Sharing Gombe

Yared, Heather, a 16 year-old local girl named Nema, and I hiked into Gombe Stream National Park on Friday morning, which was in itself a unique experience. Gombe is one of Tanzania's most isolated national parks, and is officially only reachable by ferry on Lake Tanganyika. We, however, started out from Kiganza and came in overland through the back of the park, arriving at the front office only after having already been in the park for quite some time. According to Yared, Heather and I may have been the first Westerners to ever enter the area on foot--a claim that's impossible to verify, but still means that we were lucky enough to get a very unusual introduction to Gombe. The hike took about five hours over moderately strenuous terrain; we started out westward through Kiganza's neighboring villages, first dropping down to the river and hiking through tropical forest before climbing back into the arid (or maybe just badly deforested) mountains. We then half-slid our knee-breaking descent back down the other side of the mountains and, finally, directly to the beach on the shores of the world's second-deepest freshwater lake. The first view of the lake as we topped the mountain was really incredible. If you forgot which coast you were on, you'd think it was the ocean...thick forest vegetation suddenly just gave way to a pristine white beach, deserted except for the baboons, and then a blue-green expanse of water stretching all the way to the horizon and beyond (comforting, in a way, that you can't see across it, given the instability of what lies on the other side.)

After hiking along the beach for a mile or so, we arrived at Gombe's front office. We were all filthy and drenched with sweat, but Heather and I were really eager to start our official chimp-tracking hike into the forest, as Tanzania's park entrance fees for non-Tanzanian citizens are outrageous. Every day we spent in the forest would cost us over $120, and because Heather and I were required to pay for Friday (because we'd hiked through the forest to get there), we wanted to go ahead and use the rest of the day for chimping. Yared informed us, though, that the man who collects money at Gombe had gone to the mosque that day instead of coming into work (even though Yared had called ahead to announce our overland arrival.) We were absolutely restricted from paying anyone else, he said, and positively forbidden to re-enter the forest without paying. Furthermore, the guy collecting fees would likely not be in until the evening, after the forest was closed to visitors. So we were simply compelled to sit around and wait to pay a man for an activity that we didn't get a chance to do...because we were sitting around waiting to pay him. This was horribly frustrating to my American sensibilities (value for money? Ability to complain to a manager?), and if the beach hadn't proven so indefagitably luxuriant, I would have been pretty incensed.

As it was, though, the waters of Lake Tanganyika were glorious beyond comparison. They were just the right combination of calm and tepid, and utterly clear. I spent the afternoon swimming and doing "laundry" by scrubbing my clothes in the lake (though a baboon did try to steal my only pair of pants out of a tree while they were drying, causing me to alarm the Africans down the beach as I splashed out of the water, yelling.)

We were lodged in a simple two-bedroom resthouse (it's actually more expensive to pitch a tent than it is to stay in the resthouse, for some completely unknown reason) with only a sliding bar latch on the door to keep out the baboons and mouse poop under my pillow (hanta virus, anyone?) The extra poo on top of my mosquito net alerted me to the fact that they were living in the ceiling above my bed; not always the most comforting revelation, but at least the net was there. We even had a passable cook, Joyce, who made us unseasoned rice and beans twice a day and brought us room-temperature pints of Kilimanjaro lager in the evenings.

On the second day, we went out to find the chimps...which proved incredibly easy, as a family of about 12 of them happened to be hanging out outside Jane Goodall's research station that day. We got incredibly close--no more than a foot away at one point, when two chimps came down our path from either direction at the same time and we had nowhere to go to get out of their way. (They actually greeted each other when they met! I saw chimps hugging!) They were fun to watch, though I didn't see them make tools or build a house or play Yahtzee or anything else strikingly human. After that, our guide (mandatory, and expensive) took us hiking to a wonderful waterfall that looked straight out of The Jungle Book, with water crashing over a rock ledge into a clear pool and a backdrop of moss and low vines. We then hiked to Jane's Peak, a mountaintop where we got a great view of the lake on one side and the mountains through which we'd come on the other.

We left the next afternoon by sharing an official Gombe boat with a tour group of Tanzanian government officials from the Dept of Immigration who had arrived the day before. Speaking of sharing, that's one of the aspects of this culture that most sets it apart from the US. People share everything here, which can be both a good and a bad thing... An illustration:

On our second night in the park, as Heather, Nema, and I were sitting at the kitchen table in our little house, a man in a towel walked in, greeted us cordially, and went straight into the room where Nema had been staying. When he had shut the door behind him, I leaned over to Nema. "Who was that?!" I hissed incredulously; she just shrugged. "But...he's in your room!!" I continued, a fact which also rendered Nema entirely nonplussed. (We later learned that she'd been kicked out of her room in favor of the immigration tour group, despite having been there before them, news which she accepted with a similar degree of nonchalance.) The next morning, Heather and I woke in the face of a full-on invasion. The whole dept of immigration was in our living room, drinking the coffee that our cook had packed for us to bring along, and making such a racket that continuing to sleep was simply not an option. Incredibly, Nema was out there waiting on them, refilling their mugs with (her) coffee, clearing their scraps and taking their dishes down to wash in the lake. (I don't know whether it was her gender, young age, or their own inflated senses of self-importance that allowed them to accept this as normal, but it really bothered me.) They did, however, invite Heather, Nema, and me to share their soup, which I found innocuous enough, and which resulted in me eating goat intestine for breakfast.

They presented us with three cauldrons of decreasing size, and when I saw a full jawbone, complete with all teeth, emerge from the biggest pot, I knew this was no tomato bisque I was going to be eating. The second pot, even scarier than the first, contained all the parts of the animal that we American omnivores like to pretend don't exist. Pale, knobbly intestines snaked around piles of whole organs; a geodesic stomach balanced on chewy arteries ("It looks like a soccer ball," observed Heather); an entire cardiovascular system burbled back to life in its steaming stew. The third pot contained unctious, boneless chuck of what seemed to resemble, more than anything else present, what I would usually call "meat." "Karibu! Welcome!" they chirped as a woman took a full ear out of the second pot and began chewing on it. Heather and I each took a piece from the third container and bit hesitantly into what turned out to be goat liver, which I guess is what we get for trying to eat like Americans. The officials insisted that we take more, though, and plopped some bony masses onto each of our plates, as well as a yellow-grayish, braided-looking section of intestine ("I think I got the rectum," commented Heather calmly, indicating the fluted end of her piece.) I took a chewy bite and immediately knew where the faint manure-like smell permeating the room was coming from. After a few greasy attempts at the bony thing, I thanked them--quite sincerely, as it was a great experience--and snuck off to scour my teeth and slurp my iodined lake water.

I will be leaving solo for the Serengeti within a few days, which really excites me!! I will then hopefully spend a few days around Arusha on camel, and the go to Zanzibar. Whee!