Gombe

The Latvian couple who run the guesthouse where I am staying at are helpful souls. They’ve been in Kigoma for a decade and confirm it as a good place to live and raise a family.

I have been organising the Gombe Stream National Park trip through a contact at the state parks authority, who has handled it all professionally. The boat ride from Kigoma north into Gombe was smooth and took us past isolated fishing villages hugging the steep slopes that rise from Lake Tanganyika. Towering hills are thickly covered in lush, green vegetation and thirty kilometres away across the lake, the silhouettes of mountains in the Democratic Republic of Congo are visible.

Various formalities are required on arrival in Tanzanian national parks, and the country has a fairly organised system of collecting what are fairly steep payments to visitors. As a resident I get partial discounts on some tariffs but was a little miffed to realise there is a two-tiered fee system for the food in the canteen. As a foreigner if I eat a simple chipsi mayai it costs me 12,000 shillings as opposed to the 5,000 for a Tanzanian eating the same thing next to me on the bench.

Very soon after the necessaries, I went on a hike in the forest as the park guide had been radioing the chimp trackers/researchers and found out a group was fairly accessible. The chimps at Gombe are so well studied and habituated that they don’t register the presence of humans. We had the privilege of watching a group of around fifteen chimps squabble, groom each other and fling themselves into clumps of vegetation. They gravitated to this high vantage point on the edge of their territory, watching for neighbouring groups.

It was fairly tiring work on tough terrain so down the hill and washing our faces in the cooling waters of Lake Tanganyika was very welcome. A Tanzanian woman was with us who studied in Glasgow and now works as a researcher at Gombe. Her young son bounded over as the boat docked, with a noticeable Scottish accent.

Another researcher introduced himself, originally a Scot, but he first came here 51 years ago in 1973. I don’t know what’s happening with my accent these days but recently multiple people, British and otherwise, have informed me that I don’t sound British. I have entered a hybrid identity phase.

Connectivity is poor, so I will enjoy an offline couple of days, reading, walking and sticking my feet in the lake. Seeing the crystal clear waters I regretted not bringing my swimmers and goggles, having assumed that all the huge Rift Valley lakes are a hotbed of bilharzia and crocodiles. Apparently this stretch of Lake Tanganyika is not somewhere where a croc will sever a limb.

Late afternoon was spent napping and soaking in the extremely relaxing atmosphere of the Park research station and base.