Welcome to the Jungle

Thursday, 8th July. GMT: 8:53pm, Semliki Time: 10:53pm

Alex bounded out of bed at 6:10am this morning, a full fifty minutes before we had to be dressed and ready. Speechless, as I usually am at 6am (that’s 4 in the UK, by the way), I stuttered something that probably wasn’t a word and went back to sleep. I finally rose at the moderately more moderate hour of 6:38 and proceeded to stumble about into my clothes and out of the door.

The forest was initially unimpressive. Trees. Okay. I like those. But a little like the south east Asian jungle to impress me. Luckily, as we got further in, the trees got taller. Interesting tropical flowered bloomed round our feet, along with interesting tropical fungus and interesting tropical “other”. Every so often our guide would stop us and say “LOOK”. Five seconds later Alex would say “Aha! Isn’t that something” and a minute and a half later I would say “No… no I.. Um… no, I can't see that”. Still, as we continued, we spotted monkeys and birds of all sorts. Semliki is home to one of the largest collections of endemic birds in the whole of Uganda. I can’t for the life of me remember what any of them were called, but some of them were magnificent. At least, the guide and Alex told me that some of them were magnificent. To me, they all looked like leaves. That or I was looking at leaves. We also soon stumbles across a tree where the Chimpanzees had ripped the bark to eat. This is the very subject of my dissertation and put me in a fine mood. Maybe I’d be able to make something of it after all.

Soon afterwards, my mood was killed by the guide. I told him I was doing a project on tree bark and he said “Aha! This a very bad project! They never eat bark.” Visions of a successful project, a good grade, Phd funding and a future as an academic flittered away in front of my eyes. “Now we move!” he said. As I tried to fight back waves of grief we began to climb the rift escarpment and I ineptly juggled to three tasks of staying awake, trying not to collapse into a heap of tiredness induced misery and self-pity and trying not to fall to my bloody death at the bottom of a chasm. I stumbled along five meters behind, tripping a few times on the dusty steep slopes and miraculously making it to the other side. I don’t know quite how I managed to not kill myself, but I managed. “When the chimps come here, you must move very very fast!” our guide reassured me.

On the way back we saw baboons, who can be described as nothing else but “totally MENTAL”. If you stare at them and dodge left and right, they get very confused and begin spinning around, jumping left and right, bouncing off trees and jumping feet into the air. The whole spectacle was intensely amusing and cannot adequately be put into words, much like the semi-ballet dancing movements of the grotesquely but charmingly ugly Warthog!

Must wrap up as we’ve another early start tomorrow. Once we arrived panting back in camp the rest of the day was largely uneventful except for a few upsetting RCSA e-mails and a reassuring message from Prof. McGrew telling me that Chimpanzees strip bark all the time. Maybe tomorrow, we’ll even get to see them!