Back to the Frozen North

Still recovering from the jetlag and the shock of arriving back in Toronto on Saturday to freezing temperatures. My last day in Congo included a visit to a school in Pointe Noire that is involved in our education program -- Africa Genie school -- where I expected to see a presentation or activity but found instead that I was pretty much a one-man panel, answering questions from these bright, lively students about life in Canada, the environmental issues we face and what young people are doing to overcome them, all conducted in French (my French has improved dramatically over the course of my three days in Congo!). Their energy and enthusiasm were wonderful and at the end they presented me with a book of letters from students to their counterparts in Canada. They would love to start an exchange with a Canadian class, so if there are any schools that are interested and can work in French, please let me know!

Then I began my 27-hour journey home, starting with a short flight to Brazzaville from Pointe Noire. Fortunately I had time to break my journey in Brazzaville for a couple of hours and the airport wasn't looking too appealing, so I took a cab into town to grab dinner on the banks of the Congo river at a lovely restaurant called Mami Wata. Incredibly atmospheric sitting outside, watching the twinkling lights of the DRC on the other side of the river, and dug-out canoes being poled up the murky waters. There was a high-end cocktail party going on in the adjacent garden -- lots of French champagne and chi-chi appetizers being consumed. Extraordinary how a country can be at the same time so wealthy and so stunningly poor -- my taxi driver back to the airport just shook his head when I brought the subject up.

Almost home, but still had to get over the biggest challenge of the trip - boarding a plane at Brazzaville airport which I think rates as the worst I have ever experienced anywhere in the world. There were no fewer than three luggage checks and four passport and boarding pass checks before you could get on the plane -- each one a melee of sweating people pushing and shoving to get to the front. Quite a relief to board the Air France plane and be allowed to sit quietly in the cool for eight hours.

It's taken the last few days for my journey to even begin to sink in, and I suspect will be much longer before it really comes home to me. I am filled with gratitude to everyone I met along the way -- all of our dedicated JGI staff and their teams, all the committed teachers, health workers and microcredit committees and of course all of the chimpanzees. Everyone, without exception, was friendly and helpful and has left me with positive images of the countries I visited -- of extraordinarily cheerful and resourceful people working to overcome the challenges they face and to provide better lives for their children, to enhance their communities and to protect the animals and the nature their countries enjoy.

It's hard to reconcile all this with the images we see in the newspaper and on television of the ethnic violence that has erupted recently in Kenya. But perhaps that's my biggest lesson -- Africa is huge and complex, and its various countries and peoples differ vastly from one to another. Generalizing about the continent is unhelpful and potentially dangerous, and we need to understand that what we see in the media reflects only a minute piece of all that Africa (or each one of its countries) really is. If you want to understand you need to go.

I'm now officially signing off from my travel blog -- thanks to everyone who posted comments and to all of our dedicated partners and supporters that make the wonderful work I saw in Tanzania, Uganda and Congo a reality. You're the best!

A Special Place in Congo

Well -- it has been another extraordinary day. Relatively smooth sailing getting here from Uganda, just a long, long journey. Two hour flight to Addis, night in the Hilton Hotel (don't recommend it, when I arrived at 10pm they said the room still had to be cleaned). Four hour flight to Brazzaville in the morning. Airport there is INSANE but fortunately JGI had arranged for someone to meet me and put me on the next flight to Pointe Noire, where I finally arrived at 5:30pm and was met by Lisa Pharoah of our Africa Programs staff -- so good to see a familiar face! We spent the night at the staff apartment in Pointe Noire and had dinner at a lovely restaurant on the beach -- delicious fish, waves lapping at the shore, pinpoints of light on the horizon which are the many oil rigs that dot this coast. Pointe Noire looks relatively prosperous, with a wave of oil cash flowing in -- new stadium in the centre, but the roads are still dreadful and of course the vast majority of people still live in poverty.

Which brings us today. We started with a visit to Bouity village near the sanctuary, accompanied by Abell Gousseine who is the Director of Education for Congo, and several of the teachers who run our education program here. The children at the village school, which was paid for by JGI met us with songs and smiles -- their benches and desks set up under the trees, and I had an opportunity to see an example of JGI's education programs for Congo, called "Kudia Kubanza" in action, with the children learning about the role of the forest and the animals that live in it, as well as the part they play as human beings. Extraordinary that we have to explain these things given that these children live in the forest, but in the past they have only ever viewed it as a source of food. Abell tells me that until two years ago, when JGI built the school and hired a teacher, there was no school for any of these children, and this is the first opportunity many of them have had to attend class. They seem to be entranced by the entire experience.

