2015 – Kigoma, Gombe, Kagunga and Back Again
Kigoma – It’s Thursday and apologies for not posting sooner. The synopsis is that Wednesday started extreemly early (3:00 am alarm to get to the airport) and ended with us exhausted and in an area with virtually no wi-fi or cell service. But: chimpanzees! This morning got a little derailed by Bill coming down over-night with the awful-awfuls, there were two long boat rides and Bill was presented with his very first chicken!
We are currently sitting in the tower restaurant of the Coastal View Inn in Kigoma, waiting for dinner to arrive. The wires for off-loading pictures from my camera are in Kasulu, so illustrations of the last two days will be added later to this post or to a new post tomorrow.
We had set our alarm for 3:00 am in order to get to the airport in Dar for our 6:00 am flight to Kigoma, Our taxi driver was all set to pick us up at 3:45. We got down to the front desk to find the poor staff being berated by an Indian “gentleman” who had missed the shuttle bus that was taking stranded Kenya Air passengers back to the airport for a 5:45 am flight. I think that he expected the hotel to drive him to the airport, but they didn’t have the staff to do it. He could have asked the desk clerk to get him a taxi, but I guess it didn’t occur to him. Having taken the bulk of our luggage to the airport on Tuesday, we had lots of room in the cab, so we invited him to share it. He jumped at the chance. When we got to the airport, he grabbed his luggage and hurried towards the terminal – no thanks to us, no contribution to the taxi fare or tip to the driver. I didn’t feel that our offering to share really benfitted him at all. But then I realized that it benefitted the front desk staff, who didn’t have to listen to his complaining anymore.
Our flight was late taking off and arriving by about an hour, but Air Tanzania now has jets, to we actually arrived at about the same time in the morning as we would have last year. We grabbed Bill’s guitar from it’s big travel case and put just enough cothes to survie two days in our back packs before sending the bulk of our luggage to Kasulu. We enjoyed a late breakfast/early lunch with Daudi Ndahana and the Kigoma reginal director, Reginald, then drove to Kibrizi (Kigoma Harbor). After buying fuel, Daudi, Bill and I headed north on Lake Tanganyika in the diocese’s evangilism boat. There are a lot of places north of Kigoma on the lake that are unreachable by road. One of those places is Kigunga parish; which is up to a four hour ride by boat, depending on whether the wind is coming at you or giving you and exta push. We needed a place up the coast to stop for the night, and that place turned out to be the Jane Goodal Center in the Gombe Reserve.
Mother and Baby: Chimpanzees!
My first primate viewing was while we were waiting to register, when we spied a baboon face staring down at us from the tree above. He stuck around long enough for Bill to get a picture and then disappeared hight into the trees.
You are only allowed in the forrest at Gombe with a guide and there are many strict rules about interacting, or rather NOT interacting with the chimpanzees: No feeding, stay at least 10 meters away, don’t look them in the eyes, etc. It is reported that it is harder to see the Chimpanzees at the end of the dry season, which this is, and that you never see them in the eveing, you are more apt to seeh them in them morning. We would only have limited time in the morning before the boat came for us, so we decided to go see the waterfall that that section of the park is known for, and hope to see chimpanzees during the brief time we had in the morning. We never did get to the waterfall. About 20 minutes into our trek, there in the middle of the trail was the “G” family. Check out Wikipedia.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasakela_Chimpanzee_Community#Gremlin
What a blessing! We got lots of pictures and after they moved past us down the trail, we decided to follow them instead of going to the waterfall. For 20 minutes or so we followed them, sometimes losing them for a little bit only to find them again. Our guides said that they “like to play with humans”. Eventually we decided to head back to the center leaving the chimps behind, only to have THEM follow US! Finally they decided they wanted to pass us, so we moved as far over the to side of the trail as we could. But Google, I think it was, wasn’t having any of that. He wanted to count “coup” and as he scampered past me he reached out to brush his hand at my skirt. (Yes, I was wearing a skirt. I thought that we were going directly to Kagunga parish and had dressed accordingly.)
A snack of tender branches.
Just hanging out.
All of this turned out to be a real blessing as Bill came down the the dreaded traveler’s disease overnight and we were not able to go into the forrest this morning….but baboons were VERY much in evidence at the hostel. First at 4:00 am we heard a baboon “bark off”. Then there was the breakfast fun and games. The dining room is on the second floor over the guest rooms. That doesn’t stop the baboons who apparently love chipati and bananas. They climb up to the balcony and then – BAM! grab the grills of any open window. They do this repeatedly, and then cimb onto the roof and run around up there. There were probably 20 or 30 of them of all ages on the beach when we took off in the boat to head to Kagunga.
And I’ll leave it there for tonight and catch up on the rest of the day tomorrow….
