#9 Why Uganda is Africa’s best birding destination with Philip Briggs

Jun 4, 24

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Episode 10. Why Uganda is Africa’s best birding destination. In conversation with Philip Briggs

[00:00:00] Charlotte: I interviewed somebody once and he had really crinkly trousers. He kept fidgeting and crossing his legs and the recorder picks up the krrrrrrrrrrrrrrr…

[00:00:08] Philip Briggs: So these rickety wooden seats are no good?

[00:00:10] Charlotte: I know. I should have guidelines shouldn’t I? Preparation for interview.

[00:00:14] Philip Briggs: “Crinkly trousers are not appreciated by the management.”

[00:00:18] Charlotte: Welcome to episode 10 of the East Africa Travel Podcast, hosted by me, Charlotte Beauvoisin, author of Diary of a Muzungu, and blogger in residence at Sunbird Hill on the edge of Kibale Forest in Western Uganda.

[00:00:34] Thanks for tuning in. In today’s episode, we take a virtual tour around East Africa from the rickety wooden benches high up in the bird hide at Sunbird Hill. I’m joined by my first South African guest, the acclaimed travel writer, Philip Briggs. If you’re planning a trip to Uganda, or you don’t know where to start, I highly recommend buying the Bradt Uganda guidebook.

[00:01:00] It’s the first book I ever bought when I was moving to Uganda. I got my volunteer placement with the Uganda Conservation Foundation 15 years ago and I read it from cover to cover. It’s full of information, including historical background, detailed information on all the National Parks and what you can do and see, information about Kampala.

[00:01:24] It is the best guide to the country. It’s beautifully written and well researched by two people who’ve become very good friends of mine, Andrew Roberts, who was one of the directors at Uganda Conservation Foundation, and Philip Briggs, my guest on today’s episode of the East Africa Travel Podcast. Philip is a good friend of Sunbird Hill, where I live, and a big fan of KAFRED, the original swamp walk in Bigodi.

[00:01:51] I mention KAFRED because I’m a huge fan. All proceeds go directly to the community, and it’s the birthplace and training ground for a whole host of other activities in the region and all the local expert guides.

I first interviewed Philip Briggs in 2020 for my blog Diary of a Muzungu and there’s a link to that story in the show notes. Philip has been visiting Uganda since 1988 on the recommendation of another backpacker, in fact, that he met in Kenya. On his first trip to Uganda, he travelled to Ruhija in Bwindi, which is in the far southwestern corner of the country, bordering the DRC and Rwanda. There was no cushty 4×4 for him back in the day. He was on the back of a tractor!

[00:02:34] He didn’t actually manage to see the gorillas on that occasion because they hadn’t been habituated yet. But he wasn’t too much out of pocket here, he was only charged $1! At the time of recording this podcast, it costs $700 to track the gorillas in Uganda. That’s going up to $800 later in the year.

[00:02:57] Incidentally, by comparison, it currently costs $1,500 in Rwanda to track the gorillas. Since his first tracking in Ruhija, Philip Briggs has tracked the gorillas multiple times in Uganda, Rwanda and the Congo. So who is Philip Briggs?

Philip Briggs has been exploring Africa since 1986 when he spent several months backpacking from Nairobi in Kenya to Cape Town in South Africa.
[00:03:26] (To be honest, it’s only the pandemic that stopped him!)

Since then, Briggs has written dozens of guidebooks to a long list of African countries, including the Gambia, Ghana, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, Somaliland, Tanzania and Uganda. He has written multiple books about his homeland, South Africa, of course.
[00:03:50] And in 1991, he wrote the Bradt Guide to South Africa “the first such guidebook to be published internationally after the release of Nelson Mandela” according to the Bradt website. Although it’d be very easy to be extremely envious of all the travels Philip’s done, I know – and I’ve seen firsthand – how hard he works and I’ve also had a glimpse myself of how exceptionally tedious it can be to work on a guidebook! It looks very glamorous.

[00:04:24] Yes, you get to stay in some amazing places and do extraordinary things but that’s only the bit that you see because the reality is you’re checking out hotel after hotel and honestly one looks the same after ten in a row, and it all becomes a bit of a muddle. And then you’ve got to check all the websites and the phone numbers and the email addresses.

