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to penetrate the impenetrable
Oct. 5th, 2005 09:29 pmLake Bunyonyi, Uganda
I have been to the middle of nowhere, and it is not the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. It is, rather, where you go when your teenage taxi driver takes a wrong turn en route to said impenetrability and continues for half an hour unawares.
I was first made aware of our misdirection when the top of my head smacked into the roof of our car. I'd splashed out on a private ("special hire") taxi to Bwindi, public transit being chancy-to-unavailable except on market day, and somehow contrived to fall asleep despite the humped, fissured, rocky dirt road that winds along ridgetops and steep hillsides, past glorius views of the Western Rift Valley, the cloud-shrouded Ruwenzori, and the Virunga volcanoes, along terraced fields and stands of eucalyptus forest, during the (theoretically) 3-hour journey. But when I woke, the road was no longer dirt. It wasn't even, really, a road. ( the road to Bwindi, more or less )
The Bwindi Impenetrable Forest is a national park in remote southwest Uganda, on the Congo border. It is best known for being home to half the world's mountain gorillas (the others are fifty K south, in the Virunga range of volanoes that straddle the Uganda-Rwanda-Congo borders.) Bwindi means "dark". The Dark Impenetrable Forest - it's like something out of a fantasy novel, isn't it? I mean, Mirkwood's got nothing on this place.
( where even the epiphytes have epiphytes )
( before, after )
I have been to the middle of nowhere, and it is not the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. It is, rather, where you go when your teenage taxi driver takes a wrong turn en route to said impenetrability and continues for half an hour unawares.
I was first made aware of our misdirection when the top of my head smacked into the roof of our car. I'd splashed out on a private ("special hire") taxi to Bwindi, public transit being chancy-to-unavailable except on market day, and somehow contrived to fall asleep despite the humped, fissured, rocky dirt road that winds along ridgetops and steep hillsides, past glorius views of the Western Rift Valley, the cloud-shrouded Ruwenzori, and the Virunga volcanoes, along terraced fields and stands of eucalyptus forest, during the (theoretically) 3-hour journey. But when I woke, the road was no longer dirt. It wasn't even, really, a road. ( the road to Bwindi, more or less )
The Bwindi Impenetrable Forest is a national park in remote southwest Uganda, on the Congo border. It is best known for being home to half the world's mountain gorillas (the others are fifty K south, in the Virunga range of volanoes that straddle the Uganda-Rwanda-Congo borders.) Bwindi means "dark". The Dark Impenetrable Forest - it's like something out of a fantasy novel, isn't it? I mean, Mirkwood's got nothing on this place.
( where even the epiphytes have epiphytes )
( before, after )
