Day 9: Bunyonyl Lake Tour – Little Angels Project visit – Mburo National Park – Walking Safari

Day Nine begins with Lake Bunyonyi, which has, by now, fully committed to being one of those places that manages to be both hauntingly beautiful and deeply suspicious of your desire to impose meaning on it. After spending yesterday gazing out at the water’s unnerving calm—an alien calm that mocks your need for inner peace—today’s activity promises to inject a bit of humanity into the equation.

**The Lake Bunyonyi Tour**, they call it, though “tour” feels like too structured a word for what happens. In theory, this is a chance to explore the many tiny islands scattered across the lake, each with its own peculiar story. In reality, you’re loaded into a dugout canoe that seems far too prone to tipping for your liking, and the whole thing takes on a kind of semi-improvised drift through history and water. The lake, the deepest in Uganda, is home to folklore that ranges from quaint to outright disturbing. There’s Punishment Island, for example, where, in the not-so-distant past, unmarried pregnant women were abandoned to either drown, starve, or—if lucky—be rescued by a suitor whose standards were, by that point, significantly lowered. The irony is inescapable: you’re gliding through postcard-worthy scenery while being told tales of desperate human suffering.

As the boat skirts the edges of various islands, you can’t shake the feeling that Lake Bunyonyi is withholding something from you, like it knows its beauty is a diversion, an elaborate distraction from darker truths lying just beneath the surface—literal and metaphorical. The guide, a cheerful man who’s lived on the lake his whole life, recounts these tales with the kind of detachment that only comes from seeing the same wide-eyed tourists react the same way a thousand times before.

By the time the tour ends, you’ve absorbed more stories than you know what to do with and are quietly pondering the absurdity of floating on a lake that has witnessed such extremes of human nature. But there’s little time to linger in the abstract because the next stop on the agenda is a visit to the **Little Angels Project**. This community initiative feels almost incongruous after the silent majesty of the lake.

The Little Angels Project, if I’m being honest, is one of those things that you want to be deeply cynical about but can’t. It’s an orphanage and school that aims to give the local children a shot at something resembling a future. Now, I know what you’re thinking—these visits can sometimes feel like a safari of a different sort, where well-meaning tourists pass through, snap some photos, and leave with the vague sense of having “helped” without really doing much. But here’s the thing: Little Angels doesn’t let you indulge in that kind of accessible saviour complex.

The moment you arrive, the kids swarm with an enthusiasm that’s heartwarming and overwhelming. They want to sing, dance, and show you what they’ve been learning—and it’s genuine. There’s none of the performative cheer you sometimes expect in situations like this. The kids are proud of their school, and they should be. The school’s founder—a man with an energy level that makes you question your own lack of ambition—explains that the project runs on passion and scraps of funding from anyone willing to help. You nod, feeling your throat tighten because there’s no easy way to process this. The children are full of life despite every reason not to be, and the whole thing makes you feel both inspired and slightly complicit in the unfairness of it all.

After you leave Little Angels, there’s a sense that maybe the day has peaked emotionally. But no. Uganda is relentlessly determined to keep you off balance, mixing the natural and human worlds in ways that force you to confront the uncomfortable places where they overlap. This brings us to “Mburo National Park” and the walking safari, the pièce de résistance of today’s schedule.

A walking safari, by the way, is exactly what it sounds like. Instead of sitting in a comfortable jeep while snapping Instagram-worthy shots of zebras and giraffes from a distance, you walk. Through the park. On foot. Among the animals. It’s nature stripped of the safety net, and it’s probably the most absurd thing you’ve agreed to do so far.

You arrive at the park in the late afternoon when the sun has decided to tone down its murderous intensity just a little. The ranger, carrying a rifle that looks both ancient and deeply inadequate, briefs the group in a manner that suggests he’s done this a thousand times. He explains that most of the animals in Mburo don’t pose a severe threat to humans, except, of course, for the ones that do. The logic seems to be that as long as you don’t act like prey, you won’t be treated like prey, which is one of those statements that sounds reassuring until you start thinking about it.

The first part of the trek is deceptively peaceful. You walk through open savannah, the tall grasses swaying in the breeze, and it feels like you’ve stepped into some rustic pastoral painting. Zebras graze at a distance, and for a moment, it feels like maybe this whole walking safari thing isn’t so crazy after all. But then you start noticing little details—like your guide scanning the horizon constantly as if expecting something to emerge from the bushes at any moment.

There’s a moment—let’s call it a moment of clarity—when you realize that you are now deep in the wilderness, with nothing but a walking stick and a guide’s ancient rifle between you and the untamed, uncaring reality of Uganda’s wildlife. The zebras, it turns out, are just the prelude. Soon enough, you’re up close with buffalo, animals that radiate a casual menace as they stare at you, snorting occasionally in a way that suggests they don’t entirely approve of your existence. You keep moving because standing still for too long feels like a very bad idea.

But it’s the giraffes that get to you. Not because they’re threatening—they’re not—but because they have this way of staring at you from a distance that feels unnervingly like they’re judging you. Their long necks arch gracefully toward the sky, and their gaze seems to say, “What are you even *doing* here?” And you don’t have an answer. You never have an answer when nature asks that question.

The walking safari isn’t long, but when you return to camp, your brain feels like it’s been put through some existential wringer. You’ve seen animals in their most natural state, and in doing so, you’ve been reminded, yet again, that nature operates on its terms, utterly indifferent to your attempts to impose meaning or structure on it.

That night, as you sit by the campfire under a vast sky punctuated by a million indifferent stars, you realize that Uganda has quietly upended every expectation you brought with you. Every day has been a collision between beauty and discomfort, awe and anxiety. And today—after floating on a haunted lake, meeting children who defy every narrative of hopelessness, and walking through a park where animals rule the land—it’s clearer than ever that there’s no tidy way to summarize any of it.

You’ve come here for the experience, but you’re left with a feeling—that elusive, persistent feeling that Uganda is bigger, wilder, and more complex than anything you could ever hope to understand.