All's Well

Friday, 23rd July. Semliki Time: 05:50pm

The reason that I’m actually in Semliki chasing chimpanzees isn’t just for fun. Oh no, somehow I’m going to have to work the measurements I’ve been taking here into some sort of cogent dissertation which counts towards half next year's mark. Or something terrifying like that. Luckily, while I have only seen chimps eating bark – the behaviour I’m studying – once, I’ve found plenty of chewed-up wads and trees with pieces of stripped bark hanging off them. Alex, who’s studying well-digging behaviour, has been less lucky. We’d been here just over two weeks and only seen four wells- two completely inundated. It was decided, therefore, that today’s jaunt to the forest would consist of a river walk.

This started well for me. I had Derry boots while Alex had only brought her walking boots, and my feet remained pleasantly dry for a good twenty minutes. Sadly, my luck changed and the smug smile of a man with dry toes was washed clean off my face! More matter less art, you say? Well, in short, I put my foot into knee deep mud. Suddenly my boots weighed about three times as much as they had before and the going became a lot tougher. Walking through water and sand is quite hard going and it took us about an hour and a half to walk a pitiful two km. The trudge was made more exciting by the appearance, on the stream edge, of “Afromum”. No, not a matriarch with a hip hairstyle! “Afromum” is a small, acidic red fruit with white insides that tastes something like a lemon, something like a dragonfruit and something by a banana. I was much enthused by “Afromum” and it made the mundanity of taking GPS readings and substrate measurements for each and every sandbank far more bearable.

While we saw no chimps, towards the end of our upstream slog we found a nearly dead, very large crab with three legs missing. It waved its pincers at us pathetically while we tried to put it the right way up with a phoenix palm frond. Sadly, in our attempts to right the crab, we accidentally pushed it into a fast-flowing current and possibly sent it to Davey Jones’s locker. R.I.P. damaged crab. Towards the end of our voyage, we also chanced upon four three-day-old wells and happily measured every last facet of their creation. From the depth of the water at the bottom of the well, to the bacterial content, we left with our notebooks overflowing with data.

Tomorrow, let them eat bark, then bring on the weekend.