From there on to another kind of classroom -- this one for infant chimps that have been brought to the Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Sanctuary, situated within a stunningly beautiful 18,000-acre reserve here on the coast of Congo. We are accompanied by Rebeca, who manages the sanctuary here, and what a formidable task -- there are currently 138 chimps in her care, almost all of them orphans of the bushmeat trade. The sanctuary is quite remarkable -- it just seems to go on forever, with group after group of chimpanzees being housed in different outdoor enclosures, separated by their age and size and to minimize conflict. The infants are ridiculously engaging -- they spend their days outside with their dedicated keepers, who comfort and tease them, even swinging in the trees to play with them, as they try to help them recover from the terrible traumas many have experienced. As in a human nursery, if one catches a cold they all do, and several currently have runny noses and coughs. They crowd to the fence to get some attention and affection, and I have my first experience of a true chimpanzee cuddle with Kudia.

We spend the afternoon touring the sanctuary with Rebeca explaining the mechanics of it all -- a serious challenge to feed and manage all these animals and keep them in reasonably natural conditions. The majority of the chimps spend the day out in the natural forest or in outdoor enclosures, only returning to the dormitory buildings to spend the night. The reserve itself is as much savannah as forest, and the chimps really need more natural forest and isolated conditions that won't bring them into contact with wild chimps and with humans, so JGI is investigating the possibility of moving some to another location. In the meantime, they seem happy and extremely well cared for -- after all had been bedded down (an experience in itself with the older chimps displaying and shrieking wildly!) I saw three chimps being lovingly shampooed by their keepers to control some skin condition they had developed.

I have seen all our Chimp Guardian chimps -- Timi, Kudia, Petit Prince and the ancient Gregoire and all are well and happy.

Now all is quiet and I am typing with a small sanctuary cat on my lap (how they find me I don't know.....) Tomorrow I will return to Pointe Noire to visit another school group before boarding the plane home. I will be very happy to see my family again but very sad to go .... this has been another amazing stop on my African odyssey!

Uganda's Chimp Forests and Sanctuaries

Well, it's been an action-packed couple of days. We left very early Sunday morning to drive out first to Hoima and then to Masindi District, which are in the far west of Uganda -- this is about a five-hour trip depending on where you are going. The roads are good for the first part, but very degraded at the end of the trip, making for a seriously bone-jarring trip.

The landscape seems to be quite different to Tanzanzia - more densely populated, and I couldn't get over the fact that you pass small communities, each with at least one if not two schools, at least every five minutes along the way. Not surprising when you consider that 50% of the population is comprised of children. The countryside is lush and green, but every square inch of land is in use, which makes the Budongo forest, which we were heading for, all the more precious. The team tells me that they have seen forest areas disappear in less than a few years, most to charcoal making which is a big cottage industry in the countryside.

We had the chance to visit the Busingiro education centre in the forest, where the dedicated team does educational visits for schoolchildren in the area, explaining to them about the importance of conservation and respecting the forest and its animals, then taking them on a tour of the forest. Apparently for some of the children, this is the first time they have ever actually set foot in the forest and had an opportunity to learn about the creatures it is home to.

From there we visited the Sonso research centre and the "Royal Mile" which runs through the forest (so named because it was the King's personal hunting ground). The forest is thick with birds and small primates -- red-tailed monkeys, blue and colobus monkeys. Quite fascinating.

We ended our day at the Kayo Pabidi ecotourism site which JGI has taken over management of, through an agreement with the National Forest Authority, and is almost finishing a small lodge and cabins in the forest from where you can do forest-walks and do chimp tracking. The setting is lovely and the wildlife amazing. We had a wonderful quiet night in the comfortable cabins, and saw several chimps high up in the forest canopy on a walk that morning. The evening was marked by a drive up to Murchison falls which are quite spectacular and from where you can sit and watch the sun set over the Nile river. Absolutely beautiful! I also saw some very relaxed hippos in the river and African buffalo and bushbuck along the way.

