I can’t believe I’m going to say this; it’s like I’ll never learn. It feels like spring is here and it’s only early March. I know better than to start planting certain things before Easter but it’s really hard to stop myself this year especially. We are doing some big projects in our yard getting ready for the garden tour in May. That part I’m not worried about that’s a lot of dirt work and woody ornamentals going in. But what’s making me itch are the bedding plants that are smiling at me in our greenhouses. They are already out on the tables for sale, mostly those that wouldn’t be affected by a slight dip in the temperatures.
Most of my plants that will bloom the spring that have been growing since last October, like foxgloves, poppies, delphinium, snapdragons and campanulas are starting to bud. I don’t know if they’ll hang on until May 1, but that is my hope. Believe me, I have a backup plan to the backup plan, so we’ll be all right.
Last week I ended the article in a part where mom and I were about to wake up early, drink some coffee, have some breakfast and get in the Jeep by 6:30 in the morning to go track chimpanzees. It was about an hour’s Jeep ride to a congregating place where a pretty big group of people were to meet and be split up into groups of eight to go into the deep forest listening and watching for chimpanzees high up in the trees. When we got out of the Jeep with the group we were to be with which coincidentally was the Canadian family again who we tracked the gorillas with, one of the trackers heard chimpanzees off in the distance. That was kind of a relief because that meant we wouldn’t have to go for hours before we would find them.
We walked through the deep jungle for about 30 minutes when one of the trackers pointed up to the sky and had us all stop. As our eyes adjusted, we realized there were chimpanzees all around us way up in the trees. At first, they were hard to make out because the foliage was so dense that not much light was coming through. Once the chimpanzees spotted us, they began to make a lot of noise. You can imagine what it sounds like when about 20 chimpanzees are excited and warning each other, we were there. They mostly hung around the branches chewing on some kind of fruits. Some of them were more curious than others and would climb halfway down a tree, make a threatening noise and then go back up really fast.
I was clicking away with my camera, sometimes not sure what I was getting but I figured I could deal with that when I got back to the lodge that night. Some of the chimpanzees threw stuff at us from way up high and some climbed all the way down to the ground to pound their fist really hard on a certain kind of tree that sounded hollow. The wings of the roots of these trees were the drums the chimpanzee used to send reverberations up into the air where the group was to let them know there was a threat down below. The foliage down on the ground where we were was still mostly wet with the morning dew.
The female tracker, whose name was Allen, told me the chimpanzees wouldn’t come down much as long as the foliage was wet, they don’t like that. She was kind enough to lead Mom and me in the direction the chimpanzees were headed to keep us in view of some great photos. I noticed throughout our whole trip that most of the trackers were females. There aren’t many jobs for women in Uganda, so they created a cooperative that trains women to track animals with tourists.
Watching the chimps way up in the trees, which was giving me a neck ache like walking around the Sistine Chapel, went on for about 45 minutes until suddenly, like an alarm went off, all of the chimpanzees climbed down the trees and got on the forest floor with us. It was then that I realized the chimpanzees were bigger than I thought they were. They were not shy to get pretty close to us and some of them even seemed like they were posing as we took pictures and stood very still while we watched them get more and more comfortable with us.
As it began to warm up, they began to pick insects off each other, which is a sign of love and family, and companionship. My pictures of the chimpanzees up in the trees are great, but when they came down to the ground and got face level with me, I have some pictures that are just amazing. From a distance, they all look very much the same but up close I began to notice some are lighter skinned with freckles and some are completely black in the face. Some of the older ones had gray hairs around their face lines and the younger ones seemed to have no fear at all. Just as suddenly as the chimpanzees came down from the trees, the leader of the group started making a noise and waving his arms as if to say it’s time for them to go, and they all got up and ran towards him and beyond him until they disappeared into the jungle.
It was so exciting to be so close to these animals and to look them right in the eye before they scooted off. That’s a moment I will never forget, and Mom was having a blast taking pictures with her own camera. When we got back through the jungle and back to the Jeep we went to the congregating place again, and we each received a certificate that shows we successfully tracked chimpanzees and learned a little bit.
