TANTALISING TANZANIA
What’s the daily round like when you’re running a remote African safari lodge? Richard Madden found out at this stronghold of the chimpanzee in Tanzania
Meeting chimps at one of Africa’s remotest lodges
IT’S the middle of the night and we can hear shouting coming from the lake. Is it a guest? Or an intruder? There’s no time to decide. I am still buttoning up my shorts as I break into a run along the sandy path that leads out of the forest onto the beach. In the moonlight I can see the mountains of the Congo 48km away on the far shore of Lake Tanganyika. And then I see him. The silhouette of a man is gesticulating wildly from a longboat moored just offshore. “Habari?” I shout in my best basic Swahili. “Chakula. Kigoma,” he shouts back.
The penny drops. Provisions that were missing from our resupply boat from the town of Kigoma, 128km north along the lake, have finally arrived. At 3am in the morning.
In front of me the thickly forested slopes of the Mahale Mountains loom over a chieftain’s longhouse that is throwing moon shadows on the white sand under my feet. This is the main lodge area of Greystoke Mahale, built in the architectural style of the local Kitongwe people, and the heart of one of Africa’s most remote safari lodges.
It also looked like a worthy residence for the current Lord and Lady Greystoke, namely me and my wife, Sarah. We were working as relief managers while the real Lord and Lady G, Steve Ladd and Kiri Maloney, both from New Zealand, took a well-earned rest.
Unlike most safari camps, where guests come and go on a daily basis, Greystoke Mahale sees a light plane only twice a week, so almost everyone stays for either three or four nights.
The camp was built by an Irish adventurer, Roland Purcell, who sailed a fishing dhow, Isabella, down Lake Tanganyika in the mid’80s and landed in the bay.
Apart from the pristine beauty of the location, Greystoke’s main attraction is the chance to see one of the largest populations of wild chimpanzees in the world. Greystoke is in the territory of M group, a community of more than 60 chimps that have had short spells of human contact.
By chance, our time coincided with an unprecedented episode in the ongoing soap opera in the Mahale Mountains. As dictators toppled in the far north of Africa, the chimps staged their own Mahale Spring. After biting another of the dominant males, unprovoked and in the middle of a grooming session, Pimu, the alpha male, was made to pay for his bullying ways. His bloody demise at the hands of his fellow chimps created a power vacuum with two other powerful males, Primus and Alofu, jockeying to succeed him.
For our neighbours, the Japanese researchers who have been studying this group of chimpanzees since the mid-’60s, it was a important event and led to some fascinating discussions around the camp fire when they joined us for dinner.
For in this looking-glass world, it was impossible not to see our own human behaviour reflected back at us. From their facial expressions, so similar to our own, we could read the chimps’ passing emotions. The bullying, politics and in-fighting of the big males contrasted starkly with the extraordinary tenderness of a mother with her children: tickling, playing tag and on one occasion teaching her baby to use a leaf stem as a tool for eating ants.
Particularly touching to watch was an older, infertile female who had carved out a role for herself as a surrogate mother and was often seen clutching one of the babies in her arms.
The camp can take up to 12 guests, who stay in six bandas hidden on the edge of the forest, with views over the beach.
One of their most popular dishes served here was the sashimi we would serve our guests at the rock bar on the headland after a successful fishing expedition.
On our guests’ final night, a table would be laid out on the beach and Sarah or I would make a toast. And the toast was always the same: “To the chimps of Mahale.”