A Break in Kigoma and Gombe Stream National Park

We ate breakfast on the morning of 17 May on the deck looking over Lake Tanganyika into Democratic Republic of Congo.  The mountains in Congo looked so close, but they are 6 or 7 hours away by boat, we were told.  The lake was calm and inviting.  Yet the battered rocks on the points suggested some serious wave action for generations. 

We were in Kigoma, preparing to go to Gombe Stream National Park to see chimpanzees. Kigoma is a nice town, but far from most everything in extreme western Tanzania.  The town and the area surrounding it are much, much less densely populated than Mwanza.  Also more orderly and organized.  Traffic is no problem whatsoever.  And it is cleaner, but still showing signs of habitual littering.

Our boat and captain

On the 18^th we boarded a modest wooden boat for a 2.5 hour ride to the beach at Gombe Stream National Park, northward up the lake shore.  The boat ferried us to the park, waited for two days in a nearby village, and brought us back to Kigoma on the 20^th.  The boat was lake-worthy, with a tarp canopy to protect us from the sun on the way out and rain that fell on the way back. 

Chimpanzees at Gombe Stream NP

Our visit to Gombe Stream was a lot of fun.  We saw 4 chimpanzees in total.  The first one I found by myself right behind the guest house.  The park staff and researchers all said they never see them so close to the guest house.  Indeed, they didn’t believe we had really seen a chimpanzee until we showed it to our guide, Sabas.  It was high in the trees and never came down, eventually building a leaf nest in a tree and resting there for some time.  The next day we saw three more.  We had to hike up into the hills to find them, and there we got much closer to them.  The biggest thrill was having to step off the trail to let this a mother and baby pass by, literally inches away. 

Baboons

The birding at Gombe Stream was very difficult.  In three treks, each of 3-4 hours, we saw and identified only 10 bird species, but 4 of them were life birds so I wasn’t completely disappointed.  It’s true what they told us.  Gombe is not a good park for birding.  Not that there aren’t some good birds there, but rather that they are quiet, extremely dispersed, and nearly impossible to see in the dense forest.  While looking for birds and chimpanzees we also saw many baboons and 3 other species of monkeys.

Sunset on Lake Tanganyika

We finally enjoyed some great swimming in an African lake.  Lake Tanganyika is much deeper than Lake Victoria, and perhaps that is why the lake is free of bilharzia, a nasty parasite prevalent in Lake Victoria.  So after the hot and sweaty hikes in the forest we would wade right into the lake and enjoy the clean, warm water.  They say the snorkeling is great in Lake Tanganyika—there are several hundred cichlids in the lake (think tropical aquarium fish)—but we had no snorkel gear and saw no fish while we swam.  Sunsets over the lake were spectacular.

Dr. Livingstone, I presume.

On 21 May we went to with our friends to the town Ujiji, site of Stanley’s famous encounter with “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.”   There was a modest Livingstone Memorial there under two mango trees, said to be descended from the very mango tree that Livingstone sat under waiting for death or help, whichever came first.  Nearby was also a nice, new museum building.  It was sparsely appointed with life-size paper mache statues of Stanley and Livingstone and a couple dozen replicas of paintings and old newspaper clippings or journal excerpts.  There was a friendly old man to “guide” us.  He was entertaining as he told us some history and the story of the encounter.

The ride back to Mwanza was a long 12 hours, almost as long as the 12 hours it took us to get there.  Some of the monotony was broken by the usual evasive maneuvers and running out of gas an hour from home.  It was a great 10 day break.

Chimpanzee Mother and Baby