Hills on Holiday, Part 2

As promised, here are some of the animals we encountered during our October vacation. We feel fortunate to live in a place where we can see these animals in the wild with no cages or bars.
We took a boat trip down the Kazinga Channel between Lake Edward and Lake George. We had the boat to ourselves remarkably and were delighted to see so many animals coming to the water for a drink and bath. The elephants were serene and plenetiful.

Waterbuck

Buffalo in the river. Some are red colored because they are mixed with a forest race of buffalo.

Uganda is well known among bird watchers, and the river trip gave us a great opportunity to see many of them together. I was photographing the birds when these hippos popped up to say hello.

The mother hippos did not like having us around. Two even charged our boat.

Banded mongooses make their home at the Mweya Lodge where we visited for the boat ride and lunch. One that we saw even had a collar.

We saw several warthogs with their tails high as they ran across the dirt track. We also saw a few like this big fella taking respite from the heat in mud pools.

The Queen Elizabeth National Park is famous for its tree climbing lions. We had just made the decision to drive across to a further part of the park in order to see them when we noticed two lionesses heading for a candelabra tree. This tree has a trunk resembling a normal tree, but the branches are more like a cactus. They perched in the tree for about ten minutes looking for prey but spotted nothing and returned to the male and another female. It was very exciting to get to see them in the tree.

Bands of baboons are often near the roads in game parks. QENP was no exception.

I have no idea what kind of Kenyan spider this is, but it's body alone was perhaps 3 inches long, and it had a hairy gold and white back. There were three of them outside our cottage.

In Kenya we had daily Blue and Vervet monkeys outside our cottage. This Blue monkey got a little closer than we expected.

All in all it was a great trip of enjoying the creatures the Lord created, including the two-legged variety in our own family!