Email: Greetings from Fort William, Scotland
Lauren and I are now in Fort William, on the western side of Scotland and a major gateway to the highlands. We spent three days here enjoying the scenery while dodging rain storms.
Lauren and I are now in Fort William, on the western side of Scotland and a major gateway to the highlands. We spent three days here enjoying the scenery while dodging rain storms.
It is Saturday morning and we are preparing to leave Edinburgh, our last stop in Scotland. We arrived here early Thursday afternoon after our last train pass journey from Fort William, via a change in Glasgow.
Well we are on the road again, this time for a 10 day trip to Ecuador. We flew to Miami on Sunday and then took a four hour flight to Quito, Ecuador. It is the second highest country capital in the world at about 9,500 feet.
Since we last wrote, we left the hacienda north of Quito on Wednesday and made our way to Cotopaxi National Park about 50 miles south of Quito. We hired a driver to take us between the two destinations, which included a stop at the equator itself, about 15 miles north of Quito.
As I write this, Sandy and I are making our return trip upstream on the Rio Napo (Napo River) from the Sacha Lodge back to Coca, Ecuador – a distance of approximately 50 miles. We stayed at Sacha for the last four days.
Sandy and I are now flying at 37,000 feet and have we have just crossed the coast of Africa between the border of Tunisia and Libya. The turquoise water is in stark contrast with the desert city of Tripoli.
We have been in Entebbe, Uganda for the past two days to acclimate to Africa and explore the area around Lake Victoria prior to beginning our National Park / Gorilla safari on Saturday.
Sandy and I are currently at Ishasha Bush Camp in Queen Elizabeth National Park, just a few minutes from Uganda’s border with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The camp is perched on the Ntungwe River which is fast moving and deep brown in color.
There is no electrical grid in Buhoma – the name of the settlement that includes the buildings both inside and outside of Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park. It took 180km (111 miles) of poor dirt roads to get here and the nearest paved road is 85km (53 miles) away. Our purpose for coming to Buhoma was to see the mountain gorillas in the wild.
We are now flying over the Atlantic in the midst of a 30+ hour odyssey home, which is comprised of four flights: first to Nairobi, then Brussels and Chicago, before the final leg to LAX.