GorillaSound

Category: Uncategorized | Date: Jul 30 2009 | By: gorillasound

To reach the bai, you need to have a tracker who knows the area and who had worked for Andrea. Among our trackers, Wasi worked for several years at the Dzanga Bai and still sometimes accompanies tourists there. I asked him to come with us, and he accepted happily. We needed to rent a car to arrive there , thus, there was a lot of space left in the car I painfully paid, so I invited some Baihaka friends to come with us. Mongambe, who has relatives working there, came along and also joined us the young son of one of our best trackers, who told me the day before he had never visited the Bai. After half an hour of driving through a narrow path of red dirt and surrounded by thick vegetation, we arrived at the site. From there, we walked three kilometers to reach the platform. We had to cross a small river, very refreshing but in some points becoming a muddy surface full of elephant dung! The walk is very nice, it goes a little up to descend afterward again when you reach the level of the Bai. The path has been created by elephants and as you arrive closer to the bai, you realize how many other similar paths you can find all around, all bringing you to the Bai, the Rome of Dzanga-Shanga! Coming closer to the bay, we grow excited when we hear the strong and powerful sounds emitted by the numerous elephants already in the Bai… and after some minutes we could see the elephants! The moment you see the Bai is unforgettable; so many elephants are interacting in front of you, and when I say many I mean more than 60 elephants! At the end of the day we could observe 96 of them!!!!
We went up on the platform, happy to meet Andrea after so many years. She didn’t change a bit, still the strong and beautiful woman I kept in my memory. We talked for a while recalling past years, and she explained to me the current situation of elephants in the region. The number of elephants in the bai is increasing due to the shrinking of their habitat. There are too many logging concessions around the Bai and the hunting pressure is so high that elephants prefer to remain within the Park! Forest elephants (as all the elephants) need to migrate, thus crossing different national states (elephants don’t respect boundaries!). They are changing their behaviors because humans are destroying their habitats. Since elephants are indispensable to maintain the tropical rain forest (and with it so many animal species) I would like to invite all of you to support the difficult life goal of Andrea: to safe the African forest elephants (Check her blog in wildlifedirect.com!)
Many tourists were still arriving at the platform, so after more than 2 hours looking at those magical creatures, we left our seats to newcomers and walked back to the car. The young Baihaka was extremely excited, he had never seen so many “njoku” all together, and actually all of us were very impressed and satisfied of our visit to the Dzanga Bai!