The Place Of The Little Birds

This weekend the Wilks, Kari, Dr. Christy and I spent a night at Bushara Island in Lake Bunyoni. Just outside of Kabale and about 2 and a half hours from Mbarara, Lake Bunyoni sits up in the mountains of Southwest Uganda, a region which more resembles Colorado than Uganda. The lake, one of the deepest in Africa, is beautiful and surrounded by mountainsides covered with terraced farming. Bunyoni means "place of the little birds" and it is a fitting name as there are birds everywhere.

Bushara Island is a "resort" island in the lake. Its revenues help support an orphan care project and it is supposedly an eco-friendly resort. To get there you have to take a boat, be it a motorboat or a dugout canoe. As interesting as it may be to travel to Bushara by dugout canoe, we opted for the motor boat instead. Canoeing was not neglected altogether, though. You can rent canoes on the island, so Jared and I took one on a trip around the island. We discovered that dugout canoes don't steer quite so well as your average American canoe and we spent the first 10 minutes spinning in circles. In all it took about an hour and a half of circling and zig-zagging to make our way around the island. We didn't really start to get ahold of how to make it go consistently straight until the last 10 minutes. Later we helped the girls take a trip out in a giant canoe as well.

There are a few different things you can do on the island. You can rent canoes or small one person sailboats, hike (though the island's not all that large so you can't hike for too long), play volleyball, eat decent to good food, relax by the fire at night (and yes it can actually get cold enough that you would want to sit by a fire...in fact this morning everyone was wearing sweatshirts or jackets), swim, and apparently do a variety of other activities that must be elsewhere on the lake (they were listed at the reception but they definitely weren't present on the island). There was also a small playground, from which this picture of Anna Wilks comes. At night we sat out on the swimming pier and looked up at the most gorgeous night sky. Being at significant altitude and with no power anywhere to provide any light, you could see an incredible number of stars. I've never seen the Milky Way so clearly nor stretching all the way across the night sky.

We stayed in tents. These weren't exactly camping tents, however. Each one had a few chairs to relax in out front, comfortable (for Uganda) beds, a table with chairs, a nightstand and a place to hang your clothes inside. Also provided were lanterns, flashlights, candles, and even some flip flops. And the blankets were the best: when it was still warm when I went to bed the blankets didn't make me feel hot, and when it was cold when I woke up the blankets kept me warm. Not exactly roughing it. Of course the bathroom was a "composting toilet," basically a pit latrine but with an uncomfortable seat (instead of just a whole) and some ash that you had to dump in when you were done (though it worked to keep it from smelling somethin awful like most pit latrines), and the shower was a large metal container suspended above an outdoor enclosure, but there's no power, no running water, and it's "eco-friendly".

In all it was a great time to get out and see God's fantastic creation, relax, and enjoy the company of great friends. Hope you enjoy the pictures.
















The mountain in the background is Mt. Muhavura. At 4127 meters (13,540 feet) it is the highest of the Ugandan Virunga volcanoes, a volcano chain that stretches across Uganda, Rwanda and DRC. In fact you are looking at both Rwanda and Uganda right now as Muhavura sits in both countries. Their slopes are covered in rainforests and are the home of half the world's wild mountain gorillas (the other half living in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park, also in Uganda). In fact the Rwandan Virungas were the site of the events best known from the movie Gorillas In The Mist. Next weekend Barry, Jared and I will attempt to climb Mt. Gahinga, the shortest of the 3 Ugandan Virungas. Hopefully we'll eventually be able to summit Mt. Muhavura as well.