
Guys, I’m low-key mortified by how long it took me to actually share the second half of our trip. I’ve been insanely busy writing and revising and writing and revising *something else* since we got back and apparently nyet so great at balance. I’ll try harder. Onwards:
Once you cross from Rwanda to Uganda you can definitely tell you’re in another country– not just because we had to switch our driving to the left side of the road. Our rental Rav4 was actually from Uganda so it was already right hand drive– but we’d spent the previous week-ish re-configuring our brains to drive it on the right side of the road while in Rwanda and now had to do the opposite. Let’s just say I am still completely messed up by this, six months later, while driving in Denver.
Safari Sans Fence

Top priority for Uganda was a safari at Queen Elizabeth National Park. I’ve safari’d twice before (in Kenya and South Africa) but there was one very big difference this time around: THERE WAS NO FENCE.
I was very confused by this. Normally there’s some sort of gate or wall to indicate you’re now in a safari park full of coloring book animals– but here it was just a mangled road under extensive construction, a left turn, and then a baboon was just chilling on our little dirt road. I’m sorry, what?
We stayed in a one room hut (apparently very similar to a scene from The Crown– Queen Elizabeth was here when she found out she was going to be Queen) in the middle of the park. So hippos, elephants, warthogs, etc. were just wandering around. Before dawn and after dusk we had to be escorted by an armed guard.

When we first arrived and were walking our backpack-laden selves to the cabin I spotted a ginger cat just off the path.
“Look, a wild animal,” I joked– because I have a very sophisticated sense of humor.
I made the standard *come here, cat. Let me scritch your ears* sound. Strangely, it resisted my advances and hunkered into KILL stance.
“I guess it has to be aggressive to survive out here,” I commented– because I am very educated on animal psychology.
Later that night as we lay beneath our mosquito nets, listening to hyenas celebrating death in the distance, Alex was like:
“Babe. You know that cat we saw earlier?”
He pointed to a photo in our Lonely Planet guidebook.
“It looks exactly like this African Wild Cat.”

Before I could fully appreciate the depths of my ignorance and stupidity there was a scrambling noise on the outer wall of the cabin.
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