November 20th, 2023
I was up again at 5:30 am, for the second night in a
row. The trouble with last night was
that there was live music about 70 meters from my room at Murchison’s
Backpackers, which is kind of affiliated with a hotel/lodge next door. The band stopped around 11:00 pm but then
they blared some canned music until 11:45.
What to do?!?
Julius was going to Kampala today, so he sent another guy,
Edward, to pick me up. He was not
driving the safari-mobile, but an ordinary car.
I wondered how it was going to fair on some of the roads we had taken the
day before as they got a bit gnarly closer to the forest and I got my
answer. We picked up Joseph and seemed to
be going a different, longer route than yesterday. We passed by the big sugar factory that was a
fair way from the forest. There were a
lot of workers milling about, getting ready to start their day. The factory was by far the biggest employer
in the area. Edward then took the better
maintained dirt roads used by the tractors hauling sugar cane from the fields
to the factory…made sense.
The early morning view on our drive to the forest:
Once again, after arriving at the forest, we started a walk
of the perimeter to listen for any chimp calls.
Nothing. Into the forest we
went. It started to feel like a repeat
of yesterday, but the temperature was definitely cooler as it was an overcast
day that was threatening to rain, which it did.
This made me wonder if we were going to have any luck at all as Joseph
had mentioned earlier that in rain, the chimps tend to stay in their nests and
wrap their arms around themselves to try and keep as dry as possible.
Walking the perimeter. On the left is a sugar cane field that had been harvested.
Into the jungle we go:
We exited the forest to walk along the perimeter. I had donned my rain jacket and popped open
my little umbrella to try and keep as dry as possible. Then we heard it…a few chimp calls! There could be hope yet. We started back into the forest, along a
narrow path, brushing against the wet leaves of the encroaching bushes. Joseph told me that I should put my umbrella
away before we reached the chimpanzees as it could spook them.
Walking through the wet forest:
A puddle spanned the width of the trail and was about 10
feet long, and at least 3 inches deep.
I’m travelling light in Africa, so I only have one pair of waterproof
hiking shoes (shoes being the keyword there, not boots) and some flip
flops. I knew that this would be a bit
of a risk but carrying around a second pair of shoes is heavy and bulky. I tried to step on pieces of wood, or rocks
to stay out of the water as best as possible.
I escaped the first puddle relatively unscathed but then there was a
bigger, deeper one. It looked like there
was no alternative…a couple of soakers in exchange for seeing some chimpanzees
seemed like a deal I was going to have to begrudgingly accept.
Still searching:
After wading through the puddles, we continued along the path for longer than I expected. Where were the damn chimps? They hadn’t made another sound since the first grunts we had heard. We walked for about another half hour. I figured we were on a wild goose chase again but then finally Joseph whispered “chimp” and pointed upwards. About 100’ up a tree, there was a solitary male chimpanzee feeding on figs. Sweet, we finally found one!
Hard to spot, but he's just a bit to the left of the center of the pic.
Not satisfied with this, Joseph insisted that we carry on and try to find more of the group. There were supposed to be around 31 chimps in this forest so let’s see where the other 30 are. We stayed mainly on decent trails, and he led me to one of the other feeding trees that we had passed a few times the day before, with no luck.
We got entertained by some black and white colubuses jumping around, tree to tree.
A crazy big spider, tough to see in the pic, but the web was probably 2 feet in diameter and the spider was 6 inches at least...I'm glad we don't have these in Canada.
Finally, we had luck today. There were three chimpanzees, once again, pretty high up in the tree. There were two females and a juvenile. Super awesome. One of the females started a repetitive call, it was a warning signal to others…she had spotted us. After a few minutes though, she stopped, and they didn’t pay much attention to us.
Try and spot the chimps.
After I’d had my fill, we carried on, I assumed on our way
back to the car as we had already spent over three hours in the forest. We passed by a tree with many vines with
leaves running around it and Joseph stopped.
“Squirrels” he said. Three or
four little animals scurried up the vines from eye level to about 10-12 feet
above the ground…I was quite certain that they weren’t squirrels. They sported big round eyes and
proportionally big ears too. I had seen
this animal before, but not in the wild, instead on an Alice in Chains video
for the song called Angry Chair. I later
looked up on my phone and they are called Galagos, but are also known as Bush
Babies, which is what Joseph called them.
By the size of their eyes and ears, it was obvious that they
are nocturnal, so we were lucky to find them active after 10 am. They seemed very curious, looking down
between the leaves at us. Joseph seemed
more excited than me to have spotted them.
He said that he hadn’t seen them in this forest before, and he was quite
happy with this development. It seemed
like a fitting bonus for him, and me, after the 5 or so hours we had hiked
around over the two sessions, looking for the chimps.
There’s another African animal off my list, and one that
wasn’t even on my list! Thanks for your
efforts and persistence, in the end it paid off.
I appreciate Joseph's persistence to not give up. Between the two days, we hiked at least 5 hours to see all of these animals and insects...I did not leave disappointed. Thanks Joseph!
Next stop, Fort Portal, which is supposed to be a lovely area with crater lakes.
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