QENP

This was a 7 hours’ drive from Kampala, we choose for the luxury to hire a car including a driver. The park is a home to lions, leopards, elephants, hippo’s, buffalo’s, warthogs and many types of deer. To experience the real adventure, we decided to go camping in the park. We had an awesome roof top tent on top of the car. Around sunset we made up a campfire, to keep the animals on a distance. However, soon we discovered some hippo’s nearby. This might be unexpected, but hippo’s are among the deadliest animals!

If you just leave them there to graze, they are not doing any harm to you. From the long journey we got tired, so we decided to sleep early. Already after only a few hours of sleep, I woke up. Our driver was calling us: “Selma! Selma! Wake up! There are elephants around the tent!” I opened the tent and saw a big group of elephants around our campsite. I didn’t know if this should make me happy; to see elephants so close by, or that I should be scared. Soon I found out, since our driver was now saying that we should quickly go out of the tent. Apparently, the elephants were trying to lift the tent and the car with their trunk.

Our driver didn’t trust the situation, because the group was with babies and some of them were mating. In a rush we left the campsite with our car, to the entrance of the park. The rangers arranged a bed for us in a ‘rescue house’. Although we were so tired, the games drives we did during daytime were even better. We saw a lot of lions and even a leopard! The second night our driver didn’t want to go camping again, unless we had a ranger with a gun along with us on the campsite. What a great weekend this was, I am happy to live in a country like this!