Congo II: Meeting the Family

Dear all,

My hut at Ngaga

Oh dear, it’s been a little longer than I intended… Anyway. If you remember, I had left Lango and arrived at midnight at Ngaga Camp, which is technically within the Congo rainforest, but in the bits that are outside the national park. Couldn’t see much, but the next morning, I stepped out onto the deck to see that once more we were surrounded by trees, but the camp is in a clearing really, so you’re on the outside looking in at the almost-solid wall of tree-trunks and leaves. It was just before dawn, before we were to set off into its dark depths, and time for an epiphany. To hear the night choir of frogs and crickets give way to the orchestra of bird calls: clear, fluting, whistles and tweets (the original kind), accompanied by the clouds of mist condensing then dripping from one leaf to the next, a soothing, arrhythmic yet constant sound – all this made me see so clearly that this riot of life, abundance of green upon green must have been the Garden of Eden. (Okay, minus mozzies, midges and other biting things possibly. The butterflies – one sitting on my leg and another on my shoulder as I write this – can stay.) I think we tend to think that the Garden was a well-tended orchard of fruit trees but now I have seen the rainforest, I disagree. This is the remnant of the Garden, a place of abundance, of life spilling out and replenishing each other, the still, small voice of the Creator in the wind through the dark creaking branches and the bass counterpoint drip of the rain down, down, down to the soil far below. I’m still working on this hypothesis but it makes most sense to me.

However, I digress. Back to Sunday morning which turned out a little differently to what we had imagined. The way it works at Ngaga is that two groups of five or six guests follow a gorilla tracker into the forest in search of one of the two habituated groups (of gorillas, not humans) that the researchers allow tourists to visit; the other six groups are off-limits to most humans. Even these two can only be seen at a certain distance, you may not be sick when you go visit them and you must wear facemasks, be silent – but not too silent, as we don’t want unexpected meetings in the forest. The gorillas we visit are the western lowland gorilla species, not the mountain gorillas which live more towards the east of the continent, such as Rwanda, Uganda and DRC. “Our” gorillas are slightly smaller and therefore tend to spend time up trees feeding and hanging out, but the silverback – alpha male – is still large enough to give you a hefty klap should he choose to do so. I think that of all members of the primate family, they’re the more considerate and polite bunch and we’re the loud, wild hooligans who have no idea how to behave on this planet.

So at six o’clock on the dot, feeling all brave, intrepid and adventurous, we each took a raincoat, water, snacks, a face mask and a face net (for the sweat bees that insist on visiting when you are trying to watch the gorillas), and marched out of camp, towards the forest gloom, down between towering stands of marantaceae. Think of your nice, sedate, ankle-high green ground cover or border to your flowers and then multiply this by 17; this is a ‘ground’ cover that stands in thick almost unbreakable stands some six to eight feet high, covered in enormous wide leaves. Our tracker was Calvin and ‘his’ gorilla group was headed by a silverback known as Jupiter. He (Calvin, not Jupiter) warned us, (via our guide Justine as he only speaks French), that they had been seen yesterday afternoon bedding down some 4 km away so he wasn’t entirely sure we’d see them today but if we wanted a chance at it, we best move it, so we put foot and tried to cover 4 km of uneven, muddy, twig- and branch-strewn ground very quickly, slithering down muddy bits and having to watch for vines and stalks of marantaceae that lie like tripwires all over the place.

We also had to slosh through one muddy river and one clear one, meaning that for one moment our feet enjoyed the cool water but after that, our thick socks and shoes went squelch squelch, or more accurately smuffle, squeegle and squinchle. The sun was out a bit and shining in that strong yellow dappled way thoroughly approved of by all forest narratives and poems that talk about the path less travelled by.

Yes well. I wonder if Robert Frost ever took a less travelled path in Africa, cos here the path is not well behaved and clear but rather wild and unruly with plants and trees just growing wherever they please.

