Unexpected car troubles are never fun but the unexpected is part of the game. It’s part of travel. There is always something and anyone who owns a car knows it’s inevitable for it to break at some point. African roads are notoriously hard on vehicles and by now we were not strangers to stopping at a mechanic or two for repairs.
We were on our way to Queen Elizabeth National Park when suddenly our clutch was having issues shifting and a squealing noise was coming from somewhere below the car. We immediately directed our course to the small town of Kasese to find a mechanic. Honestly, just finding a decent mechanic is part of the adventure. Kasese was not a big town and Google was essentially useless for finding one. The best way to find a mechanic was to either drive around town searching for a small painted wooden sign saying something along the lines of “garage” or ask around until someone points you in the right direction. Eventually Ross and Julien found a garage while I found a hotel and we ended up losing a full day and half of birding over the whole ordeal. It could have been a lot worse. Despite having to order original parts from Kampala after the first attempt at a clutch repair with generic parts had failed, the Toyota brand equipment arrived on time and our mechanics managed to get the car running again. While parts were expensive, labor was not. For the ridiculously low price of $45, we had seven men drop the transmission and reinstall it for us, not once but twice. I suppose a lot could go wrong when putting in a new clutch, but our mechanic seemed to do a fine job once he had original parts and we continued on our way to Queen Elizabeth National Park. We were just thankful this was a mechanical issue and not an electrical one. It was something we at least knew a mechanic in a small town has encountered before.
We didn’t know it at the time, but losing these nearly two days was a blessing in disguise. Had we continued on our current itinerary, we would have experienced extreme rain while in the mountains of Ruhija at Bwindi National Park, as we later learned was the case for Michael Mills and the tour he was leading. Instead we had great weather when we got to Bwindi and managed all of our targets easily. (But more about that in the next post!) Like car trouble, unexpected bad weather is part of the game and we easily could have lost the two days over the rain instead! That’s some clutch timing if you ask me!
Queen Elizabeth National Park, famous for its volcanic features and home to 95 species of mammals, was merely a few kilometers away. We only had a few targets to see and only spent an afternoon and a single morning within the park. We spent the majority of the time driving a track looking for Blue Quail but came up empty. We did manage to flush a number of African Crakes. Our other main target, White-tailed Lark, showed well and we found a few other good birds including African Skimmer, Senegal Lapwing, and Lesser Moorhen and arguably one of the coolest mammals we had seen in a while, Giant Forest Hog.
White-tailed Lark 
Rescuing chicks
This birding occurred 19 June 2021