Chimps and Monkeys

As we have been in the middle of the Nyungwe Rainforest with no access to the Internet, our blogging has been sparse. On Sunday, we packed up the whole crew: Johanna, myself, Isaiah and both sets of grandparents and headed to the southwest of Rwanda. After a seven hour drive consisting of endless ups and downs, curves and potholes, we found ourselves in Cyangugu at the Peace Guesthouse overlooking Lake Kivu and Congo.

The next day we were up at 4:30am to go track Chimpanzees in the rainforest... everything was great until we realized that one of our back tires had encountered a sharktooth-like stone and rendered our van useless for the entire morning. We happened to be stuck in hills covered in endless amounts of tea, right beside a tea factory. It was quite beautiful. After watching the sunrise, watching the cows come to greet us and the tea factory workers and the local villagers crowd around us, we decided to head out on a hike through the tea plantations. This is one of the most beautiful sights I have seen... green hills filled with tea, contrasted by the waters of Lake Kivu and the blue haze of the mountain in Congo on the other side.

After our morning of waiting for the tire to be fixed, we then headed out for a trek into the forest to find the Black & White Colobus Monkey. At first we only saw a few in sight, but then suddenly about 40 other Colobus Monkeys leaped off the ground into the trees in front of us. It was spectacular. That basically was our day as we then headed back to Cyangugu.

At 4:00am the next day, we tried the chimps again. Everyone was feeling good except Johanna had a migraine and I was coming down with something in my stomach. We waited for the chimps morning call before we could enter the rainforest and look for them. We heard quite a long loud sound of chimp noises and we all got excited to go look. It was tough hiking through the forest. We had to go up and down this hill and hack away at thick undergrowth to get to them. We spotted several on our trip and at one point Johanna and I found ourselves looking at a large chimp in the trees while our legs and bellies started to feel like fire. We were standing in a pile of some kind of super biting ants. Man, did they hurt... we had to both strip down in the forest and pick out our pants to make sure they were gone.

Everyone enjoyed the trip even though it was a long drive to get there, the countryside is so beautiful. Enjoy some of the pictures we took along the way.