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the chimps of Ngamba Island
Saturday, August 5 2017
location: Nyange Resort and Marina, near Entebbe, Uganda
I woke up at 1:30am to the banging of metal doors, loud talking, laughter, the crying of a baby, and the barking of dogs (probably from just outside the security fence). The metal door sound was the worst, as it kept happening every 20 seconds or so. We knew that the resort would be hosting a massive wedding this weekend, though we hadn't known what to expect. It seemed that the core attendees of the wedding were staying here with us and had stayed up late drinking. All the noise had also awaken Gretchen, and she wondered if perhaps we should ask for another room. I didn't think that would do any good; we's hear the dogs no matter where we went, and the clanging metal doors were probably mostly coming from other units as well. I suggested Gretchen try ear plugs. Eventually I fell asleep, but I awoke again at 4:00am to the crying of a baby. I get the late-night drunks, but what was up with the baby?
We had to get up early and when Gretchen's phone-based alarm went off whenever it did, we were far from rested. The rest of the resort seemed to have finally quieted down, though the peaceful sleep of those who had interrupted our sleep seemed anything but fair. So as we got our shit together, we shouted our conversation at one another and gratuitously slammed our big metal door.
Breakfast wasn't as weird as last night's dinner had been. It was a fairly conventional British vegan breakfast, with baked beans, mushrooms, and surprisingly good fried chunks of potato. Where it let us down was the coffee, which was Nescafe instant. That was the way things were 14 years ago in South Africa, but it's 2017! This was the first time we'd been offered Nescafe on this trip. It suggested that the only people who come to this particular resort are those who aren't particulary fussy about their morning stimulants, which would eliminate most Europeans, as well as the sort of Americans likely to have a passport.
Robert picked us up after we checked out, and we made haste down the red dirt road back to the main Entebbe road. The goal was a boat launch with service to Ngamba Island in Lake Victoria, which had been established as a sanctuary for orphaned chimpanzees. We arrived at the boat launch with plenty of time to spare, which allowed us to take plenty of pictures of marabou storks, hamerkop, kingfishers, and some bird of prey that kept circling overhead. Our departure for the chimpanzee island was delayed by the tardy arrival of a bunch of white senior citizens, but eventually they showed up. I thought it was important that Gretchen and I get aboard the smaller of the two boats in our flotilla just to limit delays inherent in sailing in a boat full of people with bad backs and knees, though this meant we would be sailing with another group of loud South Africans. Fortunately, there were also a pair of non-ugly Americans on our boat. Gretchen struck up a conversation with them and learned that they were part of the recruitment team for Carleton College in Minnesota. They travel the world in hopes increasingly the international diversity of the college. It sounded like a dream job to Gretchen, but it sounded like hell to me.
The boat ride took nearly an hour and even crossed the equator somewhere along the way. When we arrived, a security guy wanded us down to make sure we weren't packing chimpanzee-killing heat. I went directly to the island's restroom facilities, so missed out on the first part of the safety briefing. It seems 95% is forested and reserved for the chimpanzees, while 5% lies on the other side of an electrified fence (the part where we landed). Sometimes chimpanzees get so stressed out by their colleagues that they ignore the discomfort of the fence to escape. When that happens (and I got the sense that it was uncommon), humans are at risk. The best place to go in such a scenario, we were told, was the lake. "But what about crocodiles?" someone asked. We were assured that crocodiles do not frequent this particular island.
After the safety briefing, we were encouraged to help ourself to tea and coffee (and by coffee, they meant Nescafé). I was greedy and got both a cup of a tea and a cup of Nescafé, accidentally spilling the creamer on my second run. By the time the boat arrived with the geriatrics, there was no hot water. Once we were suitably refreshed (or angered by the lack of refreshment) there was a second briefing, this one specifically about the sanctuary and the story of the chimpanzees living here. Many had been seized as illegal attempted exports at the Entebbe airport. To keep numbers from mushrooming beyond the capacity of the island, the females had all been given contraceptive implants. But these hadn't always worked; some females had chewed the implants out (and in one case taught a resulting daughter how to do the same).
