Chimpanzees

Chimpanzees in Gombe National Park

Hey all,
As I sit in the Jambo Inn internet cafe I can hear the evening prayers being broadcast over Dar Es Salaam. Dar is 99% Muslim so 5x a day you can hear prayers being sang over a broadcast system. One morning Carol woke up from a dream where she thought God was speaking to her ....well he or she kind of was speaking to her...it was the 5am prayers being broadcast.
Ok that wasn't the topic of this posting...chimpanzees are! After a four hour flight from Dar to Kigoma ( a town on the coast of Lake Tanganyika- the longest and second deepest lake in the world), an overnight there, and a 2 hour boat ride north from Kigoma to Gombe National Park we were there..where the chimpanzees can be seen in there natural environment! Gombe was made famous by the research of Jane Goodall. Back in the 50s she and a colleague set up camp on the shores of this park to begin the first observational research of these primates. We arrived on Tuesday around 9am and after handing over our wallets- park fees are $100 per person per day!- we were off on the trail with our guide. We decided on 3 days in the park to ensure that we would see the chimps. The park is about 50 square miles and has about 100 chimps residing in in it. We were visiting the section of the park called Kasekela.
I was mentally preparing myself that we may not see any chimps while we were there. You are immediately greeted by lots of baboons. But after 3 weeks in Africa Baboons had become as common as squirrels are to us in the US. Not long after beginning our hike our guide turned to us and says "Prepare your cameras" He had spotted a chimpanzee...Sure enough there was a chimp swinging in the branches above us. Pretty hard to see at this point but we waited for her to come out of the tree for about 30 minutes. Not just one chimp came out of the tree but five chimps..a whole family of females...Gremlin, Greta, Golden, Gimly and one other name that escapes me right now. They sat themselves down right in middle of our trail. We stayed about 10 meters away and watched them as they groomed each other for quite awhile. They are meticulous about grooming. It's both about cleanliness and relationship building with each other. One of the most fun to watch was the baby in the bunch...very playful, she picked up pieces of a palm tree and made a head dress out of it, jumped on top of her mother, and sister...and was cute to watch lounge. We had the opportunity to follow this family for hours and watch them groom, collect food from various trees, groom again, feed again...that's pretty much the routine, groom, feed, rest..groom, feed rest.
After a couple hours of following, the chimps went off deep into the woods and we walked up to a waterfall. Upon our return from the waterfall and on our way back to camp..all five of them crossed our path again and sat down in front of us. We got to spend another half hour watching them before our first day ended. We then took our boat 10 minutes north to our resthouse right on the beach and got to take a swim in the Lake. Lake Tanganyika is huge...it reminds me of Lake Erie where I grew up..but a lot more remote where we were. We were very pleased to have a good meal of beans and rice as the sunset over the lake.
Carol will have to add more chimp stories later. We were very fortunate to meet 5 other chimps on Weds..and since I am running out of time on this computer I will save that story for later....hope you are all well!