I’m such a happy person, as Youri decided to visit me in Queen Elisabeth Park. He rented a boda boda (small motor), took some lessons and had to drive for 2 days to see me. Real love :-). We met 1 km before the cross road into the park, such a great timing. Both full of dust and tired. But hugging, chatting and laughing we forgot all of that in the light of the campfire.

Psst Youri can you hear that sound? Come let’s go and have a look. It was 06.10 hr but it felt in the middle of the night when we opened the zipper of the tent. It was still a bit dark. We followed the sound and just around the corner we could see a big group of elephants. Impressed by the huge size of the animals we were holding hands and had to laugh that we stood there in our underwear and just some flip flops. Still impressed by the group we never had a look behind us. Fortunately and a second later unfortunately the mother and 5 baby elephants stood behind us. We never heard them coming from that side as our eyes were still focusing of the picture we saw in front of us. Seeing the mother behind us we knew we were in trouble! And we were. All of a sudden the leader and also the biggest one of the group made a scary noise, lifted his trunk and started to attack us. Holy f*ck. The only thing we could do was running for our life and we did! Some stories are nice 1 or 2 days later but not in the moment. It took us some days to recover from this adventure as we both were really scared. Happily we managed to leave the emotions from the attack behind us and had a great and wonderful holiday together. We saw so many animals just by crossing the park with our small motor. Hippos, buffalo’s elephants, lions and monkeys were all around us.

Saying goodbye for the next two months was hard again. With tears in our eyes we left each other at the cross road. But to be honest, soon I forgot all of that. Why? I had to cross the park from north to south by bicycle. Can you imagine that I was so nervous? I never cycled 80 kilometres off road that fast! With a constant heart beat I was not so sure if I really liked it. Especially when a ranger stopped to tell me that there were some lions 3 kilometres in front of me. I asked him a thousand times if it was really ok to cycle. He assured me that there was no problem. But I can tell you that my brains thought different about this. I didn’t dare to look as my brains kept in telling me that lions and cyclist together are not such a great combination. But I made it :-) and I’m grateful of the wonderful experience I had in life.

Love Isa from Kisoro and Youri from Jinja

p.s. I crossed Bwindi national park with the Gorillas. It was a though ride as I had to climb from 1200 to 2500 meter off road. Full of dust, mud and tired legs I was happy with my first shower and real coffee after 10 days