GorillaSound

Category: Uncategorized | Date: Oct 02 2009 | By: gorillasound

I arrived in the Congo with two pieces of luggage. Actually I just arrived in the Congo as my luggage remained in Nairobi for a few days. Briefly, I saw all my luggage in Brazzaville. Then when I left to go to Mondika my second piece of luggage (a storage box with things like all my forest pants, socks, medicine and batteries) was left behind to follow on another flight as it counted as cargo. One month later!! It finally arrived. Luckily I managed to borrow pants to wear and I discovered you can survive for one month on two pairs of socks. Your socks don’t look so great but you cope.
In other logistical matters, our trackers failed to turn up from Central Africa. Usually trackers leave on the pirogue and then new trackers come back on the return trip. This usually means 5-6 days where there are fewer trackers in the camp so they have to work all day following the gorillas instead of swapping at lunchtime. This time the pirogue didn’t come back. They left to Bayanga on Tuesday the 22nd and were supposed to be back on Friday the 26th. We didn’t hear until the Monday that the pirogue had broken down and the trackers didn’t arrive until Tuesday. That meant the other trackers had to work nine days non stop and were absolutely dead on their feet.
And the eco-guards were doing a patrol around Mondika and found a poaching camp about 40kms away, in the park. In total they found 300 animals which had been killed and smoked. Some bushmeat was brought back as proof (antelope, crocodile, porcupine, pangolin and monkey) and the camp was burnt down. This poaching camp had been in operation for a long time. They managed to arrest two of the poachers, one poacher with a rifle escaped and they heard other people firing at them in the forest. This meant that half the patrol came back to our camp (poachers and bushmeat included) to get us to pass a message to Bomassa to send a truck to pick them up. And since we don’t have a radio (its away being repaired - for the last 4 months!) we had to send an email and assume that it was received as most of the people working at Bomassa are away at the moment.