It struck me that as beautiful as it was, I felt completely dislocated, disoriented. I was not sure where I was and where the end was (or the beginning for that matter), as every direction I looked in seemed to be the same: tall trunks hemming me in, large leaves waving in front of my face, dappled sun and shade dazzling me. How easy it would be to get lost here – much easier than the veld. Perhaps, I thought, when millions of years ago we decided to leave our forest home, come down from the trees and lope out onto the sunlit savannah plains, we gave up our forest GPS for a savannah one. And now to step back here, we are lost without our technology, the GPSs that Calvin and Justine were carrying being the only things between us and complete lostness.

Typical forest view... somewhere

This sounds scary/weird but these and other random thoughts wheeled satisfyingly through my head as we walked, tripped, scrambled along, not stopping much, only when Calvin would stop to read the signs – it was truly amazing how he could read one broken twig over another and point us in the right direction. At least we hoped it was, because by then we had left even the less-travelled path and cut our way (Calvin and Justine using secateurs to do so, not pangas as pangas make too much noise and would disturb the gorillas) into the depths of the marantaceae; we were following the tracks of the gorillas you see, and gorillas aren’t that interested in keeping to the paths. They were always ahead of us, or had just been here a couple of hours ago, feeding, but always tantalisingly somewhere else, out of range. Calvin would stop dead still at some points and we would stop too, not daring to make a sound as he seemed to absorb the forest with all his senses; after a while he would nod and go off in a direction that looked the same as any other, snipping away at the stalks with all the verve of an obsessed ornamental gardener attempting a bit of topiary. And we, tiredly stumbling by now, found it getting tougher, thicker, stalks rearing up to poke us in the arms and legs, sneaky vines tripping us up; it seemed as if the forest was fighting us. And Calvin pushed deeper and deeper in, frustrated that we seemed never able to catch up with the damn monkeys, I mean apes. (Pratchett’s Librarian reference, anyone?)

You can see that we had perhaps started to leave our senses of humour behind somewhere, as we had gone from glowing to dripping, every pore spewing moisture in copious amounts (it is the Equator after all), we had drunk all our water and eaten all our trail mix. But as hot and bothered as we were, none of us had any thoughts of giving up. Until about 12ish, when Calvin admitted defeat and said we could not catch them up and so we should turn back. Wearily we started to return to camp some three hours away – being on an already-cut route made it marginally easier – disappointed but also starting to think about a late lunch, showers and other comforts of civilisation.

But it was not to be. We came out on a path and suddenly there in front of us was: gorilla poo. Not just any mind you but Jupiter’s himself (don’t ask how we know this). OMG, says Calvin (in French), he was here two hours ago and is moving back closer to the more travelled paths! We had a choice to just go back by now but, despite blisters and exhaustion, thoroughly tired of swatting at a seemingly infinite variety of flying biting things, there was no thought of giving up. So off we set with renewed determination and intrepidity, and over the next two hours… well, we had just missed them over there somewhere. We’d just almost given up when some other sign would appear and off we would trot in a new direction – thankfully more or less always in the direction of camp. Wherever that was.

Finally, at 3:00, we had given up. We had heard one crack of a branch somewhere in the thick undergrowth that Calvin had said was the group feeding, we had smelt them – gorillas have a very distinctive smell – but there wasn’t a chance of seeing them in there, so we turned back for home… when he heard them again. This time he assured us excitedly, we could see them as they were in the trees. How he knew I’ll never work out. Alright, I said to him, ONE more chance!

Well, a good thing too, because we stumbled and scrambled over yet another slope and around yet another corner … and there they were: about ten of Jupiter’s 26-strong family hanging out – literally – in the trees above our heads. I can’t say our sore feet were forgotten but the pain had to move over for fierce satisfaction and wonder as we stood with binoculars and cameras and indulged in that meeting of related species, while they fed, unconcernedly, on leaves or relaxed on a branch. They knew we were there and every now and then looked down at us (or on us, but I’m anthropomorphising). They would stare straight at us, into our eyes and then look away, clearly supremely unimpressed or just plain bored. “Oh, you lot again. Well alright, if you must,” they seemed to say.

