First month in Gabon

Hello again. Yeah, I’m back in the forest. Gabon this time. I got here on January 25th, and this is the first time I post here. Sorry. I guess I’m just sort of in my new groove here. I guess I’m all used to living in the jungle now, and now’s just another jungle experience that I find myself in for the moment. The jungle is what occupies my thoughts and my time, and I really haven’t been spending too much time at the computer at all. Plus the issues, as usual, with limited power and competition for the computer when there is enough battery.

Camp life is alright here, though very dissimilar to what I was formerly accustomed to in Congo. When I got there I was immediately made responsible for the numerous day-to-day tasks that were necessary for the smooth running of the camp. Here, however, many of those things just don’t exist. Our employees are fixed in number, so there’s very little to-and-fro of staff to deal with. And the work plans and salaries are organized by others, so I barely even deal with employee stuff at all.

The camp itself is very rudimentary, so making it more liveable and efficient is more what I’ve been brought here to accomplish. It’s pretty cool, on the one hand, because many practices and installations just plain don’t exist, so I’m the one to devise and put into practice new stuff. On the other hand, it’s difficult to install anything new because the people here have been set in their ways for a while already. Not they’re not open to change, just that there’s not necessarily a good reason to modify existing comportments.

An exciting part of what I’m here to do, though, is to actually build the camp anew. At our main base camp, Yatouga, there are just two structures at the moment, and two access points to the lagoon. Before I leave in July, the goal is to have a few more structures to live in/out of, and hopefully have some easier methods of dealing with water.

But therein lies a big problem, because building requires materials, and those are in very short supply. Can you believe it, that a country which exports literally shiploads of hardwoods has essentially none available on the local market? How are we supposed to build shelters without a decent supply of wood!? The sun is brutal on the tents, as is the rain, so the hope is for each tent to be placed on a raised platform with a roof over it. Platforms require many planks though, as do the overhead frames supporting any roofing. I think we’ll probably be able to acquire decent quantities of plywood for the roofs, but I’m beginning to have serious doubts about the likelihood of seeing any platforms built during my time here. I think I may need to resort to bamboo for the overhead frames. We’ll see.

What I think I will be able to accomplish in the coming month is the installation of water systems. Like I said, we currently rely mostly on the lagoon for bathing and for washing dishes, so that can easily be tapped and piped up to the camp for easier use. We capture rainwater for drinking, so we’ll need some better gutters and filters to make that more usable.

We’ve got a second camp about 10km from Yatouga, called Ozouga. It’s in the southern reaches of a long skinny savannah, surrounded on three sides by the forest. We get our water there from two wells dug in the adjacent forest, but they are apparently seasonal and they’ve been getting fairly soiled with fallen leaves and such. Rainwater has been relied upon for drinking, but it’s frequently been necessary to have water delivered in jerrycans from the Lodge. So there I plan on cleaning and protecting the wells, bringing one or two 1000-litre reservoirs for the dry spells, and piping the water up to the camp for all of our needs.

So yeah, I get to go to Port-Gentil again tomorrow (I write this on Sunday the 2nd of March). I went there a week or two ago to pick up a bunch of camp supplies and to get a better understanding of how exactly things like groceries make their way to our camps. Finding the components of our water systems is my main goal, but I also hope to work out some better communications between the two camps. We currently have a radio at Yatouga that can communicate with the Lodge, and there’s also a cell-phone tower nearby, but Ozouga only has satellite phone access. So I’ll be going to the radio store and seeing what sort of antenna or radio or whatever would be needed for the two camps to be able to talk easily.

The Lodge is my other main place of work, mostly just for logistics runs. It’s about an hour by boat from Yatouga, or 1.5 hours by quad from Ozouga. It’s a 2.5-hour walk through the forest between Yatouga and Ozouga. The airstrip is a further 10-minute drive or so from the Lodge. Any deliveries of people or stuff arrive overland at the Lodge, and I go pick them up there. That includes employees, groceries, and fuels. We use about nine different types of fuels for our various needs. Crazy, eh?

So I guess that’s what my life’s been consumed with as of late. Cleaning up the camps and seeing what’s needed, trying to determine what of the necessary things are actually available, and then trying to get them at camp. It’s not quick, but I’m still confident that the camps will be in better long-term shape when I leave than when I arrived.