Our time in the area was made more interesting by the fact that a young chimp, about a year and a half, had been confiscated just two days before from some villagers who were looking to sell him to the first buyer. The JGI team intervened, and he is now safe at the Uganda Wildlife Education Centre in Entebbe. He was apparently in terrible shape and quite traumatized -- his mother had likely been killed by the villagers previously. Part of our time in Masindi was spent visiting the police and National Forest Authority to ensure that the villagers, who had been arrested, would in fact be prosecuted for their crime. This can be complicated, and in this case involved Debby Cox, who runs JGI, actually providing the police with a copy of the Act that prohibits possessing or trading in chimpanzees, so they would know what law had been broken.

Today I am back in Entebbe, and have had a wonderful morning visit to Ngamba Island, which is run by the Chimpanzee Sanctuary and Wildlife Conservation Trust (CSWCT) which operates a chimp sanctuary on an island in Lake Victoria. JGI Canada provides support to this sanctuary each year through the Chimp Guardian program.

It takes about 45 minutes by speed boat to get to this chimpanzee haven in the lake and is absolutely worth the visit. Here the chimps have access to an island of their own during the day and can roam freely -- there are 43 chimps on the island, almost all of whom came in poor shape, victims of the trade in chimpanzees. The island is also a haven to other species -- covered in birds of all types, with a huge colony of bright yellow weaver birds, and many lapwings and plovers, none of whom appear to have any fear. We saw the 11am feeding of the chimps which was wonderful -- they emerge from the forest and feed on fruits and vegetables thrown down to them by the keepers -- you get to see all the interactions between the chimps as they battle with each other to get the food -- one or two are clever enough to use tools to access any fruits which have fallen on the wrong side of the fence. Once fed, they are relaxed and engaging before melting back into the forests to do their own thing.

You can stay on the island in lovely tented accommodation right on the lake, and enjoy an incredible environment with lots of time to view chimps up close in their natural habitat, even going for a walk in the forest with the younger ones in the evening.

I am now packing up to head off to Addis Ababa and the next leg of my journey. Tomorrow will see me in Congo-Brazzaville, where I will visit the Tchimpounga Sanctuary, and if I have access to a computer will do my next blog from there.

On to Uganda

After my morning at Gombe I experienced the reality of domestic air travel in Africa. Rushed through the mud to the airport at Kigoma to catch my flight on to Dar es Salaam. Interesting place -- very rudimentary in many ways, but the waiting room is to die for -- furnished with red plush sofas you can sink into as you wait for the plane. Thank goodness, because we sat for approximately two hours only to be told the flight had been cancelled completely as there were problems with the landing gear.

Fortunately for me Emmanuel Mtiti had waited for me and ferried me back to the Hilltop Hotel for another night. Obviously this all happened for a reason as the zebras were waiting for me calmly again as we approached the hotel and this time I actually got a reasonable photograph! Another quiet night and then eventually got a flight out to Dar around noon the next day so have missed all the meetings we had planned with the eam in Dar. Did meet with Pancras Ngalason, however, the Executive Director of JGI Tanzania and had a short tour of the city as dusk fell.

Back to the airport this morning and very efficient easy flights with Air Kenya through Nairobi brought me into Entebbe this morning. I am now sitting in the JGI Uganda office at the desk of Debby Cox, the Executive Director. The offices are located in a big house on the shores of Lake Victoria and the terrace upstairs has an incredible view of this enormous lake (second largest in the world?) The climate here is gorgeous -- warm but the air is dry and there is a lovely breeze blowing. Have already seen about 20 different species of bird just in the garden around the house. Tried to do my laundry but the cycle is stuck halfway through as the power has gone off -- back to the manual option I guess!

Tomorrow we leave very early for the Budongo forest where JGI has an ecotourism project where you can walk with the chimps in the forest as you can at Gombe. Will be back on Monday afternoon and then visit Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary on Tuesday -- more from me then!!

The Chimpanzees of Gombe

Woke this morning at 5:45am and scrambled around in the dark to find my hiking boots and flashlight. Today was to be my day for looking for wild chimps in the forest at Gombe. It sounded like it would be promising -- the chimps had been seen nesting not more then 100 metres up the hill behind the camp. But little did I know how promising! Bill Wallauer (resident videographer at Gombe) and a guide took me into the forest to be part of the "un-nesting" for the day. After only a few minutes we stopped to wait for it to get a little lighter. I had assumed I would be using my binoculars to see chimpanzees from a distance if I was lucky but within a few seconds I realized that the grunts and rustles just above my head were coming from a chimp slowly coming awake in its nest. The hour and a half that followed was simply astonishing.

