Dirks fabulous adventures in Uganda: Nightly visitors

Last night I heard two shots of gunfire at around 9:30 p.m. when I was already in bed reading. I was told that the locals would shoot at times when elephants would come near their homes to eat some of the local fruits like banana or papaya. The main problem is that they would destroy other plants on their way to the food of their choice. A few minutes later, our dog Moritz would bark outside. Actually he does almost every night as there’s always some people walking around the house. So I just continued reading.

Next morning Claudia and I discussed last night’s shots and Moritz’s barking. She told me that she went outside to check if there was some animal in the garden but couldn’t see anything. She then went to work in the garden while I did so on my computer outside on the veranda. Later Claudia called me. She had found some footprints and other traces of our nightly visitor. It must have been an elephant wandering through our garden who was keen on eating some papayas. He must have been coming from the river, then followed the street until he passed our cottages then headed straight to the papaya tree on the opposite side of the terrain where he broke some branches off the tree. The elephant didn’t even eat the fruits as they were not ready anyway and never will as they all fell to the ground. From the tree the elephant seemed to have walked back to the river, directly through our garden where it stepped on some green pepper. Then Moritz had obviously disturbed him at some point as he turned around and followed the field outside the greenhouse where it disappeared in the woods of the Murchison Falls Park.

We will now try to stop them from coming into our terrain by hanging up some pieces of cloth that were soaked in chilli water. The locals say that this should keep elephants off ones property… We’ll see if it is going to work.

The elephant came from up there where the papaya tree is located…