This in not an official U.S. Department of State (DOS) blog and the views and information presented are my own and do not represent the Fulbright Program or the DOS. 

The week that Sammi, the Palliative Care Pharmacist, and Jenna, the Palliative Care Physician Fellow were here, we took a day trip to Jinja, the Source of the Nile River- the same one that flows to Eygpt, which was extra interesting since Sammi is Eygptian.  See below for some of the beautiful sites we saw along the way.

Ssezibwa Falls Sign

Ssezibwa Falls, on the road from Kampala to Jinja, Uganda

A patch of Morning Glories

Green Bamboo

Yellow Bamboo

Yellow Bamboo up close

The pictures above are of a bamboo forest. There is green and yellow bamboo- isn’t it lovely?  These were taken at Ssezibwa Falls.  After going to the Falls, we headed on to Jinja. We went to the Kingfisher Resort where we charted a little boat that took us on a ride to the Source of the Nile River.

Jenna and Sammi as we take off on our boat ride to the Source of the Nile River.

These birds are perched on a Talapia Farm cage; it looks like they must be frustrated by seeing all the fish inside but not being able to get at them.

These are the native Fisherman fishing for natural bred Talapia and Nile River Perch, the two most common edible fish in Lake Victoria and in the Nile River. There is no fishing pole, but just a line they bait with worms and throw into the water.

A monitor lizard scrambles into hiding but I was just able to catch his picture.

We had to take off our shoes and wade through the water over very sharp and slippery rocks to get to the sign that is posted right at the Source.  There used to be a waterfall here, Ripon Falls, but the Hydroelectric Dam that was built in 1954 to provide power to all of Uganda, the Owens Falls Dam, eliminated the waterfall.  You can’t really tell that there are 2 bodies of water coming together here at first glance but there is a spring that comes up from the ground to merge with Lake Victoria which becomes the Nile River.  If you throw a piece of branch into the water at the juncture of the lake and the underground spring, you can see the that the branch will circle around and flow into the Lake to the right before it continues to flow down the river to the left. This is contrary to what you would expect since all the water appears to be flowing down the river to the left of you at this point.  This point where there used to be a waterfall was discovered to be the source of the Nile River that flows all the way to Egypt by John Hanning Speke, an officer in the British Indian Army in 1862.

KarenBeth and Sammi at the Source of the Nile sign. Behind us lies Lake Victoria and in front of us, towards the bottom left-hand corner of the picture flows the Nile River.