Christmas in Queen

For Christmas, we went to Queen Elizabeth National Park for the day and had lunch at the very fancy Mweya Lodge. It was me, Jeff, Emily, Pani (Emily’s 2 month old baby), Marion (Emily’s neice), Faith (Emily’s sister), Alex (chimp researcher), and Julie (chimp researcher). We met at Emily’s early in the morning and piled into her car. Our first stop was the Equator where we took the mandatory tourist photos. Then we drove slowly through the park looking at buffalo, elephants, warthogs, kob, birds, and other animals as we approached the gate. At the gate, Emily and I successfully talked our way through without paying. The funnier part was that just Emily and I got out of the car and talked to the rangers, but then we drove through the gate with all 7.5 of us. We got up to the lodge and relaxed for a bit before going in to eat. We had a nice table on the veranda with a beautiful view. The table was covered with Christmas party hats and Christmas “crackers”, which are tube shaped presents that you pull on the ends of and they pop open with gifts inside (apparently this is an English tradition??). We opened our crackers and found our paper crowns, lame jokes, and cheap toys. Then we headed up to get loads of food. It was a buffet and they increased the price by 3 times just for the holiday spirit. Jeff and I were determined to get our money’s worth, so we stuffed ourselves silly. We took it slow and ate for several hours – slowly but surely eating, eating, eating. Jeff ate piles and piles of meat (of which there was a lot) and I refilled my plate with heaping piles of salad. Fresh salad is hard to come by in this part of Uganda – scratch that, it is impossible to come by in this part of Uganda – so I ate TONS! It was really good! After we got done eating, we walked Alex, Julie, and Marion down to the boat launch to take a trip on the channel to see wild animals. Jeff and I have done this a few times before and are currently broke, so we opted not to go. Emily and Faith stayed up at the lodge taking care of the baby. After we saw those three off on the boat launch, we took a relaxing walk back to the lodge and hung out with those ladies. At 7 pm, we picked the boaters up from the launch and headed back to Kibale. It got dark shortly after we left Queen and we drove for most of the way in the dark. Since electric power is rare in most parts of Uganda, the way was mostly dark. Every few miles, we would come upon a trading center or village where tons of people were gathered to party for Christmas. Most people hung out around the places that had generators to power lights and music. Everyone seemed to be having a great time!

Check out our pictures below of all our Christmas fun!