[00:04:49] That’s when it becomes really hard work and very, very boring indeed! But what really sets Philip apart is that he is the main author or the first author of a whole stack of travel guides to destinations that weren’t even on the tourist map until he travelled there and started writing about them.

Briggs doesn’t confine himself to Africa, however.

[00:05:14] He has his name on guidebooks to Suriname, in Latin America, and Sri Lanka. I’m sure I’ve missed out a whole long list of other countries too. As well as writing for Bradt, he also writes for Rough Guides, Travel Africa Magazine, Horizon Guides and many others and is a regular contributor to Safari Bookings along with his wife, the wildlife photographer Ariadne van Zandbergen. The two of them live in a village called Wilderness – [00:05:43] a very pretty name – in the Western Cape of South Africa. And if you look in the show notes, you can find our expert reviews and bios on safaribookings.com.

So on to our conversation. What is it that we talk about?

So why does he say Uganda is Africa’s best birding destination? How does he compare tracking gorillas with tracking chimpanzees?

[00:06:09] Where does he predict will become Uganda’s top exclusive upmarket safari destination? And what I really wanted to know is: is it acceptable to add a bird to your life list if you have heard it and not actually seen it?

Thank you very much, Philip Briggs, for accepting my invitation onto the East Africa Travel Podcast.

[00:06:33] Welcome to the bird hideout at Sunbird Hill.

[00:06:37] Philip Briggs: Thank you.

[00:06:37] Charlotte: We just disturbed a long-crested eagle when we got here. That was my first sighting of one in this particular little patch. I’ve sat up here and we’ve watched chimps in the tree next to us. I’ve also seen what used to be called the yellowbill – now known as the blue malkoha – from here. Welcome back to Sunbird Hill after five years away.

[00:06:58] Philip Briggs: Thank you. It’s great to be here. It’s as beautiful as ever.

[00:07:03] Charlotte: I wanted to go through some of the birds that you saw this morning, because you looked so excited when you came back. I think you went out for an hour or two after a very quick breakfast at eightish, and we were expecting to see you between nine or ten for the rest of your breakfast, but what time did you come back in the end?

[00:07:18] Philip Briggs: I think it was about one o’clock, but I’m not sure I was excited. I was actually hyperventilating.

[00:07:22] Charlotte: You didn’t have anything to drink either, did you?

[00:07:24] Philip Briggs: I hadn’t drank for five hours – just water. No, I hadn’t drunk anything.

[00:07:29] Charlotte: And you said that you saw the masked apalis, which you think is a tick?

[00:07:34] Philip Briggs: Yeah. I don’t carry a field guide with me anymore, so I have no idea what I’ve seen before. I used to scrawl these things in it, but I saw a few great birds. One is a red headed bluebill, a stunning sort of psychedelic red bird. Small but beautiful. And the masked apalis, which as I understand it from the guide Nick, is only known for a couple of forests in Uganda. I’m not sure what its distribution is outside Uganda, so I don’t think I’ve seen that. And the white-breasted nigrita, which is one of these odd birds, a type of finch, I think. Without having a guide with me, I would have never known where to start looking for it, really so, some interesting birds, as well as the great blue turaco, hornbills, a few birds of prey, lizard buzzard, and lots of colourful little birdy things.

[00:08:20] Charlotte: 198 bird species I heard today, here at Sunbird Hill.

It was really delicious actually hearing you and Nick talk through the long list of birds that you saw today at Sunbird Hill, but also on the main road going up to Uganda Wildlife Authority headquarters at Kanyanchu.

[00:08:38] You saw a green crombec. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one.

[00:08:41] Philip Briggs: It’s a pretty nondescript twitcher type bird. It’s small. The crombecs are a group of birds with very short tails, so they’re rather odd. They’re warblers that just sort of move through the leaves. It’s not as exciting as some of the other birds I saw from an ordinary, non-twitchy point of view, I guess.

[00:08:59] Charlotte: And you heard some chimps?

[00:09:01] Philip Briggs: We heard chimps. We saw lots of baboons, which seemed very, very relaxed, walking past these big males and they just look at you and carry on with what they’re doing. We saw several groups of red colobus monkey in the trees. We saw several red-tailed monkeys. We heard the Ugandan mangabey, which is the only monkey species endemic to Uganda. It doesn’t occur outside Uganda.