We stopped at a place Emmanuel knew about and had a couple of cups of coffee and talked about what we would like to do next. Mom and I were both in the mood to go into a village and walk around and talk to some people just for the experience. Emmanuel knew just where to go and before we knew it, we were in a village on a steep mountain side, that was just beautiful. People went about their business and smiled as we went by. It was definitely weird to be in the village walking around, but no one seemed to mind.
One family invited us to their place where they were working on roasting some coffee beans. They let us watch as they ground the roasted beans then they boiled some of the grinds. We had coffee together. It was a cool experience, but not the best coffee I had on the whole trip. I’m a little particular about my coffee if you can’t tell.
We walked farther until another guy invited us into his backyard where he was making banana water, banana beer, and banana gin. With his hands, he would press bananas with banana leaves wrapped around them until he got a clear liquid. That was the banana water which he let us try. I was thinking this would be pure magnesium and maybe that night I wouldn’t get leg cramps. (It didn’t work.) He had bottles and labels for his banana beer and banana gin, and we got to see his still where he made it, it looked just like an old still you would see up in the Appalachia. Mom tasted the banana beer and said it tasted pretty good, but she didn’t want any more after that.
We sat around with a bunch of ladies who were making baskets and weaving things while they smiled and laughed at us. Mom watched one of them make an angel out of reeds and some kind of indigo dye that was really beautiful. She bought that angel for Mimi and gave it to her upon our return. We were pretty bushed by that time and happy to take a ride back to our lodge to kick our feet up for a little while. At least we thought that’s what we were going to do.
I began receiving texts from some friends back home, asking if I had been watching the weather. I had not been watching anything to do with back home or really anything on the internet for quite a while. I could see that the pink was moving fast towards Atlanta and Mississippi. We were scheduled to have two more days a little farther north where the Merchant Waterfalls are.
One day we would spend at the top of the waterfalls and the second day we were going to spend at the bottom of the falls. The more I looked at that radar the more I realized we needed to get home quickly to get in front of that storm. Mom was outside talking to my sister on the phone when I interrupted to say I was going to need her help and she needed to get off the phone. I called Delta Airlines and they put me on hold for about 15 minutes, which I needed because on the other phone held up to my other ear, I was calling the Safari company we were with to see if there’s any way they could get us to Entebbe, where the airport is in seven hours.
More on Alan and his Mom’s Uganda trip in next week’s edition.
Emmanuel came running around the corner to ask what was going on. I told him we had an emergency and needed to get back to the airport as quickly as possible. He said he could make it happen. The lady from Delta Airlines came on, understood the situation and asked what I would like to do. I told her we needed to get to Mississippi at all costs. Even if she had to put us in the luggage rack and reroute us through Hong Kong, I wanted to be on the front end of that storm before I got stuck somewhere I didn’t wanna be for about a week.
I have one friend who travels for a living, so he was giving me advice on how to move this fast, and I have another good friend who is an airline hostess for American Airlines, and she was also giving me tips on how to get through this quickly. Delta managed to find flights for us if we could get to Entebbe fast enough (it took us seven hours of unpaved roads) that would route us through Kenya, from there to Amsterdam to Atlanta to Mississippi, 20 hours of hell. That all sounded good to me except for one catch, they wanted us to spend the night in Atlanta the night before the storm. The flight out the next morning would've been at eight o’clock in the morning, probably too late and we’d have been stuck. Mimi booked a hotel for us in Atlanta so we would have a place to sleep for a couple of hours when we got in from Amsterdam.
My buddy said he didn’t want to upset the apple cart, but there was a flight leaving out of Atlanta an hour and a half after we landed from Amsterdam. That’s cutting it pretty close, but it is possible. I called Delta back to see if they could get me on that flight leaving out of Atlanta late that night but also leave my name on the next morning’s flight in case we didn’t make it. They said they could do that, so we had a no lose situation, we just had to get moving fast. My friend who works for American Airlines said by all means get a wheelchair for mom when we get to Atlanta and try to see if she can look old or sick which she tried. She can’t look old event when she tries. When we made it back to Entebbe, we went to the original hotel we started at where the group from our safari company was there to meet us and wish us farewell.
