Our Uganda itinerary took us from Kampala to the Mabamba Swamp to Fort Portal to Kibale National Park to Queen Elizabeth National Park to Mgahinga National Park before we entered Rwanda to depart for the second half of our trip. The main attraction, the star of the entire itinerary, was clearly the gorilla trekking in Mgahinga National Park. It was the most anticipated and expensive part of the whole vacation and it was clearly advertised as the anchor of the week. But before we got there, we had some other stuff to see.
A wildlife watching trip to western Uganda is by its very definition a primate-heavy trip. There are about 13 or so different species of primates, including two different species of apes, to see on a typical vacation in that part of Africa. Before Mgahinga we'd visit Queen Elizabeth National Park where we expected to see monkeys, among other species of non-primates. Before Queen Elizabeth there were other stops to see apes or monkeys, including on the properties of two of our hotels and on a walk around the Bigodi Swamp one afternoon.
But placed first on the real honest-to-God, serious wildlife watching portion of our itinerary was a half day stop at Kibale National Park to take a chimpanzee trek.
I don't know why exactly, but I expected this would be a bit of a fruitless endeavor. It was only scheduled for a half a day and imagined we wouldn't see too much. My attitude about this portion of our agenda was a bit strange. The only explanation I can really offer is that I've never heard anyone really rave about a day trip to see chimpanzees. Everyone who goes up into the mountains of Uganda or Rwanda to see the gorillas goes on and on and on about how fantastic the experience was. Chimps? Not so much. I've never heard a peep about it. I figured we'd walk in the woods, see a chimpanzee or two from a distance and then move on to the afternoon portion of our day.
Of course, I wouldn't really be writing this post this way if that's how it turned out.
Chimpanzees are our closest living relative. Depending on which source you read, they share 98.6% or 98.8% or something close to one of those numbers of our DNA. They have large brains. They live in communities made up of multiple families. They are omnivorous and have been known to hunt for meat in groups. They use tools. They feel empathy, particularly for younger chimpanzees. They respect their elders. They fight. They play. They tickle. They kiss. They hug. They smile. They develop bald spots. They have been known to deactivate hunters' snares. They sometimes play with crude dolls as a way of learning to become mothers. They communicate through vocalizations and gestures, including facial gestures. They just can't talk the way we can.
The foundation of humans' understanding of chimpanzee behavior was laid by Jane Goodall in the 1960s and 1970s in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. Goodall was the first to document the use of tools by chimpanzees. She was also the first to disprove the commonly held notion that chimpanzees are vegetarians, witnessing them working in groups hunting and killing colobus monkeys for food. Appropriately, Goodall's name was actually attached to the tour that took us to see the chimpanzees in Kibale National Park, one of 17 tours that GAdventures (our preferred tour operator for things like this) operates under the Jane Goodall Collection banner.
Also appropriately, on this very tour, we heard stories while walking with a guide around the Bigodi Swamp about chimpanzees hunting red colobus monkeys. Apparently, the red colobus monkey is a "fight, not flight" monkey. Only problem is they refuse to run from chimpanzees and are no match for their strength. The result is usually death for the colobus. Goodall was right.
How awesome is it that chimpanzees can deactivate a hunter's snare, by the way? Closest living relative, I'm telling you.
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| Breakfast: chimpanzees in a fig tree. |
Despite our pre-trek stop by the side of the road, we still made it to the briefing for the actual trek itself on time. We had float in our schedule, as it turned out.
There are rules for chimpanzee treks. Don't eat on the trek. Don't chase the chimpanzees. Don't litter. Wear a mask (close relative, remember...). Don't use flash photography. If you have to poop or pee, that's OK, but you have to bury it (nobody in our group peed or pooped in the forest). And tuck your pants into your socks. I have to say, I wasn't necessarily prepared for this trip for this last rule. I didn't really bring any socks that seemed to fit the bill for tucking in but I was lucky that a pair of dress socks worked. Just.
The socks thing, by the way, is for safari ants. Apparently not poisonous but they do bite and there's some sensitive flesh in the pants area. Better to keep ants on the outside of the pants. These things were pretty much everywhere. We seemed to be constantly plucking ants off ourselves or other people during parts of our walk to find chimpanzees and some of them were pretty large. I would not have really wanted to have some of those in my pants. Pants into the socks...check!
The briefing was given by a woman named (and I apologize if I'm misspelling here) Prossie and she was just awesome. She was firm in her presentation of the rules and warned us with humor as to what might happen if we disobeyed. But she also gave me the impression that she was smart and warm and sarcastic while also totally having our back. After she was done with her talk, she grabbed a very large automatic rifle (I'm guessing on the automatic part a bit) and told us to come with her. She ended up being our guide. She was very much everything she seemed to be in front of an audience. I can't imagine anyone that day or any other day having a better guide than we had in Prossie. We got super lucky, here. Again.