Some of the intrepid survivors

About 20 minutes later, supper was over – for some of the primates in that glade anyway – and they all slid down the incredibly tall, smooth trunks like firemen to disappear into the undergrowth, while we began to plod back, bruised, battered and bloody hungry. In the end, we had been out 11 hours looking for the relatives – a new record and not one they are going to repeat (actually, if our group had been ‘real’ guests, they would have turned around a whole lot longer ago). But as we walked into camp we felt a curious mix of exhaustion and triumph; the intrepid adventurers return home successful – but oh boy, talk about stiff and sore!

Apparently we had missed the forest walk which was the afternoon activity. Hah.

Our second day of tracking was a doddle by comparison – but no less exciting for all that. Firstly, thanks to the rather inordinate amount of exercise we had perforce to do the day before, we were all a little ragged, sore, stiff and blistered, which made making the trek back through the first part of the forest, down the slope, slosh through the mud, up another slope down into the clear river (shoes not yet dry from yesterday got wet again) and then up again to the start of the area in which the gorillas spend most of their time… gasp, a little challenging. We felt the plants were sniggering at us, as we tripped a whole lot more than yesterday….

Then the clouds rolled in as we were walking, and thunder began rolling too; here, the clouds seem a lot closer and so does the thunder. It grew mistier and more thunderous and then drips turned into rain in earnest. Eventually we huddled under a marantaceae bush/tree/thing. Say what you like about these plants, their leaves are practically big enough to shelter under and if you fold one in half it makes an excellent fan to keep the flies off with. It duly bucketed down, again in the approved rainforest fashion, and we put on raincoats but to be honest we were sweating and damp anyway, so we weren’t too fussed about getting wet. Besides it was warm rain. It was misty and loud and the whole “Wait – I’m in the rain in a RAINforest” thing was very cool.  

The trackers however said that if it continued we’d have to turn back. You can’t track gorillas in the rain as both of us have similar hearing abilities – which means they can’t hear you and you can’t hear them, which can result in everyone getting a fright – which may well end in tears. So we could go back and try again in the afternoon or try wait for the rain to stop. Well, there was no way we were plodding achingly back. We told him firmly that we were staying dripping here. And happily, 20 minutes later, the rain eased enough to continue.

And then – 100 metres later, we turned off the path, and another few metres of cutting through with secateurs, we stood dead still with facemasks on, in the middle of a troop who were all up trees feeding – including thrillingly Neptuno, silverback of the group.

Thanks to Vicky for this pic of Neptuno eating his greens

Neptuno gave us a spectacular show as he gathered leaves near the top of a very tall tree, but then slid down its trunk to sit on a branch halfway down – perfect for us to view without craning our necks. There he sat, lordly and arrogant, munching away on the leaves with an intensity that reminded me irresistibly of how we must look when we all chew on maror (bitter herbs) at the Pesach seder.

Meanwhile, a young adult showed off beating his chest for us and a baby sat high up and wondered how to get down, wobblingly trying one way and then another before finding his way back to blessed earth. (I know how he feels.)

All this was in absolute silence. This difference here between us is striking – indeed, the blessing of ‘meshaneh habriot’ ‘who makes diversity of species’ came to mind. We’re all about noise and they’re, well, they’re not. And the mist was swirling all around, weaving between the trees, the only sound the drip-drip of the rain and the occasionally thunder in the distance, the greens and greys framing the stark furry black of a primate family.