[00:09:24] Charlotte: What’s the difference between the Uganda mangabey and the grey cheeked?

[00:09:27] Philip Briggs: It was one of these, what they call a split, where DNA testing or aspects of behaviour convinced people that it used to be one species. Now they consider it to be separate species. It’s a relatively nondescript monkey compared to the colobus.

[00:09:43] Charlotte: It’s very cute though. I love its scraggly tail. It’s quite easy to identify.

We’ve seen quite a few primates together this week, haven’t we? Because we were at Kalinzu Forest Reserve, isn’t it?

[00:09:55] Philip Briggs: Kalinzu Forest Reserve, the sort of up and coming chimpanzee tracking site, bordering Queen Elizabeth National Park, which is Uganda’s best savannah reserve.

[00:10:05] Charlotte: Yeah, it is, it’s the number one reserve. I think that Murchison has been overshadowing Queen Elizabeth in terms of visitor numbers, thanks to the cut-through, the public road that goes through Murchison up to Arua. I think that’s boosted the number of people going to the park, but I think Queen Elizabeth is still our most popular visitor safari destination.

[00:10:27] Philip Briggs: Queen Elizabeth has the advantage of being five hours drive. If you go to the Ishasha sector, it’s less than five hours drive from Bwindi, which is the main gorilla tracking destination. Murchison Falls is way far north so in a compact itinerary, Queen Elizabeth is the obvious complement to Bwindi for people who want to track gorillas and see lions and hippos and if they want chimpanzees at Kalinzu, which is bordering it.

[00:10:50] Charlotte: So you’ve seen chimpanzees in many different parts of Africa. You were talking yesterday about Mahale being your favourite place to have tracked chimpanzees. That’s in Tanzania. Can you tell us a little bit about that and how it compares to chimp tracking in Uganda generally?

[00:11:06] Philip Briggs: Well, Mahale Mountains is a pretty big national park on the edge of Lake Tanganyika, which is a stunning lake in the Rift Valley. It’s the second longest lake in the world. I forget, 600 kilometers long or something like that. Very deep, the second deepest lake in the world, and also just very beautiful.

[00:11:20] It’s in the Rift Valley, so it’s surrounded by mountains and forest on all sides. Mahale protects a big chunk of indigenous Brachystegia and highland forest. There’s one colobus monkey, black and white colobus, actually endemic to just the forest of Mahale, and I think about a thousand chimpanzees are resident there.

[00:11:39] One group has been habituated for tourists, but it’s a large group. And they were first habituated in the 1960s by Japanese researchers, not much long after Jane Goodall habituated the more famous programme at Gombe Stream, which is also on Lake Tanganyika. Mahale, from a chimp tracking perspective, is much more difficult to get to and essentially you need to throw more money or time at it than the parks in Uganda

[00:12:06] In Uganda, you can drive on a tar road coming from Bwindi, stop off, go chimp tracking, carry on with your day – more or less – in several places. Mahale Mountains is mostly a fly-in destination. There are no real roads going into it, they’re very rough tracks. Or you could go by boat on Lake Tanganyika. But most people who go there would stay for three or four days.

[00:12:28] So the chimp tracking is not a case of arrive at eight, go out, look for them, and if by 10.30 you haven’t yet found them, you’re probably going to start turning back. The last time I was there we actually had an early breakfast and waited, and ended up having lunch before we went chimp tracking, as the guys are out there looking for them, and when they’ve found them, that’s when they radio down and do it.

[00:12:49] Twice when I’ve been there, I’ve had chimps come into the camp at the other extreme. One was actually bizarre. We came down by boat the first time we went to Mahale, and it was an exhausting ride: overnight ferry, and then we were met by the park’s boats, and then took another boat. This is all happening in the middle of the lake: throwing your luggage onto a little boat. Finally got into the camp at about six in the morning, having not slept at all. And, so they said “what do you want to do?” And we said “I think we’ll just rest for a couple of hours,” and 20 minutes later, it’s a knock knock “we’ve got chimps in the camp.” So chimp tracking started and off we went.

