I woke up feeling a million dollars compared to yesterday and after a quick breakfast we set off on quite a long drive south to our first stop, being the Kibale Forest.

Having been a bit out of it when we arrived last night I didn’t really spend a lot of time chatting with our driver/guide, Ronnie, but what became pretty obvious straight away this morning was that he is the spitting image of Eddie Murphy. I ask him to do the Eddie Murphy laugh and he just looks at me blankly. Anyway, he seems like a really nice guy and that’s a good thing when we’re going to be with him from dusk till dawn for the next 12 days.

The Kibale Forest is best known for it’s chimpanzees which we would spend a whole day tracking tomorrow, but by the time we made it to Kibale today we didn’t have a lot of daylight left so we headed for a nearby wetlands called the Bigodi Wetland Sanctuary. This place is a haven for some rather unusual and rare types of monkey, so with our local Bigodi guide we started walking around the swamp on the lookout for some monkey business.

We’d been walking about 20 minutes without seeing a single monkey so it all got a bit exciting when my other half suddenly gasps and points off in the distance, whispering ‘there …. monkeys’ to which our guide responds ‘no …. that’s children’. Awkwaaaaaard …..!!

Anyway, over the next hour or so we see some really unusual monkeys we’d never seen before and then made our way back to our lodge up on the hilltops overlooking the forest; a great place called Isunga Lodge, run by two Scots. After a few beers and G&T’s we watched the sunset over the valley and hit the sack for an early start tomorrow.

Day 1

So, after flying Isle of Man to Manchester to Brussels to Kigali to Entebbe we finally landed at about 11pm local time. I had landed with a drone in my luggage, permission for which I had applied for but not received prior to landing so was hoping for a nice smooth passage through customs. This however didn’t quite go to plan as during the day I had started to feel quite ill with both headaches and an upset stomach so instead was making my way to passport control looking like a serial killer and sweating profusely. Nothing says ‘please check this person’ quite like a big red face and sweat pouring down your face, so no-one was happier than me when we sailed straight through without any problems at all, thank fuck!

What had really helped was that we’d had a bit of luck at the airport. I remember when we had originally looked into coming to Uganda and Rwanda that with visas you could either apply online before hand for the e-visa or just do the paperwork when we landed. In true lazy-arse style I had decided to just sort the visa on landing, so, when we landed I felt so shit that I went straight to the toilet with the shits only to come out again ten minutes later to the back of a queue of about 200 people all in line for the visa. Great!! But as luck would have it it turned out that literally EVERYONE on the flight had organised the e-visa and were standing in the E-visa queue, whilst the desk for people applying for a visa on arrival was completely empty. So we walked past 200 or so people and had our visa all sorted and paid for with a 190 people still in the other queue. Mwahahaaaaaa!!

That feeling of euphoria soon subsided though when I realised I still had to put all my bags through an x-ray machine before getting through customs. Thankfully it didn’t detect my drone and before we knew it we were being greeted by our tour company representatives and on the way to our hotel; a very nice little place right on the edge of Lake Victoria in Entebbe called the K Hotel. I still felt like shit, so I necked a few painkillers, jumped into bed and was asleep within minutes.