Eventually to our sorrow, at an unseen signal, they all climbed or slid down the trees and disappeared into the thickness of the marantaceae, leaving us with shining eyes and happily heading back to camp for a cup of coffee – all before 10 in the morning this time! I felt that, in meeting my relatives, and in taking the time to seek them, I had traced my evolutionary path, backwards and again forwards, ending appropriately as I stepped out, like my ancestors, into the brightness of an open-skied morning.

Congo I – Lango Life

Congo! Just the word conjures up a variety of impressions for everyone, most of them negative. “Congo?!” you squeaked at me when I said I was going. So let’s get something clear here. It’s the Republic of Congo, not the Democratic Republic. The former is the former French colony, the latter the Belgian one. The former has had its dictatorship, brutal civil war and has settled down thankfully. The latter… is still busy.

Now that we have that out of the way, a quick background. Wilderness Safaris went into Congo about two years ago now, building two camps in the rainforest in the north of the country, one in the Odzala-Kokoua National Park, and the other just outside, in an area where researchers have been researching and habituating no less than seven gorilla groups. (Microsoft Word insists that the word I am trying to write is guerrilla, go figure. Try it yourself, you’ll see.) After a year or so of subtle and not-so-subtle hints, I finally was offered a chance to go on a trip that included some colleagues, some travel agents from the UK, and a couple of guides.

Wednesday morning, we landed in Brazzaville, Congo’s battered capital, at a very larnie airport (built by the Chinese), and then transferred to Mikhael’s, one of the few decent hotels in town. We whiled away the afternoon trying to find the textile market, and instead seeing the green gothic-style church and a big green mosque. Green is the colour there, with all taxis being green and white. The traffic there is manic, and they all drive on the wrong side of the road and speak French; I spent the first three days thinking if I spoke English with a French accent, I’d be understood, but no go. Very odd for those of us who live in southern Africa which the British colonised… but I digress.

Suffice it to say that the excitement began the next day when we took off from Brazzaville in our Caravan and winged our way north, crossing the Equator line with the traditional ‘whoohoo!’ and Mexican wave, as we watched the plane’s navigation system click down to 00 00 00 and then begin 00 00 01 N. Soon after, the rainforest began in earnest: mile on mile of trees stretched below us, the dark green colour broken only by the lighter green of the occasional bai (a bai or saline is a stretch of open land usually around a pan of water, sort of a waterhole but in the rainforest – which just sounds weird). The thick sea of leaf-green is in fact the crowding together of many, many, many trees as each tries to reach further up than its fellow to get the best spot in the sun.

When the sun broke through the cloud above us, the ‘ground’ beneath and between the trees sparkled, as everywhere under there was saturated with water from the heavy rains of the ‘long rainy’ season that had just passed. It is the rainforest after all, our ancient, primeval home; millions of years ago, our ancestors lived with our cousins in the trees before deciding that being able to see further over the flat savannah – and walking upright and getting backache – was better for the species. (Or, if you prefer, we were kicked out of the Garden of Eden – a place of many trees – to work the land…)

Buffalo, photo courtesy of  Vicky Pollock

We bumped down on Mboko airstrip – aka some mud – and met our guides, Maxwell from Zimbabwe and Justine from South Africa, who drove us to Lango Camp. Here’s where it gets surprising: turns out that in Odzala, the forest is interspersed by quite large areas of savannah. In fact, you drive through some two hours of savannah before getting to camp, and a bumpy sloshy drive it is, complete with forest buffalo in every muddy puddle on the way. The forest buffalo is a much smaller, prettier version of the Cape buffalo, a rich brown colour, chocolate brown eyes and such fluffy, tattered ears that each one looks like a fussy old lady at a spa – going for the mudpack special obviously. They are currently still quite skittish and, as buffalo will be, rather grumpy. And still large enough that one should have respect for them and not try patting their fluffy ears.

Of course, lots and lots of new birds – lifers – which made us all a bit overexcited, like chestnut-bellied kingfisher and long-legged pipit, blue-breasted bee-eater and blue-spotted wood-dove. I know you want to know these things.

