Following gorillas isn’t always glamourous and fun when you have to put up with the million bagillion insects the forest can throw at you. First there are sweat bees. These are tiny little bees whose favourite place to be is in your eye, up your nose, down your ear or under your watch. There will always be a few around but there are certain places where there are sweat bee nests and then its agony. You have to wear a head net and thousands of them will crawl all over you. This is, of course, the perfect place for Kingo to take a three hour nap. Apparently he’s immune to the annoyance factor. One way to keep the sweat bees away is to put vicks vapour rub on. However I found out the hard way that putting it around your eyes does keep the bees away but man oh man does it sting!
The next ones are army ants. There are two ways of meeting these. The first easier way is when they are moving somewhere and are in a line and you can step over them, problem solved. But these ants will also hunt so you will have millions of them moving over a large area trying to kill everything that moves (by biting you to death – not a pleasant way to go). Your first hint this is happening is all you can hear is this rustling noise (from all of them moving across the forest floor) and then you see all the other insects getting the hell out of the way. And these adorable ants come in two varieties, the smaller, bite you and it hurts variety, and the larger, massive head and fangs, bite you and it hurts so much I screamed the first time it happened and you bleed.
So once I was following Emilie and she decides to go off into the ebuka thickets and take a nap. It just so happens there are army ants on the hunt so she goes and lies down on the other side of a log where there are no ants. My tracker and I had to spend 20 minutes swatting ants off ourselves while we waited for her to move so we could also get over the log into the ant free zone!
And once I saw Kingo step in a line of army ants and boy did he move fast in the opposite direction!
