This journal is written from the ground — field notes, not a blog. Entries arrive when passages run. So far the record is one survey: February 2026, driving the roads the four passages now follow — Murchison and the Nile first, then east across to Sipi.
The February 2026 survey
1 February · Murchison Falls
The flats had been burnt and the fires were still in the air: the sun came up through smoke haze as a deep orange disc you could look at directly. The kob were already out grazing the short burnt grass, heads down, in numbers. Two lions were far out on the black ground, small in the middle distance and unbothered by full daylight. The giraffes kept to the bushline instead — three in file under the hazy sun. Borassus palms ran all the way to a coral horizon. An elephant stood in profile beneath a spreading acacia and did not move for as long as we watched. Nobody had to go looking for anything that morning; the burn had arranged the animals in the open.
2 February · The Nile & the Falls
You hear it before you reach the viewing platform, and from the platform it is simple and hard to take in at once: the whole Nile put through a gap in black rock. At the lip the river loses its colour and goes white; below the dark ledges the gorge is all mist. Downstream it becomes a different river entirely — a calm reach in the morning light, one boat mid-river, hippos half-submerged in the channel, buffalo out on the pale floodplain carrying their cattle egrets. The gorge runs out to a hazy horizon and the water gives no sign of what it has just done. We walked the top-of-falls path, then took to the water below. The two halves of the same river do not seem acquainted.
11 February · Sipi Falls, Mount Elgon
Sipi announces itself with a hand-painted sign, which is the right scale of announcement. The main drop is a single thin column off the basalt cliff, falling past old cave hollows into its plunge pool. From under the overhang you can look out through the fall at the whole valley; at the base, the spray holds a small rainbow in place for as long as the sun does. Eucalyptus frames the walk in. After Murchison this is water at the opposite register — not a river forced through a rock shelf but a ribbon off the mountain's edge, thin enough that the wind moves it on the way down. We stayed until the light went off the cliff.
The next entries come from the passages themselves.