Then it was time to feed the chimpanzees, which meant we would finally be able to see them. There 49 rescued chimps on the island, all of them beyond that industrial-strength electrified fence, though there is a stout steel-cage conduit allowing the chimpanzees to pass through the fence to an open-air building where they are encouraged to spend the night (there are hammocks and straw so that they can build themselves nests). The chimps must be fed, since the 100 acres of forest on the island is not enough to support so many chimps. And it's the feeding that makes for consistent predictable tourist moments such as the one we were now in. Chunks of fruit would be thrown by employees (or tourists, if they'd paid for the privilege) over the fence, where the chimps would catch them out of the air whenever possible. They'd arrayed themselves all along the fence, some distance back so as to be in the place where most of the fruit landed. Whenever a chimp felt he or she hadn't received much fruit in awhile, he or she would raise his or her hand like a well-behaved fourth grader. There was, however, one chimpanzee standing in the very top of a tree, his head and shoulders above its canopy. He would shake the tree impatiently, trying to get people to throw fruit up to him. He was pretty good at catching the airborne snacks, apparently holding on to the branches he was standing on with his feet while (in some cases) using both hands to do the catching. Some of the chimpanzees had a lot of grey hair, though this wasn't always due to advanced age. According to the people who knew such things, some chimps have a lot of grey naturally from an early age, particularly a 28 year old male named Tumbo, celebrated in a coffee cup design in the gift shop.
Chimpanzees are very humanlike in the subtlety of their facial expressions, the purposefulness of their movements, and the postures they can assume. But what is going on with their asses? For creatures that are so clearly humanoid, their asses are completely alien. Still, it's not that their asses are odd by the standard of primate asses (which are often inflamed, red, and even multiple colors). Maybe the better question is: why are human asses so demure? It probably has something to do with the concealing nature of our glutei maximi (butt cheeks), an adaption to bipedalism. Another oddity of chimp anatomy is the massive size of their testicles, which are almost the size of lemons. Their penises, by contrast, are generally too small to be noticed from any distance.
After the feeding, we walked back to the gift shop past the chimp sleeping facility, where we found three or four chimps hanging out. It seems that no all chimps want to go into the forest. (No doubt some of them have a great deal of psychological trauma remaining from the incidents that had led to their ultimate rescue.)
I was delighted to find that beer was for sale in the gift shop, so I bought myself a big one-litre Nile for the boat ride back to the Entebbe pier.
Those nice globetrotters from Carleton College had told us about a winning Thai restaurant near the airport, so Gretchen tried to get Robert to take us there for lunch. He acted agreeable, but then it gradually became clear that he had a list of acceptable places to take us, and that Thai restaurant was not one of them. So instead we went to a big restaurant with a huge menu called Faze 3. They had shady outdoor seating with a good view of the airport and acceptable WiFi. Best of all, they had good Indian food options. Gretchen and I split a chana masala and aloo gobi, and it was up there with some of the best Indian food we'd ever had. Robert, who'd suffered his way through vegan food two days ago at Little Ritz in Africa asked if we'd be offended if he ate something that we wouldn't eat. We gave him the go-ahead, though it was hard to tell exactly what he'd ordered. It was some other Indian curry.
We'd be flying out of Entebbe tonight, but we still had a lot of time to kill. The initial plan was to maybe burn some time in various open-air markets. But we hadn't slept well last night and it's exhausting to be a white person in such a market, what with all the hard sells converging on your wallet. Gretchen thought maybe we could go to a beach on the lake and nap in the grass, but there was no suitable place. Robert let us out to walk around the beach, but when we tried to walk down to it, we were immediately surrounded by restaurant staff wanting to help us do something we didn't want to do. It then occurred to Gretchen that maybe we could just lie on the grass at a hotel. The Livani Beach Hotel had a nice lawn. By the time we'd gone to the desk, the idea had morphed into renting a room for afternoon and evening so we could get some much-needed sleep. When Gretchen asked what the price was, she was quoted $40. That would be money well spent if we really could get some sleeping in. On the walk back to Robert and the van, we also made an inquiry at Anderita Beach Hotel, where they gave us a $45 quote. They also had WiFi, which we weren't sure Livani had.
