in search of the mangabey

Yann Martel must have spent some time wandering around in the same kind of forest that I’ve been in for the past few days in order to write his novel, Life of Pi. I kept expecting some of the vines that I was hacking my way through to reach out, curl around me, and tangle me up so tightly that a few of my white teeth would be all anyone would ever find of me. This did not happen but honestly at one point I yelled at a plant to let go of me. It was incredible; I was out with the WCS team in the forest at the base of Mt. Rungwe in search of the new monkey species (“kipungi”) that has just been discovered, and the meaning of “bushwacking” was certainly re-defined for me. Our first morning of work (after a night in a rather damp fungus-smelling tent that miraculously didn’t leak during the intermittent downpours) we started out on a narrow path down a ravine and through thick, buggy vegetation on all sides, following our hunter-turned-WCS guide, who was clad in shorts and flip-flops and wielding a machete. This seemed adventurous enough for me, but before I knew it we had turned off the path and we were literally crawling through vines and thorns and all kinds of trees that Amnon (our guide) would occasionally slash at with his machete. It was wet and humid and almost claustrophobic, being surrounded by that much dense vegetation with no end in sight. It would not have surprised me if King Kong had jumped out in front of me, chest-thumping and roaring. And I have no idea how to vaudeville dance enough to entertain a gorilla, so then I really would have been in trouble. Thankfully, no such appearances, but I was lucky enough to be one of the handful of non-Tanzanians in the world right now to see the new species of monkey discovered here, the Highland mangabey. We spotted them (well not me, Noah and Amnon did) high up in a grove of trees near a gulley, and got to spend some time just watching them, crouched down in the dirt and eating our lunch of chocolate biscuits (us, that is). They are bigger than I thought, with a fairly long coat of grayish-brown fur and a call that is pretty much impossible to explain in words. It was very cool though, to see them, and worth the menacing vines, irritating insects, and unrelenting rain. And it was also very cool to spend some time with the staff, learning a bit of Swahili, finding out that evolution is abysmally taught in schools here (they are basically told that monkeys first evolved into Africans and then later into white people, unbelievable), trying to explain why I don’t believe literally in the Bible, and getting to eat the amazing food they managed to cook around a very smoky jungle campfire—with no shortages of avocados to go with everything which made me very happy!