Ok, Ok – I know it has been a while since I wrote a blog entry. Spending the winter in Edmonton has been keeping me busy – with teaching, taking classes, and organizing and processing data. It has also been a little less than blog worthy – although I am sure some people would love to see screenshots of statistics programs and hear about rundowns of data protocols, I have a feeling that I would lose some readers overall. I hope the wait was worth it, as I think I can write a few posts to get everyone excited about the second season of data collection coming up!
This and the next blog entries are going to focus on some side trips I took while in Uganda last year. I was not completely confined to Kampala and the Mayanja! I was able to take a short trip to Masindi, and a longer trip to Murchison Falls National Park. These two destinations are more examples of the treasures that you can find, if you are willing to explore a little!
Masindi is a town in Western Uganda, in the Bunyoro Kitara Kingdom - and it has a very interesting history. It is home to Uganda’s first hotel, built in 1923.
Masindi was a major transit point for goods moving through the Great Lakes region. The hotel is best known for its famous guests – and its interesting role in the history of American literature.
Ernest Hemingway came to Uganda in 1954 for a safari after publication of The Old Man and the Sea. It was an ill-fated trip, as Hemingway was involved in not one, but two plane crashes near to Masindi.
The first crash was a charter flight for sightseeing in nearby Murchison Falls National Park. The next day, a plane scheduled to take him to Entebbe for medical care exploded at take-off. To recover from his injuries, Ernest Hemingway became a guest at Masindi Hotel – where he reportedly read the erroneous reports of his death and corresponding obituaries while he convalesced.
Scenes for the movie The African Queen were filmed nearby as well, meaning that Hollywood stars Katherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart had to have somewhere to stay during filming.
They chose the Masindi Hotel – adding to the hotel’s international legacy.
The grounds of the hotel include a massive tree as the centre point of the outdoor restaurant.
This tree plus vines, mango trees, and tropical palms reinforce the lush landscape found nearby. Naturally, the hotel also features the Hemmingway Bar!
Other aspects of Masindi include an open-air market, where one may purchase all manner of goods. It is common for a family group to set up their wares and monitor the sales as they socialize with relatives and friends.
It is a noisy, colorful, and boisterous atmosphere. After being in the solitude and greenness of the bush for a month or two, the Masindi market was a bit of sensory overload at first – the neon colors, lots of voices, and the smells of fresh fruit and street food left me speechless for a while.
But, I enjoyed the experience and relished an opportunity to go to another market after a few more quiet weeks in the Mayanja!
One more strange thing I would like to mention – there are a number of pine plantations along the route to Masindi.
Unless you are a botany nerd, you may not know why that is strange, but pines are native mostly to the Northern Hemisphere and the New World. At first, I thought I was mistaken, but after a Bachelor’s degree in Forestry and many years in the southern U.S., trust me that I know pine plantations when I see ‘em. I asked my guide and trackers, and they did not know why there were pine trees, nor why that would be odd. I found out from a Uganda Wildlife Authority Ranger that in the 90’s and early 2000’s that foreign environmental groups planted the trees as a carbon sequestration project, and that they had been mostly forgotten in the ensuing years. While it has given me a few ideas for future research, it is also a reminder that you never know when or how your skills learned in previous jobs can benefit you down the line!
And there you have it – a new blog post, and another one with hardly any animals in it! But the next post I have planned will change that. Stay tuned for an entry on Murchison Falls National Park – where the buffalo and elephant roam!