We got organized and followed Prossie back down the road we had driven up all the way to the spot where we stopped on the way there. To the same fig tree with the same chimps. Yes, we had already seen this group but look, the views we got were amazing and breakfast (for the chimps, not us) with this clear a view was just incredible. Super clear and great picture opportunities. But ultimately, we wanted more. We wanted different looks. We wanted closer looks. We wanted chimpanzees on the ground very, very near to us. After all, wasn't this supposed to be a "trek" and not just a "stand by the side of the road"?
Let's head into the forest.
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| Heading into Kibale National Park (top). Following Prossie following chimpanzees (bottom). |
Entering the forest of Kibale National Park is as straightforward as it sounds. There's no walking to a trailhead or anything like that. Step off the asphalt, move aside some twigs and brush, watch out for safari ants and just plow in. There's no path, no boardwalk or anything. Just push stuff aside and move on. Follow Prossie.
And of course, there are no chimpanzees when we did this at first. Should we go back to the fig trees? There were plenty there. Why did we leave them in the tree? I know we said we wanted to go trekking but there's nothing here. Not yet, anyway.
Keep going.
Patience helps when looking for wildlife. And with the chimpanzees, we honestly needed a bit of that. There was nothing to see but there were sounds. Not ape vocalizations, but crashing from above. Something sizeable is clearly moving in the canopy overhead. But nothing is visible. Anywhere.
Then just like that, they are there. Right on the left of the trail. On the ground. Just paused there en route from where they are coming from to where they are going. Two pretty sizeable looking chimpanzees. Right on the forest floor feet from us. But not for long. They picked up and moved on, faster than we could possibly track them. Before I could even get a good picture. We let them go. Remember...no chasing the chimpanzees.
After the initial disappointment of the two chimpanzees passing in front of the path we were forging, there seemed to be more and more of these animals everywhere. Mostly in the trees around us. And they are difficult to spot and track, particularly because they keep moving around. Why don't they stay in one spot?
Here's where Prossie's prowess as a guide came in. Walk forward. Stop. Follow me. Circle back. Stand here. Look there. She seemed to be able to position everyone in our six-person group someplace useful and valuable. Or maybe it was just me. I don't really know, I guess. It's difficult to pay attention to that sort of thing when there is wildlife to see this close.
These types of looks allowed us to ask questions and learn. How long do chimpanzees live? How old is that particular one we are looking at? How long do baby chimpanzees stay with their mothers? Are there any natural predators in Kibale? How does breeding and selection of a mate work? How long do pregnancies last?
This last line of questioning was inspired by a female in heat feeding in the trees immediately above us (fourth picture in this post). It turns out that the sexual habits of chimpanzees involve a good amount of promiscuity. Females are likely to sample or be sampled by (depending on your point of view, I guess) a number of partners before deciding ultimately who to mate with. This sampling may be several partners per day until she is ready to mate for good. I guess women's rights aren't particularly a thing in the chimpanzee community but it is a little heartening that she ultimately gets some input into who her partner will be.
The other questions? They can live decades. We saw some in their mid to late 30s. Babies are dependent on their mothers for 10 years or so. Pregnancy is about eight months. And snakes kill chimps in the forest. We did not see any snakes at all and certainly none that could take down a chimpanzee. No complaints on that one from me.
That patience I mentioned earlier? It paid off.
Eventually, we found a great number of chimpanzees coming down to the forest floor. Maybe not all of them all the way down, but enough to be of great interest to us. In ones and twos and in small families. To nap, to rest, to just lie down, to socialize with each other, to groom. And in some respects (and I'm supposing a bit here), just to see what all these crazy humans are doing on the ground in their neck of the woods.
These animals are incredibly tolerant of our presence. Look, I'm sure they see people like me every day, white people dressed in hiking pants tucked into dress socks with headbands on to stop the sweat pouring into our eyes and with fairly good-sized cameras to allow us to capture as many awesome pictures as possible. They clearly know we are there. When we look into those light brown eyes they clearly see us looking at them while they look back at us. And they are totally OK with it all. Well, most of it all.
Of course, people are stupid, right? They can't resist the temptation to get as close as humanly possible to a chimpanzee. They want selfies. They want to walk behind the apes so they can get a picture of themselves in the background with a wild animal in the foreground (which is effectively surrounding them). And unbelievably, most of that is actually OK. Only once did we see a chimpanzee sit up and shake a small sapling in apparent warning when someone got just a bit too close.
But to a point, there seems to be an understanding that we are not there to do harm. And that's totally incredible. For us.
