Rule one broken, many more to go

When in Africa, or any country outside Europe I have ever ridden in, the first rule is never ride at night.

At 5am, two hours before dawn we were packed and off, heading through Kampala.

This was so we could get across and out of the city before the traffic snarled the city. As we stopped at the first set of traffic lights I asked our guide, Ayaz, why we were the only people stopping at the red light. He took the hint and led us through the rest, weaving around cross traffic with everyone else. My day riding round had established that it was safer to drive like the locals.

The last 100km to the park is on a gravel dirt track. I was bimbling along happily, Ayaz and Mark (two up with his partner) had sped ahead out of intercom range when my rear end went all sloppy. I coasted to a stop and looked down. A puncture! In all my miles of overland travel I had never before had a puncture.

I settled down to wait for someone to notice me missing and hoped Ayaz had a decent repair kit as the tyre was off the rim. Eventually he reappeared, saw the problem but told me he had two issues as Mark had come off in a ditch and needed a hand. So I settled down for another wait.

Mark and his passenger were ok, a bit bruised but in good humour. We removed my rear wheel, and carried it the remaining 50k to our camp where we left Ayaz to sort it out while we went in a cruise safari. One advantage of a booked, guided trip, someone else gets to sort out the fiddly bits.

The next morning was another early affair, up just before dawn, cross the river (Albert Nile ) and collect our ranger/guide.

Immediately elephants were seen at the side of the road, giraffes, buffalo with big horns, wart hogs, and baboons .

The main attraction at this point was to find some lions, hence the early start. The rangers are in contact, and  once a sighting was made we we lead across to them. Unfortunately we had missed a pair mating by about 15 mins.

Our ranger was eager to please us, so he asked for my bike keys (he also preferred smaller bikes) and rode into the bush to try and herd them out. At this point Mark and I were saying "what the fuck are we doing?" . Standing in the jungle, waiting for a man to make a large predator angry, and herd them towards us.

A tour van came along, and the ranger told Mark's partner we were crazy, get in a bike on in a vehicle. At this point she bottled it, and asked to leave the spot.

As soon as I had a bike back, we did. Apparently we had broken a number of rules .....

Later while watching hippos