Mt. Elgon

On the second day of my hike two of the armed rangers shot and killed a poacher right in front of me. Got your attention? Well, you'll have to read until Day 2 to find out what happened.

First, a little background. Mt. Elgon is the 8th highest peak in Africa making it the Mt. Manaslu or Mt. Fridtjof Nansen of Africa. Its located on the eastern border of Uganda, the mountain is shared with Kenya, which has about half of it. The peak is in Uganda, though. It has the largest base of any freestanding volcano in the world, and is thought to have been much higher than Kilimanjaro. About 20 million years ago it erupted leaving an enormous caldera, which the park service in Uganda claims is the largest in the world. Even if its not, and I don't really trust the Ugandan authorities on this, it's pretty big. There are several different hiking routes and I chose one that is supposed to be done in five days, but looking at the route it was pretty clear to me it could be done in four. After a little haggling with the park rangers they agreed to let me do it in four and arranged the guides and rangers. The next day I started the hike and...

Day 1:
The hike started at about 2000 meters and since I got a late start we decided only to go to the first camp which is about 11k from the park entrance, but has a good 1000 meter elevation gain. I passed through really beautiful, almost temperate rainforest looking, forest initially before passing through the bamboo forest range, which is at a higher elevation. We reached the campsite, Tutum cave, which was very, very pretty. The campsite is an enormous cave with a waterfall going over in front of the cave. Horsetail falls like, but the cave is bigger while the falls is smaller than at horsetail. The other cool thing about the cave is it has thousands and thousands of bats that at dusk all flew out to go have dinner. Well, I set up my tent in the cave, and went to sleep eventually only to be woken up by the guards. They said they heard something in the cave, and there had been reports of a leopard living in the cave not too long ago. So...I moved out of the area I was in to be next to the guards and the fire they had going constantly throughout the night. No leopard sightings that night, and I'm not convinced there was one, but I guess it was best I moved the tent.

Day 2:
Since we started late on the first day and only got to the first campsite we had a really long day head of us on the second. We had to cover about 43k alltoghether to get to the camp which is the base for going to the summit. Still in the bamboo forest we started walking further up the mountain, but eventually leveled off in an area above the forest. The vegetation started getting pretty weird and its a vegetation zone that only exists on alpine mountains in Africa. Eventually, probably another week, I'll get pictures uploaded and you can see it there. So...I'm not going to try to describe it, but its really, really, really cool looking stuff. There were a few tough climbs, but for the most part it was fairly level ground.

The hike was beautiful, and it was an otherwise uneventful day until we reached an area where the landscape opened up and you could descend down to Kenya if you wanted, and the vegetation was less dense. All of a sudden we see this guy run only about 15 meters in front of us, and the two rangers take off after him. He was a poacher, and while many apparently have guns, it was very clear to me, that he only had a machete on him. The rangers yelled at him to stop or they would shoot (that's what they translated to me later). He didn't stop, and they started shooting. They missed him badly at first, but after a minute they hit him a few times and he went down. I was pretty upset over the whole thing primarily because they never tried to shoot low and his legs, stopping him, but not necessarily killing him. I had taken along some Israeli army bandages and had a lot of first aid stuff in my pack. I ran over to see if he was still alive and if it was possible to do anything, but one of the bullets got him in the head, and he was clearly dead. Don't worry, I put on latex gloves first, but I checked for a pulse, and there was none.

I was pissed at the rangers for not shooting low, but they than claimed they saw two other poachers in the distance, but running away from us. I never saw the other two, but irregardless, it seemed a little dangerous to stay there. We had another two hours of light, and it was another hour to our camp. We were also in an exposed area, and we'd be easy targets if the poacher's friends decided to come back and attack us. Basically, after contacting the park headquarters we ran across the open area to the other side of the valley to where there was thick vegetation and than made our way quickly to the camp. First a side note - the whole hike we were moving very quickly, but I was sure my guides could do faster. I saw how much faster they could do on the way back to our camp after the shooting. After just a few minutes one of them was almost a kilometer ahead of me, and I was blown away by how much faster the local folks are than mzungus like myself who are in pretty good shape.

That night a few more park rangers came to the camp as a precaution, and the next morning they went out to get the body. Poaching is apparently not a huge problem in the area, but I wouldn't have known it from my hike. The poachers will kill anything, but buffalo is the most lucrative animal. Its illegal to serve it, but apparently some high end hotels will buy it illegally for clientelle that want buffalo meat. After being assured that the hike to the summit was far away from the areas where poachers go I decided to go on with the hike.

Day 3:
Very late, the previous night, a mzungu and his guide and ranger entourage also arrived from a different route to summit the following day. So all of us made out for the summit, called Wagagai, which is 4,321 meters. The other mzungu, Nico from London, is a very cool guy, and it was a nice hike to the summit. While it was still cold, it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, and we spent a bit of time up there. At that point Nico and his crew continued the way I had come from the previous day, despite the poaching incident, and my crew and I summitted what is called Jackson's peak. While a few hundred meters lower than Wagagai it is a more impressive peak and I thought the view was better as well. From both summits you can see well into the Kenyan side and its just a gorgeous afro-alpine caldera landscape all around. Again, you'll see it in pictures eventually so I won't try to describe it too much.

We got back to the camp where we spent the night around noon. After a quick lunch we started going down the mountain to a camp not too far from the park boundary. We reached that camp earlier than expected and at that point it made sense just to head all the way to the bottom. So what was supposed to be an easy day, compared to the distance covered in Day 2, turned into a 40k day as well, but I made it back to Mbale, the largest town in the area, by night.

The hike down the mountain was similar to the hike up, even though its a different area of the mountain. Bamboo forest leads into temperate looking forest, and its all very, very pretty. The last section of the hike goes through a rural agricultural area that encompasses the base of the mountain. Its the prettiest farm, rural area I've seen in Africa. Lots of coffee, bananas, lettuce, maize, beans, nicely kept homes, streams going throughout the area, and I was blown away. That part was almost my favorite of the entire hike, but the weird high alpine vegetation was the best.

That was my hike, which was one of the best I've ever done, and incredibly memorable, even if not always for the best reasons. Oh, if you're curious what will happen on the whole legal side of the poaching incident. In short, nothing. An investigation will happen, but from what I was told since the guy was a poacher it doesn't matter that he wasn't armed or that the rangers never tried to shoot low. He's a poacher, and he deserves to die is the basic mindset around the whole thing.

I'm going to be in the Mbale area for the next few days, primarily resting my sore body, and on Friday I plan on rafting in the Nile river with Nico, the guy I met on the Elgon hike. The rafting leaves from a town just an hour east of Kampala, called Jinja, and the rafting is supposed to some of the best in the world, and only the Zambezi, below Victoria Falls, is supposed to better in Africa.

That's all for now, although this has to be one of my longest posts. Hope everyone is doing well, and have fun.

tchau, B