Hemingway Adventure

Western Rift Valley, Uganda

At the head of Lake Albert, on its eastern shore, is our first sight of the Nile, snaking east and north, a coil of silver in the late afternoon sun. When we get closer I can see large herds of elephant in the shallows, and the heads of innumerable basking hippos. Fish-eagles looking like lords in ermine with their white head and neck feathers fly below us as we slowly descend toward the falls.

The Murchison Falls are not high and they're so enclosed in rocks and forest that you don't see them until you're almost on top of them. What makes them so special is the sheer power of the water-flow. This is no elegant sheet of falling water, it's more like a power-jet. The Nile, a third of a mile wide as it flows off the plateau, is squeezed into a tortuous gorge only twenty or thirty yards across. Some of the water spills over a precipice further away, but the bulk of this throttled river blasts its way downwards in a corkscrew spiral, the water tossed from one rock face to another until it crashes out of the gorge in a carpet of foam a quarter of a mile wide and half a mile long.

We land at a dirt airstrip nearby then take the ferry over the river to put up for the night at the Nile Safari Camp.

There is no respite from the heat, no evening breeze like the one that cooled us in the Chyulu Hills. Instead, the chatter of crickets and the drone of mosquitoes and, echoing up from the river below, a frog chorus interspersed with the chuckle and splash of the hippos.

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PALIN'S GUIDES

Series: Hemingway Adventure
Chapter: Western Rift Valley, Uganda
Country/sea: Uganda
Place: Western Rift Valley
Book page no: 183

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Western Rift Valley, Uganda

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