My photographs did not come out at all because the light was so low and flash is not allowed, not to mention that I am a terrible photographer, but there were often chimpanzees within just a few feet of me. In fact, it was almost impossible not to be close to them as they are so unafraid of the human presence, and totally disregard the people watching them. As the light slowly grew in strength we saw the chimps wake, stretch, make rushes at each other through the forest and slowly move off to feed, with us following closely behind. In some cases, I would be closely following a pair down the trail, only to realize I myself was being followed my another large chimp who wanted me to move off the path and out of his or her way.

I saw the large, older male Frodo, who is looking quite grizzled and whose back is almost entirely grey; Chris, the current dominant alpha male; Ferdinand, who would like to be the alpha male; Titan, Gremlin and her baby Gimli, Gaia, Golden & Glitter (the twins), Nasa, Tubia, Tarzan and Tresia with a very small infant. To be honest, I probably saw many more individuals, but it was very hard to keep them all straight!

I can honestly say this has been one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life, and I recommend it to anyone who has the opportunity. There were displays of anger and fear, grooming and calming, wonderful cuddling of mother and child. The funniest was the young male Tarzan (really quite small) who challenged us as a small boy might, throwing stones in our direction and shaking sticks menacingly.

After an hour the guide gently suggested that I needed to go find another group of chimpanzees to watch -- apparently the rule is that you can only stay so long with any one group so there is less chance of you passing on any colds or infections you might have brought with you. The risk is only too real as several chimps have died from respiratory infections which are only brought in by humans.

So reluctantly I disengaged and went instead to see the waterfall higher up in the park before heading back to the lake for a swim and a late breakfast. Gombe is extraordinarily beautiful and peaceful -- chimps aside it is a great place to come to. The lake is beautifully clear and warm for swimming. I stayed in a little rest house which was very comfortable, and I was fortunate enough to have drinks with Jane Goodall on the beach last night and dinner with her and Grub and Anthony Collins and Shadrack Kamenya who run the program there, as well as Bill Wallauer -- an amazing group of people.

There is much more to see and do here beyond the chimps -- the park has a huge baboon population and as we were leaving we also saw a young Impala on the beach with the baboons. In some ways it has all been a bit too much to take in!

Now I am back in the GGE office in Kigoma and will taking off soon, back to Dar es Salaam. I am feeling extraordinarily fortunate and grateful to all the people here who have made my stay so rewarding. The team is wonderful and doing remarkable work -- and the need is so great. Anyone who has spent time in the presence of the chimpanzees of Gombe will know that they must be saved. The results of the land-use planning and conservation work that is happening around the park is already beginning to have results, both for the chimps and other wildlife of Gombe and for the people who live here.

Thank you to the dedicated JGI team that is making this all a reality! More from Dar es Salaam tomorrow before I move on to Uganda.

Highland Villages

Short entry today because the boat for Gombe is waiting for me and the internet connection takes time here to catch up with my typing. Amazing day yesterday viewing the highland villages that form part of the Greater Gombe Ecosystem project. Here I thought Kigoma was rural but the furthest village we drove to (Mkigo) was a 2.5 hour drive from here over rough roads (the drivers here deserve a medal). I met with wonderful people in several villages, saw a woodlot project, village tree nursery, family planning group and a microcredit group. All had amazing stories to tell me about how the GGE project has affected their lives. My favourite was the microcredit group -- I met with the board (see photo above) who explained what a small $100 loan can mean to them -- mostly they spoke of education and how an increase in income means their children can go to secondary school. The landscape is extreme and beautiful with villages dotted throughout -- homes all constructed of red mud bricks. Everyone is moving on foot or by bicycle. All the women and even the tiniest of girls are carrying loads on their heads -- water, firewood, the laundry, the groceries. The colours are amazing and the smiles brilliant despite what is obviously an extremely difficult life.

Can't say any more -- must hop on the boat to Gombe. More after I have seen chimps (hopefully). Jane Goodall will be there and we will be visiting lakeshore villages together which will be great.

Final note -- saw zebras last night near the hotel - my first viewing in the wild!