Mberera Forest

This is my first real effort to make good on something I mentioned a while ago. What was that? you ask. To provide you with shorter, more frequent posts. See, the Westminster Recap post I wrote took about 6 hours to produce (writing, editing, resizing pictures, uploading, etc). My plan for this post is to finish it in less than 15 minutes. I better get rolling...



The picture you see above is from a hiking trip Amanda and I took with John and Tom and Jill Fontaine. When did we go? Oh, about a month ago. September 30th to be exact. We visited Mberera National Park, which is only about 45 minutes from Kampala, on the way to Jinja (east of Kampala). To be honest, I was expecting to see a lot of colorful plants and interesting wildlife on our hike, but I was kind of disappointed. The forest was primarily green vegetation and there weren't many animals that we saw. (The welcome center had a picture of a ~4 m Python that had been spotted on site. Amanda wasn't happy.) There were two redeeming aspects of the trip though: The first one is these amazing trees that are shown above. They remind me of trees I've seen Florida where the root system is also exposed. Of course, the big differences were that the Ugandan trees were over a hundred feet tall and the visible root systems were 8 or 9 m wide.



The other really neat thing we saw was a group of five monkeys. We had hiked for a few hours hoping to see some monkeys but didn't. At the end of the hike, with the welcome center literally 50 m away, we here these guys making all sorts of sounds. We watched them run around on a few different trees for a while before they scurried out of view. If I remember correctly, these are Red-Tailed Monkeys, even though you can't see it in this shot John took:



Alright, it took a bit longer than 15 minutes but I'm still happy with my time.

Go Cards!