We landed a little ahead of schedule. The weather here on the equator was overcast and warm with scattered showers. The airport at Entebbe was easy compared to Heathrow or even Denver. All bags come in on the single conveyor. We scooted through customs and immigration but the $30 visa fee good for 90-days depleted our US funds. While we waited for a few minutes for Stephanie to pick us up we had a flashback to our first day in South Africa when I screwed up our arrival date and no one came to collect us. But Stephanie came and in short time we arrived at the JGI compound on the shore of Lake Victoria.
We horsed our gear from the truck to our second floor room. ‘Hornbill Hall’ is just off a large living room and bathroom. It has a single bed and a double, each with mosquito nets. Off the living room is a nice veranda with a great view of the lake and enough birds to keep us busy for a while.
We were introduced to the staffs – JGI shares the facility with the Chimpanzee Sanctuary and Wildlife Conservation Trust which manages the Ngamba Island sanctuary. The rest of the morning was taken up with paperwork and orientation and plans for our trip to and duties at Kalinzu. It will make more sense once we get into the job but that won’t happen until Sunday or Monday because of some “unscheduled” national holidays which resulted from the recent elections.
After a lunch we finished our briefing and went with Stephanie into town to buy some food for the next two days. She “loaned” us 100,000 shillings, about $60 until we can get to the bank in Kampala and we shopped at John's, a tiny, claustrophobia inducing store and at an open-air fruit and vegetable market. The equivalent of $1 bought us four small tomatoes, six bananas, and three potatoes. They also had mangoes, pineapples, avocados, a variety of dried beans, capsicum, chunks of meat and more. If the country markets are as rich we won’t have trouble feeding ourselves but our diet most certainly will change.
We both had trouble staying awake during the last briefing – 5 hours of sleep in two days isn’t quite enough it appears – so we napped for a couple of hours before dinner. We had soup and grilled cheese tonight but we bought a frozen chicken for tomorrow. I have no idea what we will do with it. The kitchen is most definitely lacking.
Although Kalinzu will have no electricity, life at headquarters isn’t much of an improvement except for flush toilets and a hot shower. Steph says the electricity works every other day, two out of three if you are lucky, and the lighting in the office consist of a bare 50-watt florescent bulb suspended from the ceiling. It’s not much different from camping except that the Chimp House has staff and visitors coming and going, making us feel like the outsiders we are.
It’s only 8:15pm and I beginning to fade. Could we be only 48 hours removed from Denver?
