Day by Day Travels

We managed to get a good nights sleep – hopefully we have conquered the jet lag! Up early as we were heading to lake Victoria for a ride out to the Mabamba bay marshes.
Now a quick note- I was not sure that I could navigate this trip on my own. The language barrier and the pure logistics of all the place we wanted to see, was very daunting. I had reached out to Rhino Africa, a company that we had used to book a safari in South Africa. They in turn oganized our trip to Uganda with Wolf DMC. Our guide for this trip was Timothy. He showed up on our day of arrival, filled us in on the where, how and when we were going. Honestly this was the best idea ever, as we just showed up at the designated times and had to worry about naught this entire trip- well done me!
So off on our first must do. We drove through the orange sand streets of Entebbe to the lake – once at the lake we caught a boat across this huge lake. Lake Victoria is Africa’s largest lake by area, the world’s largest tropical lake, and the world’s second-largest fresh water lake by surface area after Lake Superior in North America.
When we got to the marsh we transferred to a swamp canoe to better navigate the marshlands. 5 minutes in and we found what we were looking for – the shoebill stork! This massive bird is actually closely related to the pelican but looked like a prehistoric dodo to me. They are huge at about 5-6ft tall. This guy had his eye on us the whole time- winning the staring contest for sure. There was jsut us and one other swamp canoe- so he was not crowded at all and we were able to jsut site back and observe. There are apparently under 5000 still alive today – so on the verge of extinction. After watching this guy for a while we made our way through the marsh and saw more birds than you can imagine. I will never remember them all. We’ve become bird watchers – I guess this is 50!