Mabira Forest

After being back in the hustle and bustle of Kampala for a few weeks, Christine and I were dying to get out into some wilderness for a bit. I get into a “the world is my oyster” exploratory mode when I’m traveling in a place where cheap lodgings and national forests are abundant and the result is usually pleasing. So, in full oyster mode Christine and I packed a set of clothes and a flashlight and hopped a matatu to Mabire National Forrest, a 300km.sq stretch of jungle that is known for hosting a variety of monkey and butterfly species as well as just being gorgeous.
Our matatu dropped us off in Najembe, a tiny town in the middle of Mabira flanking the road that connects Kampala to the source of the Nile, and since white people are a little more scarce in rural towns than they are in Kampala, we had a little trail of smiling kids following us around within seconds while we walked around asking local women (using mostly hand gestures) where we could get a bite to eat. We stepped into a “restaurant” (a small room with a tin roof, two couches and a small fridge) just in time to avoid the torrential down pour that had been tracking us, and ate Matoke (a local dish composed of smooshed plantain), drank local tea, played cards and had a lovely but broken conversation with the restaurant matron until the rain stopped about a hour later. When we paid her the equivalent of about 2 US dollars for the food and tea she declared “now you are my sister!” and waved us onward, smiling. It was great.
That night, after hiking around a bit and sampling some delicious “chicken on a stick” (seriously, half a chicken….on a stick!) from the market we stayed in a little banda that had two twin beds, a deck that faced the dense jungle (allowing for nice monkey watching around dusk) and approximately 300,000 mildew spores that were waiting eagerly to enter my alveolar sacks and make a nice little home for themselves. I woke up in the morning with a slight cough and burning lungs, as did Christine, so I know that it wasn’t wholly psychosomatic.
Next day we went on a nature hike with a local guide who told us all about the trees and animals we saw including monkeys, coco trees, a lot of birds whose names I can’t remember and (my favorite) “strangler figs” which are trees that, at a young age, attach themselves to an established tree, slowly grow up its trunk and then after a few centuries, engulf it completely leaving a huge fig tree with a hollowed out network of roots near the bottom where the poor host tree once resided before it was basically suffocated by the fig. No, these figs are not my favorite because of their life-sucking nature, they’re just pretty :)