We got there at nine o’clock at night and had a 3:40 a.m. flight out of so we had three hours to dilly-dally before catching a ride to the airport at midnight. They gave us a room to get packed and cleaned up and we had a little time to spend with Emmanuel before we left. Saying goodbye to him wasn’t easy as we had all become pretty good friends by this time and he was everything to the trip that we had just experienced. We all promised to keep in touch by writing letters to each other when we could. Emmanuel dropped us off at the airport and we were on our way. All the flights went well; we made it to Atlanta and the man with the wheelchair was waiting there for us and told me to hang onto him tight.
When we got to customs, he unsnapped the barrier rope and busted us right through to the front of the line, much to a lot of Dutch tourists’ chagrin (we were on our home turf now). The customs agent looked at us and waved us through, and we were on our way to the gate to make it home late that night to good old Jackson. Things at the Atlanta airport were deteriorating fast as people were going into a panic and flights were getting canceled. We jumped on our flight before anybody could change our mind. We took that quick one-hour flight to Jackson; I was never so glad to see our hometown and Mimi on the other end there to pick us up. Mimi had covered the yard with frost cloth, got some of the guys at the nursery to help her bring lots of firewood up to the back door and had plenty of water and rechargeable things in case electricity went off when the ice storm came. The next morning the ice began to fall, the electricity went off for a short while, and my generator kicked in.
As we have done for other ice storms, we slid our mattress into the room with the fireplace and kept that fire going for five days and nights. We had so much to talk about and it was such a perfect time to recover from that long crazy flight back from Africa. Mom’s place was in good shape at Saint Catherine’s. They hardly ever lose their electricity there. The next morning, I got up and went grocery shopping for her to make sure she had some vittles to munch on until the roads were clear. That was one amazing journey that we were on and I’m still flipping through the pictures keeping the best ones and deleting those that don’t make the grade.
During our downtime, I was able to put together a slide show of the best pictures. Mom, Mimi and I put together some duck gumbo and some good bread and invited 18 of our family members over for a picture show of our trip. Max and Madeline showed up with a beautiful king cake since it was that time of the year. I thanked her for the cake and started welcoming more people as they came through the door. Finally, she said “you really need to look at the king cake!” so Mimi and I opened the box and on the top of it had a picture of a sonogram of their three-month-old baby girl! Madeline’s dad was there to celebrate with us and that made it really fun for the rest of the night. Since so many of our family members were there. It was the perfect night to announce their pregnancy. It looks like they are going to have a baby in August. Mimi said she wants to be called Mimi by the new baby, and I think I’ll go with Papa. Now we are so excited we can’t even think straight!
I have a good friend that contacted me once or twice while I was in Africa. She asked me to send a few pictures along the way, so I did as I picked out some of the good ones each night and sent her a few from each day’s activity. Upon arriving home, she had a wonderful gift ready for me. She had taken some of my very best pictures and made them into frameable cards and the envelopes to go with them. They were so beautifully done I will cherish them forever. I guess we are birds of a feather because she knew exactly what would make me happy. Mom will get half of them, and I will get half as we are both letter writers. What I’ve been thinking about lately is where Mimi and I will go next.
Spring has sprung so early we just have not been able to figure that one out yet, but I have a feeling we will figure something big out for a September trip. Until next week it is time to get your beds prepared, clean up any weeds and cut back all the perennials and hopefully you’ve already cut your roses back. It’s time to start shopping the garden centers to see which way everybody’s going this year. We hope you’ll come by and see our place as it is looking amazing from the flowers we grow in our greenhouses to the product that’s come in from Mimi‘s market trip that she took while I was gallivanting. Enjoy this weather.
More on Allen and his Mom's Uganda trip in next week's edition.