The entrance to Lango is nothing short of inspiring. You walk up a long boardwalk, deeply shaded by overhanging trees, and then at the top, burst out onto a broad, open deck, dining area on the left and lounge/bar on the right, Lango Bai and sky ahead. As we walked onto the deck, the sun came out and the bai lit up golden and bright: a large flat area filled with glinting water and a small herd of forest buffalo. The backdrop to the bai is a huge stand of tall trees; it is out of this ‘stage right’ that the animals come to the bai. A dead tree to the left had a whole flock of yellow-billed kites – I’ve never seen a flock of these raptors before, so that was fascinating, and they were joined by one palmnut vulture (we ended up seeing many of these but I still got excited every time) who perhaps had an identity crisis. The audio is as good, with the complaining sounds of the little egrets as they wade through the water, the sloshing of the water around the legs of the buffalo, and the ceaseless zinging of the insects. In fact, the sounds in general seemed to be louder and clearer than usual. (But the silent ones are the ‘petit noir’ flies – little bastards that bite you before you even notice them, leaving a bloody mark that itches like mad.) There is so much life and heat and wet, it feels prehistoric; I wouldn’t be surprised to see a pterodactyl fly past.

There was just time to dump the bags in the frankly weird room (made of raffia palms, but odd submarine-like bathroom structure in the middle which ‘twangs’ and ‘doings’ every time you walk past it) and meet Santos, the chef from Benin, who was not having a good day. The oven had packed up and oh look, there’s no shop or oven-fixer for miles, which also meant that my staple “any available vegetable double-wrapped in tinfoil” could not be made. Luckily, they had actually bought a whole set of pans, pots and other things especially for me, so in fact, I ended up having all sorts of yummy stuff like soups and fried things. What is mind-blowing is the logistics of everything here. All of nature (and some humans) conspire here to make you work harder: from the mud in which we always got stuck, to the insects, the rain, the red tape…

After an unusual but good supper, we retired to our rooms. Each room is surrounded by a profusion of foliage – enormous leaves of a hundred shades of green, their movements in the breeze counterpointed by the large multihued wings of moths and butterflies, all bathed in that unearthly blue light of the moon – so bright I actually could daven maariv by its light. I felt as if I was in the forest in Avatar – as much as I didn’t enjoy the storyline, its magical scenes must have been inspired by this forest (mind you, the movie left out the insects that fly in to greet you like long-lost great aunts…).

Boy, is it noisy at night. Lots and lots of frogs shout and yell all night long, as well as a bullfrog who by the sound of him was the size of a small European country, waking us up every hour or so with a deep bass BOOONNNNNG! There was also a very cute green frog we saw perched on a chair that looked exactly like Yoda and I’m sure would have sounded just like him. I seem to be in movie mode but perhaps that is because this was unlike anything I had ever seen, totally out of my reality.

Friday saw us taking the long drive through the savannah (after the almost obligatory getting stuck in the mud and spending a while trying to get out, to the sound of chimps presumably laughing at us from the trees behind us; we didn’t see them though) to the ‘harbour’ (French for jetty, one presumes) and got into an aluminium boat to set off for a three-hour boat ride up and down the Lekoli River. After the rains, we couldn’t even see the banks, but just mangrove-like roots disappearing from under large-fronded branches into the rushing waters. Beautiful aerial orchids, palm trees and oh yes, tsetse flies, which we tried to avoid with judicious covering up of all skin we could and slathering of cream. Rock, the captain of the boat, seemed to have singlehandedly taken on to kill all the tsetses on the river. With a bunch of twigs. While he was steering the boat. We decided that he perhaps killed two the whole time we were out there, but you can’t fault his enthusiasm. All along that boat journey, the sounds were those of the river slushing and whispering along, the put-put-put of the boat, some bird calls, all punctuated by the arrhythmic THWACK of Rock’s twigs.

