Spending a day with the chimps

Our chimpanzee tracking day is a great experience. The standard is walking through the jungle until you find the chimps and then getting one hour to watch them. We booked the add-on and get the full day chimp habituation program. It starts with waking up at 5 am to be there for sunrise when they get up and go up the trees for breakfast. Afterwards they come to the ground for some grooming and napping, to interact with each other and establish their ranks. Then it’s up the trees again for lunch and then more grooming and napping. Our group includes over thirty chimps and decides to walk their territory in the afternoon, so we start to run through the jungle, still managing to lose them in the end and having to walk back to the road for over an hour. But the five hours we had with the chimps were so good, it was worth climbing up and down hills, getting tangled in thorny bushes and, in Sabine’s case, being pushed out of the way by the angry ruler of the chimp community charging some member of the group.