Of course, the rules that were covered in our introductory briefing addressed closeness. 25 feet or 8 meters is the guideline for distance. I can tell you it's almost impossible to maintain that cushion between them and us. Sure, some excitement got the best of us sometimes and drove us to within about four feet of the objects of our attention (yes, I'm blaming the excitement here). But they also come deliberately close to us on their own. Not just mature chimps either. We saw some younger members of the group really near to us. Maybe not by themselves, but their guardians appeared unconcerned with our presence so close to their offspring. We have a great camera that allows us to take really detailed close-ups. Some of the pictures on this post, though, are taken with my iPhone 8. Yes, we were iPhone 8 close.
The incredible intimacy of this experience sticks out. In a number of ways.
First, the closeness between us and the chimpanzees imparted an automatic level of connectedness. Before we walked into the Kibale National Park forest, pretty much every wildlife interaction I'd had on the continent of Africa involved me sitting or standing on a boat or in a car a good distance from whatever I was viewing. Now, sure, I've seen a warthog or two and the odd troop of baboons here and there in towns or on hotel properties but never like a significantly sized, potentially dangerous or lethal species in front of me while I was on foot.
I'm not dissing warthogs here and I certainly don't want to be attacked by even a single baboon but clearly an adult chimpanzee a couple of strides from me is a whole different ballgame. Seeing from a distance is not seeing from four feet away. The level of detail and observation is completely different up close.
But more than just the physical distance was the connection we witnessed between chimpanzees, although that totally had to do with how close we got. There were obviously intimate connections between individuals in the forest, some through vocalizations but more often through visual lines of sight or physical contact. We saw them play with each other and watch out for each other and comfort each other with their closeness. We also saw them checking with other members of their group from a distance through sounds or glances. Just making sure everyone is good, essentially.
One of the interactions between chimpanzees requiring and demonstrating trust is grooming. It's not just about picking bugs off another chimp; it's a social bonding experience that's extremely important in chimpanzee society. I feel fortunate that we got to see this in our time in the forest. After watching one older male chimpanzee chill in front of us for 20 minutes or so, he got up, walked over to a nearby companion and sat down for some quality grooming time. First one, then the other. You groom me and I groom you. It was a privilege to see this, particularly after spending so long with one half of the pair and understanding the immediate leadup to that social connection.
As if it weren't amazing enough to be able to spend time with these creatures, all of this takes place in an absolutely gorgeous environment. It's lush and cool and very, very green. I don't spend a lot of time in forests in my everyday life but if I were to walk in the woods every once in a while, it wouldn't be a forest that looked like the one in Kibale National Park. It's completely exotic.
All of that added up to an amazing experience. I can't believe that I've never read anything about how incredible a walk in the woods to watch chimpanzees can be. It's also an hours-long experience and that fact alone is important. So many wildlife encounters are extremely brief. This one lasted over three hours. Gorilla tracking (we'll get to that soon enough on this blog...) gives you an hour with a single small family. Our chimpanzee experience lasted more than three times as long as that and we saw probably two dozen chimps or maybe more. This was without doubt one of the best days I've spent following animals in the wild. Not just in Africa. Anywhere. If someone ever asks you if you want to go on a chimpanzee trek, just say yes. And wear long socks.
One of the things I was most surprised about in our three plus hours in the woods was the almost complete lack of vocalizations from the chimpanzees. Yes, we heard some in the excitement of play or chase and we heard and saw one older chimpanzee call out to some distant companions to make one of those treasured long distance touches that we witnessed. But overall, they were remarkably quiet, preferring to make connections between each other in more silent ways. I expected a lot more noise.
We did at one point hear one human imitating the calls they heard the chimpanzees make, which was a little surprising for a couple of reasons. First, "do not mimic chimpanzees" was on the list of rules posted on the wall of the briefing room, although I guess not everyone reads and follows the rules. Second, the warning about doing exactly that points out something incredibly simple and probably obvious given a little thought: you do not know what you might be saying.
Look, I don't know about you, but I don't speak chimpanzee. There are also a whole lot of human languages that I also don't speak and I don't, as a general rule, go around imitating people in foreign countries. There are a few reasons for this but one is definitely that I do not, under any circumstances, want to say something offensive or that might incite someone to do something to me that I don't want to have happen.
Same rule applies to chimpanzees, folks. The last thing I want to do let out some kind of aggressive chimpanzee scream or hit on a chimpanzee's mate. We were also told not to replay any videos filmed while on our walk that involved any sort of vocalization. Want to make chimp sounds? Inside voice on your walk, here. Or do it when you get back to the hotel. You do not, after all, know what you might be saying.
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| The rules. Rule number 7 is important. |