Vicky's shot of colobus mom and baby

Sadly, the river was too high to see elephant coming down to drink but we did catch a glimpse of three of the area’s 11 diurnal primates: grey-cheeked mangabey, putty-nosed monkey (with a dab of white on his nose that looks like sunblock that hasn’t been rubbed in), and excitingly, a mother and baby Guereza’s colobus with black and white fur all at cubic angles. The nature of game viewing here is that you have to be quick – things zip or fly or leap past between and behind all that thick green.

The way back had more old ladies and men in mud wallows and then very excitingly a Central African slender-snouted crocodile – a name that is almost longer than the critter himself. Poor thing tried to do a runner out of a roadside wallow but we leapt from the vehicle and surrounded him so that he froze hoping we wouldn’t notice him. Lots of close-ups of the frightened reptile were taken and he finally responded by hissing with his mouth wide open so that the bright yellow inside was visible – probably this is to frighten things. Eventually we let him go – presumably to therapy.

It being Friday afternoon, the others went on game drive while I remained in camp and brought in Shabbat. What I found ridiculously interesting is that being pretty much on the equator (all of 0°36'0.60"N off actually), sunrise and sunset is almost exactly at 6:00 pm and am – those ideal halachic hours are real here.

Shabbat morning we went for a walk. In the river. Again, being the rainy season (by the way there is in fact a dry season here with no rain and it gets dry and muggy, no really), the water is high in the bai and therefore is eminently wadeable. What also makes it wadeable is the lack of large crocs and hippo, so off we went for a wade in the clear water of the Lekoli River for a kilometre or so. You have to wear closed shoes; some recommend wellies but they tend to fill with water and then get stuck in the mud.

It’s an interesting breaking of barriers – one that says that you don’t get shoes or socks wet, or that you’ll melt if you do. Here, you step off a little jetty into ankle-high, cool water – in your shoes, socks and clothes. As you walk though, the water gets higher and higher, eventually reaching your waist. There’s a feeling of freedom in that, I found, as well as one of being rather ‘immersed’ in the experience har har pardon the pun. When it is shallow, it is correspondingly very muddy and we squelched gelatinously, glummily and oozily through the mud. Mind you, I stepped into such deep mud I literally could not step out without leaving my shoes in it; only after wiggling and wriggling contortionist-like did I finally manage to ease out, a true game of stick in the mud that was a most attractive sight for everyone. As we waded we saw buffalo moving away from us and in the distance, eagle-eyed Vicky saw an elephant and so we splashed stealthily towards it (he very kindly was just outside the techum Shabbat), before creeping, dripping, onto a small island and watching him from the shelter of the trees. Forest elephant are a different species to the savannah elephant – officially – and they are slightly smaller, with long straight yellowish tusks and generally their build seems to be somehow more stretched than usual. At present, they’re quite shy in the area and not used to us yet, so what a privilege to watch him as he fed a little way away from us, totally unaware of our presence as we stood and dripped. We then dreamily sploshed back upstream back to camp, cracking up laughing at ourselves as we noticed that when we got to waist-high water we all stepped as daintily as we could with our arms up above our shoulder height – looking exactly like baboons when they walk through water in the Okavango. Well, we are related after all.

At this point, after lunch, the rest of the bunch left Lango to undertake the three-hour transfer to Ngaga Camp. This would have not usually been on a Shabbat, but thanks to chaos and various reasons, it did. Which meant that I spent the rest of the day waving away tsetse flies while reading and seeing the back of house of the camp, and then supposedly leaving after Shabbat on my own special transfer to Ngaga by driver Pierre – to be there in time for gorilla tracking which started at 6:00 the next day. Obviously, the vehicle got stuck in the mud and so we only left after 9:00, and bounced through the dark avoiding nightjars along the way but sadly nothing else, to arrive at camp at midnight, fall into bed and get up very little later to go meet the family.

But that’s another story. 

I think this sums it up admirably