But the woman at the front of Livani said that they did indeed have WiFi. So Gretchen made the transaction, and we were shown our room. Perhaps we should've seen it before paying for it. It was a dreary little space only a couple dozen feet from the front desk. Its window opened into an alleyway with overflowing bins full of beer bottles and there was an annoying electronic sound that came every five, eight, or thirteen seconds. Our room seemed clean, but it had a weird smel that I thought was like freshly-cooked pasta. Gretchen thought it smelled like a skeezy hotel room. What was more, the WiFi was pretty terrible. It took some back and forth with the front desk to get it working to begin with (evidently people wanting working WiFi is an infrequent thing). And then it kept crapping out and complaining about bandwidth limits (based on the admin page, which I was able to log into using the default password, it looked to be using the 3G phone network for its connectivity). Admittedly, I was downloading last week's episode of Game of Thrones using Bittorrent, but that was only three hundred and some megabytes in size.
Eventually the beeping ended, but was replaced by loud talking just outside our window. With ear plugs, we managed to mute the sound down to a minor annoyance. Try though we did, neither of us managed to fall asleep. [REDACTED]
Well before 8:00pm, we'd decided we'd had enough of our dreary hotel room. Gretchen grumbled to the front desk about the shitty WiFi and how she'd like to get her money back, but of course that was never going to happen. Meanwhile our driver Robert had shown up and was sitting at a table in the lawn enjoying a cup of tea. There were some crazy birds overhead, including a pair of hornbills and some crested cranelike birds (but not crested cranes).
We were feeling a little hungry again, so Gretchen wanted Robert to take us to one last restaurant before dropping us off at the Entebbe airport. There was an Ethiopian restaurant called Betty she'd seen near the airport, and she sort of vaguely knew where she'd seen the sign. It would be fun and appropriate to eat Ethiopian food in East Africa, if not in Ethiopia itself. There didn't seem to be any other customers at Betty when we arrived. We sat outside and Gretchen ordered us two vegetarian platters. They were much like such platters at other Ethiopian restaurants we'd been to, though the injera was strangely white in color. Instead of getting a lot of it in a roll on the side, more was used to make "the tablecloth" on which the wats were dolluped, and we had plenty around the edge to tear off and use. The meal was good, and we managed to eat nearly all of it despite the large amount that two portions represented. I also had a Nile beer of course.
Robert took us to the airport, Gretchen gave him a $40 or $60 tip, and we said our goodbyes. Following up on a conversation we'd had earlier in the day, Robert said he would be investigating SquareSpace as a platform for setting up his own website so he can be an independent tour guide some day. And then we disappeared into the airport, along with a spazzy young male American college student who seemed excited by the African adventure he'd just had. Getting through customs wasn't terrible, though Africans in the line ahead of us seemed to be going through a lot more trouble than Europeans and Americans.
There were two security checkpoints: one at the entrance of the airport itself, and a more thorough one at the gate. At that second one, my bag appeared to contain a bottle of something. Sure enough, in a side compartment was a 12 oz bottle of Tusk beer, which Gretchen had snagged from the cooler on the boat ride to Murchison Falls. I chuckled at seeing it and told security they could have it (what else could I do?). Happily, there was good WiFi as we waited at the gate.
Our plane (which had just come in from Kigali) was fully boarded ahead of schedule, meaning we could take off ahead of schedule too. Once we were in the air, I brought out my laptop and proceeded to watch two back-to-back episodes of Game of Thrones. There was season 7, episode 3, which I'd downloaded at the skeezy hotel, and then there was episode 4, which had been leaked ahead of its airing date (which would be tomorrow) and was also available on Bittorrent (I'd finished downloading it in the Entebbe airport). There was a 240 volt outlet at my seat, but unfortunately it didn't seem to work. Our airline attendant kept giving us alcohol (which Gretchen would also accept on my behalf), and there ended up being more than I could reasonably drink. So I started pouring it back into my travel bottles (particularly the extra cognac).
Gretchen with Robert against a background of marabou storks at the boat launch into Lake Victoria. Click to enlarge.
Despite already having two apples, a mother chimp with a baby politely raises her hand to request more food at Ngamba Chimpanzee Sanctuary. Click to enlarge.
Tumbo the chimp, as celebrated in a coffee mug design.
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