A strange bird

When we've spent a week in a major town (Kampala this time) we always like to move about again, explore the surroundings, discover new places and the main reason: cycle! The 15th of August we head for a place that will ring a bell for a lot of people: Entebbe. At 35 kilometres from Kampala it lies at Lake Victoria and thanks its existence mainly at the international airport. While writing this I realise a lot of us do not have any recollections hearing the name Entebbe. I'm getting old: it was in 1976 that an Air France-plane coming from Israel
was hijacked and forced to land in Entebbe. Israeli paramilitary troops ended the hijack with a spectacular surprise-attack and liberated all the passengers. Maybe the younger readers remember something of the events through the dramatic movie that was based on the hijack: Raid on Entebbe. This isn't the reason for our visit here. We're never very interested in those big, silvery birds, let alone a hijack. There are lots of birds that are far more beautiful and interesting.
The road from Kampala to Entebbe leads through a landscape that's quite undulating in a united ribbon of villages. It looks like we see the same mini-stores in every village again, waving and staring people and of course banana-plantations for the Ugandan staple-food: matoke. Entebbe itself consists of no more then a few streets, a couple of expensive hotels that aim at the thick wallets of passing business-men and politicians, and houses that have an air of past glory. We're glad we've arrived here on time, thanks to the short distance, because it takes us a few hours to find decent accommodation for a reasonable price. Our first choice, a camping site, has given its last breath a short while ago. The guesthouse, which some people advised us to go to, costs about seven times as much as we can spend. Hotel Imperial, where world-impostor Bush resided a few months ago, is not to our taste. Thanks to some boda boda-boys we find the only affordable place in town: the New African Village Inn. Here again lights without light and a shower with a jerrycan, and unfortunately no friendly staff.
After having washed ourselves with a splash of cold water we're off in search of the botanical gardens, one of our reasons for visiting Entebbe. Saint Christopher sends us a guide, like usual, and a good one as well this time. Emmanuel is an orphan since he was nine, when both of his parents were killed by the mutinous gangs of Joseph Kony in the north of the country. A year later he fled to Entebbe and has taken care of his own livelihood since then. Now he's 21 and a nature-guide for almost 12 years. He's very good at it. He shows us al particularities of the gardens in detail: incense-tree, nutmeg-tree, clove-tree, cinnamon-tree, umbrella-tree, travellers-tree and crocodile-root-tree.

The latter has very freaky overground roots that resemble a crocodile in the water. During a photo-session we discover we're standing on a safari ant-highway. I'm bitten very hard in my toe (at night I have to remove two big ant-jaws out of the attacked body-part). Between the monkeys we go to a stretch of jungle, where the original Tarzan-movies have been filmed and Idi Amin - always afraid of getting poisoned - drank the safe water of a natural source. While avoiding the giant webs of the dragon-spiders we go searching for another goal of us: the great Blue Turaco and the Shoebill. Our experienced guide finds the Turaco after a long search. A shy bird that hides in bushes and tall trees. We see six of them: big blue birds with a brown tail, yellow beak with red and a black cock's comb that stands straight up on his head. You can't imagine something like this. Our ultimate goal, the rare Shoebill, we don't find though.

The next day we visit the Uganda Wildlife Education Centre. Animals that have been saved out of the hands of poachers and illegal traders, or just had an accident are brought here. In a lot of ways it resembles a zoo, although a number of animals walks about free. It's a strange sensation being in a zoo in Africa, like something isn't quite right. An aquarium in the sea. Via the shortest way we go to the bird that excessively tickles our imagination, hoping to catch a glimpse of it. We arrive at a marsh-area, surrounded by thicket and protected by a fence dozens of metres high. On a few metres distance we see a silver grey kind of stork over a metre high, with an enormous head, ditto beak, crest, yellow eyes, thick neck and long legs and toes. It's an amazing combination of a Walt Disney-cartoon that went wrong and a pre-historic Jurassic Park phenomena. This can't be real.

We discover three more of them. For two hours we're standing there, sometimes one of the birds come so close that we can actually smell and even touch it through the fence. After having taken a lot of slides of the Shoebill we still stare at it, mouths wide open. Fascinating. Incredible. Great. Overwhelming. Breathtaking. Impressive.
We're done with Africa. See the Shoebill, and die.
A strange bird.