[00:13:23] And the other time I was with a bunch of other people that had great chimp tracking over two days and they all decided to do a forest walk to visit a waterfall. I decided to hang around camp and do a bit of birdwatching; as I did, in walked the chimpanzees! I sat there with the camp managers and we enjoyed it.

[00:13:40] The difference is you have repeat experiences and, for three or four days, the chimp tracking can be the focus of what you do. I mean, it’s also a great forest for monkey biodiversity and great bird watching and Lake Tanganyika is reputedly the least polluted lake in the world. There are no big cities on it. I would think it’s probably true you can swim in it (which sadly they don’t allow anymore; there’s a crocodile which I think is probably a very minor threat) but you can swim in it and see your toes wriggling at the bottom of the lake.

[00:14:11] Charlotte: Oh, that sounds beautiful.

Stunning. You’ve got these mountains rising above, you know, two kilometers high in the lake shore so it feels like a magical tropical island with chimps.

[00:14:21] Philip Briggs: Fantastic place.

[00:14:22] Charlotte: Fabulous. And how many times have you tracked the chimpanzees, would you say? Have you got a number in your head?

[00:14:29] Philip Briggs: Not really, because I first tracked in Uganda several times in the late 90s and early 2000s, and chimp tracking then was a lot more difficult than it is now. I remember guiding a tour once and a guy turned to me at the end of it and said “is this what gorilla tracking is going to be like – chasing some furry little black things through the forest?”

[00:14:47] It was rough going because chimps are very fast on their feet in the forest and if they decide they want to move, you’re stumbling along behind them looking very human and inept. And so I would say the first 10 times I tracked chimps in Uganda, I don’t think I ever had a great sighting: Budongo, I don’t think I saw them. Kibale Forest, I went several times. And bear in mind that they didn’t then call it a chimp tracking activity, they called it “a forest walk with a sprinkling of possible chimps” or something like that. But it was considered a bonus if you saw them. Obviously, that’s really changed now. And I’ve now tracked chimps in Rwanda: Nyungwe Forest.

[00:15:20] Charlotte: How does that compare?

[00:15:22] Philip Briggs: It’s relatively difficult. It’s difficult terrain. I would not want to make a judgment on the quality of sightings there based on one or two tracking occasions, but we weren’t lucky. It’s very steep. It’s a bit like Bwindi and tracking gorillas in Bwindi on a bad day is very steep, very slippy.

Compared to gorilla tracking, chimp tracking is very hit and miss. You can go in one day and you have fantastic sightings. You go the next day and they’re higher up the mountains or it rains and you just don’t get it. Gorillas are sedentary. I’ve done it at Rubondo Island quite recently, which is also in Tanzania, and they actually introduced chimps onto a forested island. It was created as a sort of floating zoo and that never quite worked. They’ve ended up with, I think, two communities, about 50 chimps each and pretty good sightings there.

But, I think the top place is Kibale Forest, although it gets a little crowded compared to some other places, and then Mahale and Gombe and – increasingly – a number of other places in Uganda, including Kalinzu Forest and Budongo.

[00:16:17] Charlotte: And Kyambura Gorge.

[00:16:18] Philip Briggs: Kyambura Gorge. Yes.

[00:16:20] Charlotte: We might have to cut this short if it starts raining really hard.

[00:16:24] Philip Briggs: It’s okay now, I think the rain is …

[00:16:25] Charlotte: To rewind a bit, what brings you to Uganda? What are you doing on this trip?

[00:16:29] Philip Briggs: I wrote a guidebook to Uganda. The original one I wrote in 1992, it was published in 1993: the Bradt Guide to Uganda.

[00:16:36] So I’m here collaborating with someone else, Andrew Roberts, who’s a well-known map designer here, and he’s been involved in several editions of the Bradt Guide. I’m also working with a company called Safari Bookings, which is an online safari booking portal, and really fact checking and expanding their coverage of Uganda.

[00:16:54] Charlotte: We were at Kyambura Game Reserve earlier in the week in Queen Elizabeth National Park and I think that’s a destination you’re going to be adding.

[00:17:02] Philip Briggs: I’d certainly want to add it. Kyambura Game Reserve has been there forever and it’s never been developed for tourism. But we came in with a company called Wild Places, who now has a concession there for the whole reserve.

