Day 156: Public road through QENP to @the river lodge Ishasha

We had a slow morning and only left at 11:00 again. We retraced our route on the horrible ‘tar’ road back to the turn-off to Ishasha in the South. From the turn-off, it is a decent gravel road with only some corrugation towards the end. It’s a public road, but we still got to see elephants, topi, large herds of buffalo, impala, baboons, warthogs, and waterbucks.

The scenery varied between savannah-like terrain and thicker bushes to a proper forest in the Maramagambo Forest.

We turned off towards Lake Edward at Kisenyi. It is a very rural and dirty town with lots of Maribou storks feeding on trash next to the road. We got to the lake shore where fishermen were cleaning their nets or something. Just as we were about to leave after taking a quick photo we saw a pod of hippos very close to the fisherman. We parked and walked along the shore stopping opposite the Hippos, less than 30m from the closest fisherman. The fisherman didn’t seem to mind at all.

After few more photos, we hit the road again and headed to @the river lodge. We arrived at 14:47 and were greeted by the South African manager who was excited to hear our South African accents. The last 300m to the campsite from the reception is one of the bumpiest roads we’ve ever felt. It’s like a roller-coaster ride, especially when only going at walking speed.

The campsite is next to the river, but there wasn’t any grass at this stage. It looked like they haven’t had a lot of rain yet. We set up camped and tried to fix the battery monitor by replacing the whole fuse cable with a new one, but it still didn’t work.

Later we went swimming at the small river beach. The river was flowing quite strongly so if you don’t hold on to the ground you’ll be washed away down stream. We had some fun ‘letting going’ and the walking upstream just to float down some meters again.

For dinner, we had beans cooked in coconut milk and rice a team effort by Caro and Sekar.