A Kite that Won't Fly

Doug and the kids decided to drive me to the retreat, instead of me flying down. They took some vacation days and had a good time.

We left Kampala around 6am on Saturday so I could get to the Speke resort and register for the retreat in time.

Of course, there is never a trip to Kampala without a little excitement.

On previous trips, we have killed a dog, seen elephants, hippos, kobs, and baboons, we cross the Nile River twice and see some marvelous rapids, and there is always interesting things riding on the road with us. Some of those things I will show you in a later post about the drive home.

We had been traveling about 3 hours when we drove upon two Kites in the road. They look very similar to a hawk.

One took off in time, but the other was delayed in taking off, and he met our car going at a very fast speed.

Looking behind us, we never saw anything.

Doug was sure it was still stuck on the car, but I couldn’t see how.

Well…Doug was right.

We stopped right before the first Nile bridge, and when Doug got out, he saw the kite stuck in our luggage rack…dead, of course.

The sad thing about it all is that we were sick enough to not only take pictures of it and pose with it, but we also cut off one of his feet. Do you blame us? Those talons are amazing!

We left it on the side of the road, and when we drove back several days later it was gone. The funny thing was that I saw two more dead kites on the road on our return journey.

My guess (completely uneducated, of course) is that the kites are in mating season, and the males are a bit “disoriented,” if you know what I mean.

Why else would they sit there with a huge piece of metal barreling down on them.

As a side note: We hid the talon because we didn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea. We are completely aware that witch doctors could probably use them for something, and we didn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea about us (even though we are a bit crazy).

And of course, there are always monkeys and baboons - they are getting to be as normal as seeing cows in Texas. (If you look closely you will not only see the baby on the stomach in the foreground, but there are two more monkeys on the hill across the road.