As for the great apes, I really don’t have much contact with that side of things. Unfortunately, even our forest teams haven’t had too many chimp or gorilla contacts lately, which reflects the stage of habituation so far. It’s really tough to actually find the same communities repetitively, particularly since their ranges overlap somewhat and the IDs aren’t yet clear. So the norm has been to follow a group for a few days or a week or two, then lose them, and then to go apeless for another week or two before finding some more. But are those ones the same ones that were followed previously? If not, it doesn’t really help in the habituation process because the individuals of each group don’t get enough constant human contact. That’s how the work goes right now though, and we can only hope that with a few more years of such perseverance the habituation will improve.

I’ve nonetheless had a number of forest days, which obligatorily mean full days in the forest. It seems that 15 to 20 km is very normal, despite the initial morning commute by boat or quad to the trailhead. Whether from Yatouga or Ozouga, the forest teams leave between 7 and 7:30am, and return sometime around 5pm. The forest is sometimes quite open, with clear views often exceeding 50 or even as much as 100m. Other areas are very swampy, so days out rarely involve dry feet. I went out the other day and was already walking on a floating mass of thick grass over a body of water before 8am, with every step submerging the grass mat in the brown water. The subsequent trail was reached by balancing across an arced mangrove branch across the dry land (where a small monkey skull had been perched on a stake to mark the forest entry!).

We spent majority of the day following swamp edges in search of gorillas or their traces. We found recent nests in several locations, as well as plenty of footprints, feeding signs, and so on. But no gorillas. For me that was just one day, but it’s been getting old for the gorilla teams who search in vain day in and day out.

I did encounter chimps a couple of times on another outing. Hearing their screeches as we approached in the forest were my favourite moments, whereas actually catching fleeting glimpses of them look at us and run away was less thrilling. We did eventually catch up with a few chimps feeding high in a fruit tree, but the view through the understory was pretty covered. I wish they had spent more time screeching! The chimp teams have been similarly discouraged to the gorilla teams lately though, with too many days spent seeing little more than nests or feeding signs, with the occasional chimp just walking by for a matter of seconds seemingly just taunt them.

We got another tease last night too, as we heard a raucous group of chimps break out in cacophony a couple of times at around 10pm, just as I was getting ready to retire to my tent. The sky was about as clear as I’ve seen it here, with the Milky Way clearly streaking through the rest of the stars, and I found the calls of rowdy chimps echoing across the lagoon to be a poignant close to the evening. (Judging by the direction, the community is not one of our target communities for habituation, though news from Ozouga has our chimps being contacted over the past couple of days in the forest along the beach.)

As for communication, I think I prefer just to forgo use of the camp email system, given that I’m expected to pay for it (I got a fat email bill for Congo recently) and that the camp computer is often at the camp where I’m not. The Lodge actually has internet access, so I try to check my Hotmail whenever I visit. I’m not always able, because my Lodge visits are always pretty hectic and the network is sometimes down anyway, but I can at least check it every week or two.

The Lodge itself is pretty cool vacation destination for tourists from around the world with a week or more to spend. They’ve got the main Lodge, as well as several satellite camps throughout the park. Tourists do safaris and see elephants and buffalo and red river hogs, and there are nightly excursions to see crocodiles. It’s rare for tourists to encounter chimps or gorillas, but they’ve apparently been seeing them about as much as we have lately. The Lodge’s camps all have such luxuries as running water, reliable electricity, and cold drinks, so visits there are a nice respite from our rustic camps. It’s also good to have a chef-prepared meal of fresh produce from time to time as well.

So voilà. My life lately. Perhaps I’ll get all motivated and write more frequent entries from time to time, but I haven’t really been into it lately. Life is pretty nice here though, despite the conditions, and the beauty of my surroundings is just amazing. So yeah, next time perhaps I’ll write more about the animals I encounter, or the people I work with, or the projects I undertake that actually get done. We’ll see. Write me at Hotmail if you want to say hi, or even text my Canadian phone at 1-514-586-2470 – I usually turn it on daily to check for text messages.

Later,
Ryan.