23 days, hand luggage only

Hmm, 4 months is a long time, and a hell of a lot has happened during this period, as I’m sure you can guess. I’m evidently not going to bore you all with a detailed account, but I’ll try to pick out a few of the more interesting/entertaining tales, and pepper it with the odd photo when and where I can. Currently sat in the hotel bar in Port Gentil, Regab on one side, so if this gets more and more incomprehensible, then there’s your reason.

On the 1st September 2011, after 4 days of travel, I finally arrived in camp Yatouga, the site of the gorilla habituation (as opposed to camp Ozouga, where the chimpanzee habituation occurs). Yatouga is situated on the southern edge of Iguela lagoon, and as such is bound on two sides by rainforest, with mangrove and lagoon on the third and fourth. After the hour and a half boat ride through the lagoon, it was an incredible experience to step off the boat and finally get a look at my home for the next year. The first thing to strike was the assault against my ears, as the sound of the rainforest kicked in with continuous squawks, clicks, whistles and croaks, from an all manner of different creatures hiding amongst the trees and bushes. Accompanied by the dense smell of vegetation, and meeting the six pygmy trackers and Matachado (the camp chef), it was a lot to take in. My home was a tent, and my office, the rainforest directly behind the tent where the elephants, gorilla and chimpanzee roam. This was to be the beginning of a good year, though it didn’t get off to too great a start…

So as I said, I arrived in Yatouga after 4 days travel, but unfortunately, my luggage wasn’t so lucky. All I knew (and all anyone at the airport knew), was that it got on the plane in London, and somewhere between there, Addis Ababa, and Libreville, it went missing. Awesome. I was to leave Libreville the day after my flight in, so I had to put blind faith in Freda, who lives in Libreville and works with Max Planck, and who I’d just met. It wasn’t an ideal situation by far, but with my flight to Port Gentil (POG) already booked, it was all I could do. A few days later (via a 5 hour boat ride) we arrived in Ombue from POG, and had a few minutes to gather ourselves before we were whisked off to the head of police for the state. And in true African style, here we hit another speed bump. We needed him to register us to allow us to work in Loango, but he wasn’t in too pretty a mood. First, we needed two passport photos, of which I had none, then he claimed that our entry stamps in our passports were faked, then our letters of invitation to work in the country were simply not enough, so that finally, he wanted to keep our passports until all this was sorted. All these angry musings from the head of police was very difficult to take seriously, as he sat there in a slipknot tee-shirt.

Ok, just got back from diner, evidently with a fair bit of beer, and am feeling a liiittle tipsy, but maybe this’ll help the creative juices flow… Though as I have just read in Steve Jones’ ‘The Single Helix’ (which I found in Yatouga, Stevie J has made it to Gabon!), alcohol and creativity is just psychological, but tell that to the guy sat in front of the computer with beer and cigarettes. Oh wait, he did…

Ok, ok, focus. Foooocus. Where was I? Police, no luggage, Yatouga. Right. So I had one pair of trouser, one pair of boots, two tee-shirts, two boxers and socks, and that’s about it. Welcome to the jungle! Thanks to the generosity (or pity) of Julie and Chris (the two other French research assistants at Yatouga), I was able to acquire a pair of shorts, tee-shirt, raincoat and water bottle for the forest, and was, as such, set for the jungle for an indefinite period of time. My first day was pretty boring (we saw 1 buffalo and a few red river hog (potamochere in French, pota for short) in 9 hours of walking). But after that things picked up, to make an amazing first few weeks.

On the second day I was out in the forest with Julie and two of the trackers, and we found fresh gorilla tracks. The trackers, as is often the case, seem to have a sixth sense for animal tracks, seeing things where most see leaves and dirt, but eventually, they stop and point through the trees. Heart in mouth, I raise my binoculars and peer at the spot they indicated, and sure enough, there sits a huge silver back gorilla.

Julie starts tongue ‘clacking’ (the noise we make to tell the gorilla we are there), and almost instantaneously we receive a resounding ‘WOO-WOO-WOO!’ back. This is known as a soft bark, and it’s his way of telling us that he knows where we are. It’s difficult (even with this much beer) to describe the feeling of looking at such a creature, as he simply sits there and stares back straight back at you. It’s the age old question of, who’s watching whom? Due to his behavior, and his distinguishing features (a mole to the left of the silver backs nostril), Julie was able to confirm that this was Kamaya, the silver back of the Atananga group, one of the two gorilla groups habituated. We were in luck! We sat watching, as he sat resting and sleeping for a few hours. Every now and again, you’d look up to check he was still there, and see him staring back at you, to then look away as you make eye contact as if he wasn’t bothered at all. Whilst all we could see was the silver back, we knew, and could occasionally hear, the other gorilla of the group around him, and after a while, they upped and moved on. We waited, so as not to crowd or stress them, and then followed suit. The first thing to hit, as you move to where the gorilla was just sat, not 10 minutes before, is the smell. It fills your nostrils so that you can smell nothing else, and has often been described as a mix between animal manure and human sweat. I don’t think I could ever forget it, as it is an amazingly musky, but not unpleasant, smell.

Ok, I’ve just been chucked out of the bar, bad sign? I don’t think so, more of a ‘trooper’ sign. Alright, let’s get back to Atananga. It’s an amazing feeling, to be able to look down on a flattened patch of leaves and think, ‘a western lowland silver back was JUST sat here’. We look for feces and find nothing, and so continue trying to track them. We determine their direction and off we go, stepping and crawling over and under vines and bushes through the dense vegetation, pretty much as anyone would imagine traditional ‘jungle’ to be, with low hanging liana vines and plants with spines. At times it can be pretty hard going, hot and sweaty, and picking leaves and ants alike from your hair, and I haven’t even gotten to the swamps yet (expect leaches and a lot mud). After only half an hour we find the gorilla again. Julie lies down to get a better look, whilst me and the trackers remain standing, and Julie starts the clacking again. But this time, instead of the reassuring ‘woo-woo-woo’, we receive a full on bark and charge instead, with plenty of plant shaking and display included. Caught completely off guard, with adrenalin coursing through the system, I take an involuntary step back wards as a 400+ pound gorilla crashed towards us (Diane Fossey apparently peed herself when she was first charged by a silver back, so at least I’m one up from that). This was my first gorilla charge, and one I’m unlikely to forget. As we were expecting this to be the Atananga group again (with Kamaya rarely, if ever, charging), Julie didn’t even skip a beat even though she was lying belly down on the ground, but as it was so intense and impressive, I couldn’t help but try to distance myself, despite how futile it would have been. It seems that this second group, despite being not half an hour from our Atananga contact, was a completely separate, unhabituated group. This just goes to show how rich a forest Loango is, that two different groups of gorilla can live and tolerate each other within such a small distance. And the day, just my second out in the forest, marks the beginning of an amazing 4 months working in Loango.

Over and out