[00:17:12] Effectively, it will operate much like a private reserve, although other people can come in, and it looks magnificent, basically an extension of Queen Elizabeth National Park.

Going back to chimps, there is chimp tracking on Kyambura Gorge. It’s one of the top chimp tracking sites, and that borders the Kyambura Game Reserve and Queen Elizabeth National Park itself. From what we saw at the height of the rains, which is not the greatest time to visit, we still saw lots and lots of elephants and frightening numbers of buffalos.

[00:17:40] Charlotte: They were frightening!

[00:17:42] Philip Briggs: Hippos, huge pods of hippos. And we did a couple of walks. The nicest was to a pair of beautiful crater lakes. I think it just has so much potential. And I think it’s going to be in ten years’ time – or even five years’ time – would predict it’s perceived as Uganda’s top, really exclusive, upmarket safari destination.

[00:18:03] Charlotte: And we had the whole place to ourselves, didn’t we?

Philip Briggs: Yeah, and that would be how it will be, obviously. As they create room space, I think they’re going to have 11 rooms, but it will be a very exclusive experience.

[00:18:15] Charlotte: And so we were staying at Honey Bear Camp, Wild Places’ tented camp. They’re planning a lodge as well, which is going to be called the River Station, is that right?

Philip Briggs: The River Station, yes.

Charlotte: And they’re also investing in Murchison as well. You’re going to be going up there soon. They’re deep in Murchison, aren’t they? I can’t remember where the location is.

[00:18:33] Philip Briggs: I’ll send you information, but as it stands I’m waiting for directions.

[00:18:37] Charlotte: We’ve been swapping notes about entries in the Bradt Guidebook and it’s very interesting to hear how Uganda tourism is expanding to the extent that you can’t possibly include all hotels in the guide. It’s interesting to hear which sections you’re going to expand and which sections you want to cut out.

[00:18:57] Charlotte: Do you want to give us a bit of insight into how that works?

[00:19:00] Philip Briggs: I think the whole way that guidebooks are going, just to backtrack a little bit, the Bradt Guide has always had a lot of background information. about culture, history, wildlife, not just practical information. But I think the way the guidebooks are going is it’s more and more easy to get practical information – or rather listings of hotels – and make bookings online. It’s not like it was in the 1990s or early 2000s when these places were almost impossible to get hold of, and the number of hotels has increased so hugely that we really want to focus on the background information, the ‘how to do it’ information and still include listings, but to make them more – there’s a word I’m looking for – not selective, which is not to say only the most upmarket places, but what we think are the top two or three places in each price bracket and good value budget places, the really top upmarket places.

You know, we will always slightly favour owner-managed and small companies because I think one: guidebook readers tend to be people who prefer that personal touch of an owner-managed lodge, and secondly: there’s more of a guarantee of ongoing standards when you don’t have rapid changes and turnovers of management. Also, they tend to just be smaller, more intimate, more (I don’t like the word boutique), but it’s just a more personal touch. I might be wrong, but I think guidebook users – as opposed to people working solely through safari companies or tour operators – are inclined to want that kind of information. They want places where they can interact with staff and interact with management and get that feeling of being part of something.

[00:20:29] Charlotte: And you write a number of Bradt Guides, don’t you? How many different countries have you worked on? You’ve got quite a geographical spread.

[00:20:37] Philip Briggs: Well, I mostly do Africa. I was very lucky. I started writing in the 1990s when there was really very little coverage of Africa, so I’ve managed to become the writer of guidebooks to a bunch of countries that had enormous potential and, in most cases, were going through periods of huge economical, political disruption: Uganda, Tanzania, which didn’t have any political issues, but it had gone through economic turmoil; Ethiopia, which had been through a sort of insane communist regime that finally retired in ’92; Rwanda, which most people would know about. And I got involved in writing guidebooks for these countries just at the point when there really wasn’t a tourist industry, and it was a few backpackers milling around.

[00:21:18] I’ve just done the 9th edition of Tanzania and Uganda’s going to be the 10th edition, and it’s amazing to just have that long connection to the country and watch how it’s developed. I suppose almost a slight homecoming feeling whenever I go to these countries. I’ve done a few other guides, a few to West Africa and Malawi. Malawi’s another one of the ones that again never really had political or economic turmoil, it was just not very well known.

