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…)
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| I think this sums it up admirably |
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