled, and we drifted into the reeds. I was excited about being like Katharine Hepburn in the classic "African Queen" (some scenes were filmed near Murchison), but the other passengers were less amused. After we spent an hour watching for aggressive hippos and mosquitoes, the engine sputtered and we chugged on, unharmed except perhaps by the Ugandan sun.

On our safaris the rare shoebill, a prehistoric-looking stork more likely seen in Murchison than elsewhere, eluded us, as did the leopards. Somehow that made sense in this place that belongs to wildlife, not to lines of safari vehicles. If a leopard wanted to look us in the eye, like the giraffe, he would have. If not, well, good for him.

Theresa Morrow is a journalist living in Kampala, Uganda, working with her husband, Seattle Times editor Bill Ristow, who is a Knight Fellow with the International Center for Journalists.