[00:21:39] I’ve done a couple of guidebooks outside: Sri Lanka, Suriname, and updated books to parts of Greece and North Macedonia, but mostly I end up coming back to the same few countries.

[00:21:52] Charlotte: I noticed that Uganda has won the award for the best country, as voted by travellers “the top country safari destination as voted by SafariBookings travellers,” not the most popular destination in terms of bookings, but the most popular according to travellers. Uganda’s also been voted the best country for birding by experts.

[00:22:19] Philip Briggs: There’s no question in my mind that Uganda is the best birding destination in Africa. If you combine the size, the compactness of the circuit, the ease of moving between different habitats and just the sheer variety of birds. It’s on the equator, which is always where biodiversity is highest. I forget the exact number of bird species recorded here, but I think it’s around 1,050 – which for perspective, I think is the fourth biggest in Africa – but the other countries ahead of it would all be at least double the size in the case of the Congo, that could eat 20 Ugandas for breakfast!

There’s just an incredible diversity of birds here. The guiding here caters to bird watchers. There are so many guides who know their birds really well, and most parks offer birding walks, so yeah, it’s got the birds, it’s easy to get around, and people are “birding savvy”, which is not so much the case in countries that cater more to just general big five tourism, they get very few birders, so guys are focusing on finding the big five.

00:23:19] South Africa is the only other country I can think of where birding is such a recognized pursuit and interest.

[00:23:25] Charlotte: So could we say that for birders, Uganda is the most serious destination across East Africa?

[00:23:32] Philip Briggs: I would think if you were visiting Uganda, as the first country you visit in Africa, it might almost be overwhelming because a lot of it is forest birding, whereas Kenya or Tanzania have perhaps more savannah, so you’d see more easily the more common African birds, the obvious ones. I think that anyone who’s done a safari almost anywhere else in Africa and finds themselves interested in the birds would then find Uganda the obvious country to come to. It’s also got the shoebill which is one of the most magnificent and silly birds ever created, a refugee from Dr. Seuss kind of thing.

[00:24:07] Charlotte: And where in your view is the best place to see the Shoebill?

[00:24:11] Philip Briggs: I wouldn’t like to have a view on that because I’m only going on what I’ve seen and that’s not necessarily representative, but for many years Mabamba Swamp was felt to be the best place. I was down there recently and chatting to people and they felt odds were about 50:50 [of seeing a shoebill], which is pretty good, but probably not as good as it was a few years ago.

Murchison Falls Delta has always been a pretty reliable site, and you can take a boat trip to the Delta, which is very much focused on looking for shoebills. And I’ve done that two or three times, and we’ve always seen shoebills. I’ve always seen shoebills in Mabamba Swamp too.

[00:24:41] Lake Edward in Semliki Game Reserve is probably the best shoebill sighting I ever had, and I was there a couple of days ago, I didn’t go out again. But the guys there said recently they’ve sometimes seen two, three, four times in one boat trip. Semliki is a more exclusive setup. Mabamba is a community project very close to Entebbe, the main airport, so very easy to visit and fit into an itinerary without adding hugely to the cost. Semliki would be the other extreme. It’s an exclusive destination and something you’d really have to go out of your way to do, but if someone said they really wanted to see shoebill as well, that would be what I would recommend.

[00:25:16] Charlotte: Okay, excellent. Thank you very much. First time I ever saw a shoebill was at Entebbe actually, Uganda Wildlife Education Centre.

[00:25:23] Philip Briggs: That is a very good place to see them.

[00:25:28] Charlotte: It is definitely the easiest place to see them.

[00:25:30] Philip Briggs: Well, I’m afraid in real birding terms it wouldn’t count as a tick, because it’s a zoo.

[00:25:34] Charlotte: ] Really? I didn’t know that.

[00:25:34] Philip Briggs: No, you can’t go to a zoo and see a bird and call it a tick, but also it would ruin for me to go there before you went to look for them in the wild. It would ruin or dilute the experience of looking for them in the wild. If however, you go shoebill tracking and you don’t find them –

[00:25:50] Charlotte: – you’ve got the backstop.

[00:25:51] Philip Briggs: You could at least go and see one in Uganda Wildlife Education Centre (its proper name and sounds much better than the Entebbe Zoo although that’s what it’s known as colloquially).

