Gombe and the chimps

After that ride, Gombe was paradise. We are the only people here except for the staff, we have a nice room there are cold drinks aplenty and the beach and lake are gorgeous. No crocs no bilharzias, so we can swim and lounge danger free. We had a good dinner and watched half of “the hangover” on my laptop with Shakira one of the local girls that works here. Having probably never been out of Kigoma, my explanation for the the strange bachelor party antics in Vegas were probably a more surreal experience for her than for me. (as I’m writing this there are a bunch of Baboons prowling around outside).

So up early we had breakfast and hooked up with our guide Isaiah and headed up the mountain. It was hot and wet and I was soaked by the time we got to the top. We trampled through thick jungle for 45min until we broke through the top layer of jungle to a grassy clearing.

Here we hiked up in knee high grass about 500m and then we could hear and see the chimps making a racket in the trees to our left about 700m across the ridge. We then traversed a 45 degree slope to arrive upslope of a troupe of 15 chimps headed by Ferdinand the alpha male he was with Titan, Frodo, Swine, and Sandy among others. There are 150 chimps in the park, they are all named and guides can recognize them all. Amazing, way better than the gorillas.  They are so active and so human. If you believe in creation, stop reading here.

These guys are about 5feet away, Ferdinand is on the left.

So we just hung out with the Chimps and Isaiah for about 2 hours. These groups in the Goodall study are all acclimated to humans, so they pretty much go about their business and ignore you.  When they got close I got a little nervous, all I could think about was some story on This American Life where they recount a tale of three policemen trying to separate a agitated chimp from his owner, a crowd forms and some bystander yells “a chimp a tear a man apart limb by limb!!”, the cops relented. That was my seminal memory as Ferdinand shot us hard looks from a short distance.

According to Isaiah they all have different personalities and different skills…just like people. He pointed out the ones that do somersaults, the ones the like to fight, the ones that chase the baboons.  It finally started to rain hard and they hunkered down just like the three of us. Pretty funny I looked over and our poses and expressions sitting in the rain matched the 10 chimps in the trees.  When we got down, I casually chatted with some biologist at the base camp, we are 98.8% genetically similar to chimps. In fact we are genetically closer to chimps than they are to gorillas, that is probably why it is so captivating and fascinating to watch these guys up close. If it wasn’t raining we probably would have been there all afternoon. During our visit a couple of the females were in heat and they would flirt with Ferdinand, I’ve seen similar behavior in many bars. It was so amazingly human.

This guy was eating

  Deep in thought 

There are about 10 chimps right in the trees behind us here.

We went for a nature hike down through the rain with Isaiah on the way down and saw Gombe stream and some famous waterfall. After lunch and for the next several hours the camp was literally overrun by baboons. At about 6pm while Justin and I were quietly reading inside the lodge, one of these suckers opened up the door downstairs and snuck in the lodge crept up the stairs a scared the crap out of us. You should see the canines on a Baboon to appreciate him creeping up the stairs in your lodge.

Overall very cool day, I was 50/50 on coming out here after our two days of hard travel. I would recommend this over the gorilla’s any day. Much cheaper as well, park passes are $100 vs $500 for the gorillas.