Aug 24, 06:40 PM
Colobus Monkeys
Okay, a lot has happened in my last weeks in Tanzania. For one, thing, I was not in Tanzania for the whole time. I went to Rwanda for a week. While I was there, I went to the Nyungwe forest for a Colobus monkey hike.
Check out the pictures here.
The walk through the forest was really beautiful, with long vistas down into thickly wooded valleys and out onto the hills after hills for which Rwanda is famous.
When we got to the monkeys, there must have been 100 of them jumping and crashing through the trees. They make loud guttural grunts and high pitched yelps. They break off branches, large and small, and tons of leaves as they chase each other. It’s amazing to watch them leap onto little branches that seem much too small for them. Alphonze, my guide, said they can jump 20 meters. He also said they eat only the leaves of the trees that they’re in and some fruits. They don’t drink. Despite that, they do “make pee,” as Alphonze put it, down on unsuspecting people. Alphonze, the two trackers who follow the monkey troop everywhere, and I, were just missed.
They have heads, beards, armpits, and toes of white, but are otherwise jet black. Their babies are pure white. Their only predators are chimpanzees and eagles, who can steal babies.
We walked back to the place where the main road meets the turn off to the ranger station and there I waited for another mini bus to take me to Gikongoro where my stuff was waiting in a hotel room. It’s not a very busy road (though nicely paved, like nearly every road in Rwanda), and it was about 15 minutes before any vehicle passed.
While I waited, a little kid appeared out of the heavy mist and drizzling rain, barefooted and short-panted, with arms tucked into shirt for warmth. I couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl. “She” chattered to me in Kinyarwanda in a friendly way, but I couldn’t understand anything, of course. Then she noticed that one end of my bootlaces was hanging rather low and was frayed a bit. She said something more in her sweet voice, gently scolding me a bit, it seemed, and tucked it up into my boot. The little shoe-less one was worried about the condition of my laces. She then headed off again.
After another ten minutes, there was a dala dala heading east, and I climbed aboard.
Mark,
So beautifully well written and so tender.
Welcome home and I love you
— Dad Aug 27, 06:19 PM #