[00:26:02] Charlotte: I think I was at UWEC visiting a baby elephant called Hamukungu. He was rescued from Queen Elizabeth. His mum was killed by poachers, sadly, on Lake George and he swam to an island and he was rescued by fishermen who popped him in the boat. He was a tiny little thing, like a metre tall or something. And we went to Entebbe to scratch him under the skin, behind the ear.

[00:26:23] Philip Briggs: I’ve never scratched an elephant behind the ear.

[00:26:25] Charlotte: It’s actually quite weird because from a distance it looks really cute, then you touch it and it’s so hard and the hairs are very fibrous. But yeah, very cute to say that you’ve stroked a baby elephant. And of course I had to make the most of it and get my shoebill picture in.
We were arguing the other day, weren’t we, about what counts as a tick because I heard a bird and I said, that’s a lifer for me.

[00:26:49] Was it you who said “no, you can’t say that, it doesn’t count?”

[00:26:52] Philip Briggs: Well it was actually a friend who was traveling with me, Vince, who somewhat derisively said that doesn’t count.

I was talking to some of the researchers here, if they go through the forest, they will mostly go on calls because they know the birds, they’re trying to establish what is there, and a call is a very easy way of doing that.

[00:27:08] I think on a personal level, I wouldn’t feel that having heard a bird and not having seen it is the same as seeing it.

Charlotte: It’s no way near as satisfying.

[00:27:16] Philip Briggs: We all make up our own rules. I mean, my rule would generally be, if I’m with a guide and he says that’s that bird and I don’t see it to my satisfaction, I still wouldn’t count that as seeing it. Other people might, but it honestly doesn’t matter. It’s all just stuff to do with your time really, isn’t it?

[00:27:33] Charlotte: And talking of sightings, I was in the same vehicle as you the other day, when you spotted two forest hogs, and honestly, I didn’t see anything! I might have seen a ‘dark something’ but I didn’t recognise it as an animal, let alone two. I didn’t tick it, hand on heart, but I can say that I was with somebody who did spot two giant forest hugs in Kyambura Game Reserve.

Thank you very much, Philip, for being part of the Diary of a Muzungu Travel Podcast. And I hope it’s less than five years before we welcome you back.

[00:28:08] Philip Briggs: Well, let’s hope so. I mean, we usually do new additions every three years, but COVID had its say on that one.

Charlotte: Ah, yes, of course.

Philip Briggs: So, you know, hopefully we’ll go back to a three year cycle.

Charlotte: Okay, so see you in three years – or less.

Management would like to appreciate Mr. Philip Briggs for not wearing crinkly trousers during our conversation.

[00:28:39] A big thank you to my first travel writer guest, who is an absolutely incredible writer, who I’ve had the opportunity to travel with very briefly, who I’ve learnt so much from, not just about the destination that we were in and the wildlife, but also about how he puts together a story, the kind of questions that he asks, what’s important for updating a guidebook, why guidebooks are still relevant.

I mean, like he says, there is very little online that’s comprehensive about any destination. (Lord knows I’ve tried with Diary of a Muzungu!)
There are few people who have traveled so widely across Africa as Philip has. There are a lot of travel writers and researchers, but he’s been traveling to Uganda, for example, for over 30 years, and he’s recently been working on episode 10 of the Uganda guidebook. Every time he comes, he updates and continues researching new destinations, double checking what is already there, adding things, improving things, deleting things.

[00:29:44] So it’s not just that he’s traveled here to all the new places and all the nooks and crannies of the many countries. What I was really interested in was: we can sit here in Uganda tourism industry and say “Uganda’s the best country in the world to travel to, or it’s the best safari destination,” but when you talk to somebody who can compare Uganda with Tanzania, with Kenya, with Rwanda, with Southern African countries, when you have somebody that has such a deep, deep knowledge of what a good safari entails and they say positive things about Uganda, you know, we’re really onto something with promoting this country and developing this country for tourism.

You’ve been listening to the East Africa Travel Podcast with me, Charlotte Beauvoisin, author of Diary of a Muzungu.
[00:30:42] Thanks for listening.

Read about Sunbird Hill, chimpanzees, and travel to Uganda.

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Stay tuned for more sounds from the jungle!